I returned to the Panthéon after previous visits over the past decade, to see the first new art exhibit in crypt of the Republic in a century. And the exhibit is by a German artist!— Anselm Kiefer. Six vast glass vitrines catching the cold light from the dome, full of wreckage and silence.
I walk into the Panthéon patriotism, heroic scale; the new exhibit by Kiefer is frailty and fragility and pain enclosed in glass. Commissioned for the 2020 panthéonisation of Maurice Genevoix, author of Ceux de 14, the German artist installed six towering glass-and-steel vitrines—now permanent—plus two large canvases that were shown on loan. In the six enclosures are rusted barbed wire, scorched garments, lead books, concrete shards, and sprigs of wheat sit in suspended collision, as if a battlefield had been archived rather than cleaned up.
The materials aren’t metaphors; they’re blunt instruments sharply contrasting celebration of heroes. The Pantheon is France’s national crypt of heroes—Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Curie—built to canonize clarity. Keifer's vitrines are enclosed chaos, monuments for a century that never stopped bleeding, a counter-monument to the patriotic and heroic. The work keys directly off Genevoix’s witness to the Great War; phrases from Ceux de 14 (so I have read about this book of World War I) run through the installations like exposed wiring. You don’t admire these pieces so much as absorb shock from them.
This is the first major new art commission in the Panthéon in nearly a century—the last comparable addition was Bouchard’s 1924 memorial. Kiefer isn’t just adding objects; he’s reopening the monument after a hundred years of stasis.
The clash between neoclassical order and Kiefer’s scorched-earth art is dramatic. The vitrines are not subtle. Kiefer puts the horror of war in the midst of patriotic celebration, a new dimension in this room that is the French nation’s memory chamber.
Standing in the great hall, I thought of how I was drawn to the patriotic and heroic sinceI was a child, but then saw the ruin and wreckage that is actual war. Kiefer puts the horror front and center in contrast to the beauty and majesty of the rest of the building and its art.
