The building, therefore, could be seen as an essay in flattery. It hints that these desirable qualities are already to some extent possessed by the country and by its governing class. Ideals flatter us because we experience them not merely as intimations of a far distant future, but also as descriptions of what we are like. We are used to thinking of flattery as bad, but in fact it can be rather helpful, for flattery encourages us to live up to the appealing image it presents. The child who is praised for his or her first modest attempts at humour, and called witty as a result, is being guided and helped to develop beyond what he or she actually happens to be right now. They grow into the person they have flatteringly been described as already being. This is important because the obstacle to our good development is not usually arrogance, but a lack of confidence.
The Spanish general Spinola, on the right in Velazquez's painting The Surrender of Breda, is depicted receiving the key to the city of Breda, in the southern Netherlands, from the representative of the defeated Dutch forces, Justinus van Nassau (125). This is a painting of an ideaclass="underline" that a victorious general should recognize the merits of his opponents and treat them with respect and consideration. It is a memorial to unusually good and noble conduct. It is not trying to present a comprehensive or accurate account of war, just as the National Congress building in Brasilia is not trying to give an accurate presentation of what Brazil is like as a country. Instead, each latches onto an important and highly relevant ideal. The painting is not a fiction - Spinola did in fact behave well towards Nassau. The Congress is not a fiction - there
An advance fragment of Brazil in 209S.
12-4. Oscar Nicmcver. Brazilian National Congress. Brasilia. 1957-64
A guide to honourable defeat.
125. Diego Velazquez. The Surrender of Breda, 1634-5
arc indeed aspects of elegant seriousness in Brazil. The point in each case is that these very desirable qualities are, so far, unusual, and art is attempting to make them a little less so.
Art can help us with our tendency to lack hope because we think the best kind of behaviour is too far above us, too difficult and too hard. We too often lack the self-conception that makes noble conduct available to us. Art should not berate us for our failings in the forlorn belief that self-disgust will lead to goodness. Rather, we need to strengthen our better natures, and flattery is one of the ways of helping ourselves and others to become better people.
In many countries' histories there are particularly painful things that need to be digested. The hope is that a country can heal itself with the help of political art. This challenge is raised to a pitch of difficulty and importance in Germany. The appalling tragedy of Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s calls for atonement, rather than denial or pure lamentation. The need is not merely to say that terrible things happened, but to deal with the legacy of guilt in the name of improvement. However urgent the need to acknowledge past evils may be, this on its own does not create a better society.
Anselm Kiefer talks to us all, and especially to his German compatriots, as adults about how to recover after terrible things have happened. binenraum presents a magnificent hall in the neoclassical style of Albert Speer, the Third Reich's favourite architect (126). This noble place is seen as though through a veil of tears, represented by a distempering, dripping and peeling surface. The grey and black ball in the middle of the foreground might be a hint of a fallen chandelier or a suggestion of a world consumed in cold fire. There is sadness and anguish here, but the architecture of the room is genuinely beautiful and the painting fully acknowledges this.
In its frontal display, with a geometry of a hall that maps perfectly onto the painted surface, Innenraum is like Poussin's Eucharist, one of the most confident and serious presentations of the possibility of salvation in the history of Western art (127). Poussin believed the Eucharist cleansed an ancient sin, and thus set people free. It is not that Kiefer expects people who view his work to be conscious of the similarity. It is rather that both painters have reached for the same scheme of classical order. Poussin is closer in; Kiefer looks from farther away. In Poussin, the oil lamp still hangs above the redemptive scene.
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A country that needs great political art like few others.
126. Aniclm Kictcr, tnnenraum. 1981
Salvation via art.
127. Nicolas Poussin, The Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. 1647
Kiefer's title, Innenraum, makes a plea for inner space, for mental and emotional room. If our minds arc large we can separate and hold apart ideas that have been forced together in the past. Maturity is often displayed by an ability to hold contradictory ideas in mind, and Kiefer invites us to think that not everything about the Nazi past was wrong. Certain authentic emotions and longings were skilfully engaged by the regime. The difficult fact is that Nazism co-opted themes that life in a good society actually needs. National pride, a sense of mission in the world, grandeur, honour, collective energy and loyalty: these are important for good societies, but their corruption and abuse in Nazi ideology have made them appear imaginatively completely unavailable to many Germans, as though they belonged exclusively to villains and must be hated and rejected forever as a result. Kiefer is a good adult guide to the possibilities of hope and recovery in the face of a horrifying past. He makes it bearable to approach an agonizing but important theme: 'How can Germans recover health, vigour and grandeur in a sane and substantial way?'
In 1995, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude also had a go at this task by wrapping up the Federal parliament in Berlin (128). Although a nineteenth-century work, the Reichstag had a particularly painful
memory attached to it. The Nazi party rose to power in 1933 on the back not of force, as it might be convenient to believe, but of popular electoral success. This has traumatized modern Germany, but a vote cast in 1933 hardly entails agreement with every element of party policy up to 1945, let alone the actions of the government over the massacre of European Jewry or the behaviour of its armies on the Eastern front. Nevertheless, the election results are a fraught reminder of collective responsibility.
Jeanne-Claude and Christo did not change the Reichstag, but by covering and then unveiling it, they set up a grand public opportunity for a renewal of the nation's relationship to its most important political building. It allowed Germany to give its parliament back to itself. The Wrapped Reichstag was a secular political form of baptism. Baptism is a symbolic moment in which past wrongs are put aside and the individual is re-dedicated to the future. Political art has a pivotal role to play in allowing nations to learn to start again, even while they acknowledge guilt for past sins.