This is the second in our ongoing series on “Becoming the Sea,” the monumental new Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum. If you missed our first story, which introduced the artist and the Jewish and St. Louis roots behind the show, you can read it here.

Anselm Kiefer has depicted rivers in art before. He has flown over them, painted them, burned them into ash. But his newest works, now installed in the vaulted Sculpture Hall of the Saint Louis Art Museum contain a river unlike any he has ever rendered: ours.

The Mississippi as myth

Kiefer’s interest in the Mississippi began in 1991, when he came to St. Louis to oversee the installation of his work “Breaking of the Vessels.” During that visit, he took both a helicopter and boat trip up the river from St. Louis toward Alton, an experience that deeply shaped his visual vocabulary.

Now, more than 30 years later, five monumental paintings fill the museum’s Sculpture Hall. Created within the last two years specifically for this space, two of them draw directly from that Mississippi journey. In one, the river’s winding path is cast in thick lead, evoking an aerial view of its curves and crossings. In another, the surface glows with a crust of gold leaf and electrolysis sediment, suggesting the weight of time embedded in the landscape.

“He wanted to see the river from above,” said Melissa Venator, SLAM’s assistant curator of modern art. “That bird’s-eye view, where time and geography collapse, became part of his visual language. He was seeing the river not just physically but mythically.”

In the painting “Missouri, Mississippi,” the viewer peers through sedimented layers of lead and straw materials that invoke both toxicity and transformation.

Venator calls it a “bird’s-eye memory map.” It’s the Mississippi as seen by an artist not a mapmaker.

“He’s referencing American land but also European myth,” she said. “For Kiefer, rivers are places of forgetting and return. They carry destruction but also the possibility of renewal.”

The river as portal

In “Becoming the Sea,” the river isn’t just a subject — it’s a metaphor.

“The Mississippi becomes a symbol of erosion and memory, much like the Rhine in German Romanticism,” Venator said. “And in Kiefer’s hands, it’s layered with trauma, renewal and myth.”

Venator was speaking broadly about Kiefer’s artistic language, not just the works in Sculpture Hall. His practice often involves burnt books, ash and heavy natural materials — metaphors for destruction and transformation. But here, the process is simpler. The five new works were made materials that give their surfaces a luminous but corroded texture, like something lifted from the bottom of a river.

St. Louis as catalyst

Kiefer’s artistic turn toward American riverbeds started here in St. Louis, and it didn’t come out of nowhere. His connection to SLAM began in 1983, with the traveling exhibition “Expressions: New Art from Germany,” which brought Kiefer’s work to local audiences for the first time.

In 1987, the museum acquired his painting “Brennstäbe (Fuel Rods),” and just a few years later, added “Breaking of the Vessels” to its permanent collection.

Kiefer came to St. Louis in 1991 to oversee the installation of that massive piece — the same visit that sparked his river journey north, which would later resurface in this new work.

This commitment to Kiefer’s work didn’t happen in a vacuum. Jewish St. Louisan Morton D. May played a key role in building SLAM’s collection of postwar German art, donating the world’s largest group of Max Beckmann paintings to the museum. That gift helped position SLAM as a leader in the field — and made it a natural home for this exhibition.

“This show ties together decades of collecting and community-building,” said Venator. “It brings St. Louis into an international conversation and it brings Kiefer’s vision right to our front door.”

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