In a Gallery 801 which is full of paintings in color, Odalisque in Grisaille cannot be overlooked. It is quite a remarkable and unusual experience to see a painting of such smooth and fine detail completely in greyscale, especially so if you already have the color image of Ingres’ celebrated Grande Odalisque of 1814 in your head. Odalisque in Grisaille of 1824 serves as an unfinished repetition of Grande Odalisque, which for unknown reasons is reduced in size and simplified. The lack of color is not a creative choice, rather a signifier of incompleteness, given that a common painting technique at the time was to create a monochromatic underpainting using a neutral grey mixture to notify variations in tone, in which afterwards the canvas was …show more content…
It hangs on a wall entirely to itself, and at over six feet tall and spanning more than 18 feet across it fully pulls you into its world. The title refers to a couple of things, one being the Province of German Bohemia, disputed territory after World War I which was seized by the Nazis in 1938, as well as the poem Bohemia Lies by the Sea by Ingeborg Bachmann, who was influenced by the rifts imposed upon her generation by the second World War. In her mournful poem she longs for a utopia she knows can never exist. In his piece, Kiefer uses generous applications of oil paint, emulsion, shellac, charcoal, and powdered paint on burlap leaving extremely thick, jagged, and protruding layers, creating a physical a representation of a rugged land filled with complex history. Every detail echoes with a memory and the vast surface enfolds the viewer within. The color pallet is overwhelmingly grim with an abundance of browns, grays, and blacks. The application of the pigments and materials portrays a feeling of distress. I can imagine the rough physical gestures that must have gone into making this piece. Visually it almost reads like a Jackson Pollock painting, but rather than a completely abstract composition, Kiefer gives us visual elements that allow our minds to group together a coherent scene. The two lines register as a road. Kiefer employs one-point perspective to create an effective level of depth, swallowing me within. Juxtaposing the muted and earthy colors are bright splotches or reds and oranges. Through the gestalt principle of similarity these are all seen as belonging together as a common object and through past experience our minds read them as flowers, specifically poppies. They still give me mixed feelings, some of the red resembled dripping blood, but along with the road clearly taking us to somewhere beyond, these elements give some