Inspirations Behind Simon Holt: Nigredo
The German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) creates his art around the themes of German history and the Holocaust. Many of his works incorporate multiple material types. The catalogue for his work Nigredo (1994) includes oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw on photograph and woodcut, and is mounted on canvas.
Anslem Kiefer, 2001
Nigredo takes its title from one of the first steps in alchemy, the pseudo-science that sought ways to turn lead into gold. In this first process towards the philosopher’s stone, all the alchemical ingredients were cleaned before being cooked and reduced to a uniform black material. This idea of reduction was also important in Jungian philosophy, where the term first indicated the subjects ‘state of undifferentiated unawareness’. Once the subject has advanced to a state of maximum despair and there seems no way forward, nigredo occurs – it’s the blackened time, ‘Eros and Superego are at daggers drawn’. From this point onward, progress in Jungian philosophy is possible.
In Nigredo, Kiefer has turned a landscape inside out. As with many of his German landscapes, it’s an image of the devastation of Germany and German soil after not only WWII but also the centuries of conflict that preceded it.
Anselm Kiefer: Nigredo, 1984 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
In the image, the fields are bare, with only stalks indicating their former crop. In the background, the air is not clear – there are clouds of white and dark smoke rising into the air. In the top left corner, ‘Nigredo’ is written in the artist’s hand. The viewer stands above the field, and the black objects at the bottom could be many destroyed things: hedges? Trees? Houses?
The painting is large, 10 feet 10 inches × 18 feet 2 1/2 inches (330.2 × 555 cm) so the details become clearer. We’re looking down into a valley, and the land rises to the left. At the bottom of the valley, the fields cease and are replaced by water, perhaps. Or maybe it’s more smoke, rising from destroyed buildings. There’s so much to read in here, particularly as you consider Kiefer’s concerns with environmental destruction. The promising part of the work is that, in alchemy, nigredo is followed by albedo (whiteness); nigredo is only the first despairing step before redemption can follow.
English composer Simon Holt (b. 1958) was asked by pianist Rolf Hind for a piano work, and on that same day, he discovered Kiefer’s Nigredo. He read the painting as the artist’s attempt to turn a landscape inside out and ‘having made it “suffer” in this way, Kiefer has attempted to symbolically restore the earth’s vital functions’.
Simon Holt
The opening fascination with an oscillating semitone leads the journey into more bravura territory at the extremes of the keyboard. Through the work, the time signatures keep changing as he keeps us off balance.
Simon Holt: Nigredo (Rolf Hind, piano)
Although better known for his ensemble works, particularly for the Nash Ensemble, Holt’s piano music has been part of his life since he studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in the late 1970s. In this work, he’s extending into wider territory and exploring the capabilities of the piano as a forte instrument, a piano instrument (referring to dynamics), and its ability to give us introspective thoughts throughout.
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