Ways of Worldly Wisdom: Hermann’s Battle is a 1980 woodcut, paint, and shellac work from Anselm Kiefer’s Wege der Weltweisheit series, held at the Art Institute of Chicago. The series arranges German cultural and mythic figures in forest-tree compositions; this sheet names Arminius (Hermann), the Germanic chieftain who defeated Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest.
Close looking
The scale is mural-like: the sheet is over a meter high and nearly two meters wide, treated not as a page but as a wall. The ground is built from layers of shellac, ash, and paint over the woodcut impression, giving the surface a dark, encrusted texture that reads as bark, as earth, as accumulated sediment. The woodcut lines themselves — bold, jagged, Expressionist in their violence — are partially buried under the material that has been poured and scraped across them.
The composition is structured around a central tree-form, its trunk splitting into branches that carry names and dates. Hermann’s name appears among them, carved into the wood and then partially obscured. The layering is physical as well as historical: the woodcut medium evokes both the German Expressionist tradition and Nazi propaganda prints; the shellac and ash layer evokes burial and burning. What reads first is the darkness — the entire sheet is a near-black with ochre and brown passages where the material is thinner. The surface is aggressive to the eye; it does not invite contemplation so much as demand confrontation.
The mark-making is dual: the clean incision of the woodcut knife against the smeared, poured, and dripped overlays. The tension between the two — precision and chaos, carved line and pooled matter — is the work’s formal argument. The figure of Hermann is not depicted; he is named, buried, and monumentalized in the same gesture.
See also
- Anselm Kiefer — the artist
- Wege der Weltweisheit — the series
- Heroische Sinnbilder — the earlier photographic series