Anselm Kiefer, Breaking of the Vessels (1990). Photo by Jan Looper Smith. Earlier today, a friend asked for some sources of artistic inspiration, and my initial impulse was to share with her a work by Anselm Kiefer. I decided that most of his work was too "heavy" for what she had in mind, but it got me to look at his pieces with a different eye. Yes, they are monumental, weighted with meaning and the material itself (as they are often made out of lead, for example), and arguably bleak by disposition. But there is obviously more to it than the initial impression. Kiefer's work lends itself to many viewings, and many meanings. I began to understand a work like Breaking of the Vessels as being about far more than just the horrors of Kristallnacht, which it so clearly seems to point to. As the Saint Louis Art Museum's description of the piece makes clear, Breaking of the Vessels also refers to the Kabbalah, "a collection of mystical writings from the Jewish religion, when the world was created, [when] the attributes of God—his mercy, wisdom, and power—were divided among ten vessels that were not strong enough to hold them, and they shattered into pieces." Beyond these direct historical and spiritual referents, the value of his work (as this particular piece demonstrates so well) for me is in how it seems to inhabit the world in this weighted way, but also suggests something vague, resplendent, life-affirming, and supernatural. Even as it appears to be viciously, viscerally part of the world (like a shelf of library newspapers after a bombing raid), its haunting beauty is also somehow sublime, like a cathedral or a neglected tomb. Its beauty lies in its very monstrousness. —Ed Luna
