VBefore art, first a few facts. The Grand Palais Ephémère is a temporary building for the renovation of the actual Grand Palais in Paris. In 2024, the huge temporary wooden structure will then serve as the venue for the judo and wrestling competitions of the Olympic Games under the name Arena de Champ-de-Mars – the direct vicinity to the École Militaire obliges. After that, the building will be demolished and sold. As of this week, it has been accessible from its prominent place on the Marsfeld, across from the Eiffel Tower. The equestrian statue of the French First World War hero Joseph Joffre is integrated in the foyer, which was not specially relocated for the interim construction. Everything seems overwhelming: the area of 10,000 square meters under the up to twenty meter high vaulted roofs over a cross-basilica-like floor plan, the two huge glass surfaces on the front sides with views of the Eiffel Tower and the military school, the diffuse twilight. And the total of more than 860 square meters of canvas that will be shown in the first exhibition is also overwhelming: nineteen new paintings by Anselm Kiefer, brought together under the title “Pour Paul Celan”.
The largest of them, “It left the street as an ark”, to be seen in the picture above on the right at the back, is 128 square meters alone. Paintings of this size are unusual even for pine; they are known, however, from his stage sets. And indeed the ensemble of these pictures for Paul Celan is arranged in the gigantic Parisian space like on a stage: with apparently moving actors, because all canvases are mounted on trolleys. That was Chris Dercon’s idea, says Kiefer in an interview with this newspaper – the boss of the Grand Palais is a man who comes from the theater. Kiefer himself also likes to set up his pictures in the studio on rollers in order to facilitate the work on them, which can sometimes take years. Anyway, this studio, outside the town in Croissy. As the former warehouse of a large Parisian department store, it is much larger than the Grand Palais Ephémère: 60,000 square meters. When Dercon first visited Kiefer there at the beginning of the year, he must have realized that by comparison he only had one room to offer the artist. And yet more space than it had ever had for a regular exhibition. So the plan arose to not only make Paul Celan the topic, but also the studio itself.
The bunker from the German border fortification of the Second World War on the Rhine, today part of Kiefer’s “For Paul Celan – Poppy and Memory” (2019)
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Image: dpa
The studio moves into the exhibition
Between and behind the nineteen pictures there are therefore other Kiefer works: one of the famous lead planes and a concrete bunker from the earlier German fortification lines on the Rhine, which Kiefer knew from his childhood, bought later and now has poppy blossoms sprouting from it. In a container you can see photos from 1969, printed on huge lead plates, which served as models for the paintings in the “Occupations” series. And at the very back, covered by the oversized “Ark”, there are three house-high shelves with work materials from Croissy, now refined into the autonomous work of art “Arsenal” – in other words: the ammunition for the artist’s work.
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