Anselm Kiefer acquired La Ribaute—an old silk factory in Barjac, France—in 1992. The almost 100-acre estate comprises buildings, outdoor art installations, subterranean chambers, tunnels, and a five-level concrete amphitheater. The artist lived at the site until 2007, when he relocated to a new studio space at Croissy-Beaubourg on the outskirts of Paris. Kiefer’s Eschaton Foundation now handles La Ribaute and welcomes visitors to the estate through guided walking tours.
Anselm Kiefer and The Eschaton Foundation at La Ribaute
The Foundation conducts its explorations of La Ribaute in French, English, and German on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from mid-April to the end of October (with a summer break). Tickets are available only online and sell out quickly. The regular tours last about two and a half hours and introduce the visitor to a curated selection from the 70-some artworks at La Ribaute. Full-day outings are also offered.
Along with providing guided visits, the Eschaton Foundation is responsible for preserving La Ribaute and cataloging the contents of Kiefer’s archive. It also facilitates exhibitions, research, and publications to increase awareness and appreciation of contemporary art.
Their website states: “The Foundation’s name, Eschaton, refers to life’s cyclical nature and the concept that creation and rebirth arise from ruins and are enabled through demise and destruction, a significant leitmotif in Anselm Kiefer’s artistic practice.” The term eschatology comes from Ancient Greek. Eschatologists study the end of things, like human history or the entire world. Kiefer’s fascination with eschatology is no surprise, considering his personal history.
Who Is Anselm Kiefer?
Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany on March 8th, 1945, exactly two months before World War II ended in Europe. The night of his birth, while he and his mother were safely away, his house and town were severely bombed. Growing up, he remembers playing in the rubble from the war.
Kiefer earned his art degree in 1969 and immediately gained notoriety for his photographic series Occupations (Besetzung). In this series, Kiefer traveled to sites that had been key locations for the Nazi regime and photographed himself giving the sieg heil. He wanted to force a discussion about the Nazis, something he felt no one in Germany was talking about but needed to.
The Germans, in general, were greatly offended by this work which seemed to be using Germany’s physical landmarks to reinforce a link between the country and Nazism. But that was not Kiefer’s goal. His intention was to keep the past from being forgotten. He didn’t want history to be buried or to let evil stay hidden around him.
After completing his Occupations series, Kiefer moved from photography to mixed media paintings, incorporating glass, straw, wood, plants, and lead into large-scale works. Along with this shift in media, he began exploring how myth and history blur together, seeing myths as another way to understand history. He also studied the Kabbalah and traveled extensively. His creations—then and now—combine cosmological, mystical, literary, archeological, and theological perspectives.
La Ribaute
In 1995, Kiefer moved to La Ribaute and, over the next several years, created one of the most remarkable conglomerations of artistic expression anywhere. Before examining some specific works in Kiefer’s vast complex, let’s set the stage with this quote by Camille Morineau:
“Visiting La Ribaute . . . whether in sunlight or in the shadow of the tunnels, I understood that against all expectation and all logic, it is the feminine that has triumphed—that if La Ribaute is an emblem for the transformation of the world, it has to be seen as, among other things but also primarily, a compelling invitation to put women at the center and thus a rather implacable demonstration of their power.”
Exploring La Ribaute is like a treasure hunt. The physical results of Kiefer’s creative synapses—as he refers to them—are tucked away in the folds of these vast grounds, forming an ecosystem all their own. These enigmatic works impact the mind and senses in ways that often defy clear explanations.
Women of Antiquity at La Ribaute
The tour of La Ribaute begins in a large open courtyard in front of the 19th-century silk factory that came with the estate. The yard is bare except for a gathering of ghostly gowns standing erect and shouldering various objects to identify the women the dresses represent. Cast from wedding gowns, these fantom females reflect the idea of the divine feminine as found in Jewish mystical literature—shekhinah—the divine bride. In this sculpture series, Kiefer extols known and unknown women, especially those erased or snubbed by history.
For example, the dress topped by a tower of bricks is called Phryne—an ancient Greek actress, art model, and courtesan. She was so successful and wealthy that she offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes, razed by Alexander the Great in 336 B.C.E. She insisted the walls include the inscription “destroyed by Alexander, restored by Phryne, the courtesan.” Unwilling to accept the idea that a female sex worker could rebuild what Alexander the Great had destroyed, the city fathers turned her down, and the walls remained in ruin.
Like Phryne and her companions, other headless female ghosts pop up throughout the grounds, alone and in clusters, as reminders of the unequal treatment of women in many cultures, particularly strong women whose intellectual questioning and bold behavior are often considered unacceptable and a cause for silencing. One impressive grouping of these “ghost gowns” resides in a large greenhouse nestled in the landscape. These sculptures represent more women from antiquity, like Pandora, Lilith, and Sappho.
Kiefer says his sculpture of Sappho is a “monument to all the unknown women poets.” Sappho’s white gown supports a stack of books—the guardians and disseminators of knowledge. And the books, so often used by Kiefer, are made of lead. According to the artist, lead is “the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history.” Lead is also important to Kiefer for its association with alchemy. Like medieval scientists who tried turning lead into gold, Kiefer uses art to transform human understanding.
The ancient Greeks praised Sappho’s poetry but criticized her morals, saying she behaved like a man, meaning she was a lesbian. Even though her lyric poetry was esteemed in her day, very few of Sappho’s original words survive. Except for one complete poem and a handful of fragments, the rest disappeared by the Middle Ages, helped along by Pope Gregory VII, who ordered her books burned. Today, her writings are known almost exclusively through quotations from other authors’ works.
Kiefer also commemorates Hypatia, an equally extraordinary woman from antiquity. She was a Pagan philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer who lived in 5th-century Egypt during great religious turmoil between Christians, Jews, and Pagans. Considered the leading mathematician and astronomer of her time, Hypatia is known to have written several treatises, none of which have survived. Despite her revered status as a scholar, Hypatia met a violent death at the hands of religious fanatics.
Kiefer depicts Hypatia with an odd-shaped glass head. The shape is called the “melancholia cube,” after Durer’s 1514 woodcut Melancholia I, where this unique geometric form appears. It is an interesting choice for Hypatia’s attribute and a good example of the multi-layered meanings found in Kiefer’s images—meanings that defy linear explanations.
Durer, like Hypatia, was enthralled with mathematics. He saw geometry as a primary building block of artistic creativity and laid the groundwork for descriptive geometry in his treatise on human proportion. In this sense, Durer’s geometric shape is a logical symbol for Hypatia, except for its connection to melancholia—the subject of the woodcut where this one-of-a-kind shape originated.
In Durer’s time, artistic creativity was often associated with depression or melancholy. In this woodcut, Durer personifies this state of despair as Melancholia, an angel in a long flowing gown (like Hypatia’s). She holds a caliper against a tablet in her lap as if creating a carefully measured drawing from which she pauses to brood. Everything in the image is recognizable except for that odd-shaped cube. Is that what gives her pause? Is it the cube’s lack of symmetry that bothers her, symbolizing the artist’s inability to achieve perfection? Or does she see the cube, with its cut-off corners, as incomplete, causing her to ponder the unfinished state of human understanding? In any case, Kiefer has honored Hypatia’s brilliance with a mysterious geometric shape originally conceived by another genius—an artistic one of German descent, just like Kiefer.
The Crypt of Samson at La Ribaute
Like the Women of Antiquity Series, Kiefer’s Crypt of Samson also alludes to the powerful qualities of women. According to Deuteronomy 7:3, God forbade Israelites from marrying Philistines, but Samson married one anyway. The power she held over Samson’s passions was stronger than the will of God. And it was another woman, Delilah, who destroyed his superhuman strength. To access the Crypt of Samson at La Ribaute, you enter a round ribbed metal tube that forms a tunnel leading into an underground pillared room. The pillars reference the ones Samson grabbed to bring down the Philistine temple of Dagon in Gaza.
Although the Bible only mentions two such supports for the temple roof, Kiefer chose to create a multi-pillared room. These spaces are known as hypostyle halls, primarily associated with ancient Egyptian architecture. I can’t help but think that Kiefer incorporated a hypostyle hall into Samson’s crypt as a reminder that the ancient Egyptians believed in the power of the divine feminine and worshiped many goddesses, including Isis, who, with her brother Osiris, was thought to have created civilization.
Anselm Kiefer’s Women of the Revolution at La Ribaute
Another underground space at La Ribaute houses an installation called Women of the Revolution, which pays homage to 19th-century women who impacted the French Revolution, like Madame de Staël (a writer and political theorist), whom Napoleon exiled for expressing her beliefs. In this installation, Kiefer represents the women as a series of black, draped beds (deathbeds) that he describes like this:
“Dedicated to the Women of the Revolution, it contains lead beds with puddles of water stagnating in their hollow spots. . . The water is now out in the open and its surface, visible through the dust, is again like a skin, a membrane, a boundary between the inner and the outer; a metaphor for the tremendous power that women draw from deep within themselves in contrast to the superficial bluster and bragging of men.”
A large photograph on lead dominates the back wall of the installation. It shows Kiefer in front of a watery landscape, inviting comparison with Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, painted by the 19th-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich.
Friedrich’s work is considered one of the masterpieces of the Romantic movement. It has been interpreted as an emblem of self-reflection or contemplation of life’s path, and the seascape is believed to evoke the sublime. It was also a painting appropriated for Nazi propaganda during World War II.
By including a self-portrait resembling Friedrich’s masterpiece as part of his Women of the Revolution installation, Kiefer effectively steps into history himself—owning it as a German and a man, contemplating it like Friedrich’s Wanderer, and transforming it by making women the focus of the discussion as he’s done throughout La Ribaute.
