Kiefer's 'der Morgenthau-Plan,' 2012. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photograph by Charles Duprat)

“The Morgenthau Plan” was an American proposal, first mooted in 1944, to partition and deindustrialize Germany after the war. It was never enacted precisely as planned, of course, but while the war was still going on, Joseph Goebbels was able to use news of the idea to rally resistance along the Western Front. “The Morgenthau Plan” is also the title of an installation that Anselm Kiefer showed at Gagosian’s new space in Le Bourget, Paris, last year, of his current show at Gagosian in Chelsea, and of several of the massive, oil-and-acrylic-on-photo-on-canvas tableaux in the show.

Kiefer's 'laßt tausend Blumen blühen,' 2012. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photograph by Charles Duprat)

The plan could certainly be the fertile premise for a robust conceptual engagement with—just to pick from ideas cited in the show’s press release—unintended consequences, industrialism, tyranny and social reorganization, or the sinister inadequacy of mere beauty as an artistic goal. But despite the repetitive insistence of the title, written directly on several canvases as well as on the gallery wall, Mr. Kiefer hasn’t quite gotten there yet—which is too bad, because his paintings hardly need any corpus of explanation in the first place. (Maybe “The Morgenthau Plan” is not a depiction but a demonstration of the dangerous inadequacy of verbal ideas.) One der Morgenthau Plan, for example, comprising three canvases fit tightly together, is just under 10 by 20 feet. Each is covered with a close-up, out-of-focus color photo of a field of flowers, and each photo is almost entirely covered with paint. In the upper half of the composition, translucent layers of gray and blue, thick cracks, drips and stains create a sky of misty, fantastic depth. Tilting across that sky are a dozen ovals, thick knots of paint in charred-bone color that are either blossoms from up close or airships from far away. They blow over on black stems or trail down lines of black smoke into the riot of shockwave strokes and nocturnally floral colors that cover the paintings’ lower half. The raw intensity of abstraction is fit into the direct clarity of figuration: dollops of white paint with black hearts have yellow-orange accents, vague little areas of royal blue float without anchor, and algae-colored stains on the bottom are more like the misremembered synthesis of a meadow than like any one thing you’d ever see. (Through June 8, 2013)

Mr. Kiefer. (Courtesy Thomas Lohnes/AFP/Getty Images)

A press release about the Anselm Kiefer show that will inaugurate Gagosian's new gallery in the north of Paris at Le Bourget this fall just landed in our inbox, and it reveals that Mr. Kiefer is pretty excited about the building, especially because it is near an airport. (The artist is perhaps best known for his jumbo-sized sculptures of airplanes.) Below, his complete endorsement:

Gagosian's daring new Paris gallery is a delight. Both the architecture and location captivate and enchant me. Situated on the edge of an airfield--similar to my own studio in Croissy--airplanes arrive and depart while my works hang there. The pictures arrive, stay for a while, and, once seen, can leave again. This is the objective. The flights, the paintings, the comings, the goings. The space is so inspiring that you can envision the artworks in it immediately. It makes me think of the poem "Unter den Linden"(Under the Linden Trees) by Walther von der Vogelweide.

Oh? You want to read "Unter den Linden" now? Gagosian has that covered:

Under the lime trees
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.
Beside the forest in the vale,
Tándaradéi,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.

I came to meet him
At the green:
There was my true love come before.
Such was I greeted -
Heaven's Queen! -
That I am glad for evermore.
Had he kisses? A thousand some:
Tándaradéi,
See how red my mouth's become.

There he had fashioned
For luxury
A bed from every kind of flower.

—Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170-1230), "Under den linden" (Under the lime trees), translation by Raymond Oliver

This is pretty much the best news release ever. It also includes the poem in French. This time Ernest Combes is the translator. Here we go:

Sous les tilleuls,
Sur la bruyère,
On a dormi : nous étions seuls.
Ô doux mystère
Que dut trahir
L'herbe et les fleurs qu'on dut flétrir!
Bois ombreux ! fraîche vallée!
Tandaradei!
Ô chanson d'amour envolée!

Cœur tout tremblant
Je suis venue -
Dejà m'attendait mon amant.
Je fus reçue,
Vierge des cieux!
À ne désirer jamais mieux.
Ses baisers ! ô douce chose!
Tandaradei!
Voyez comme ma bouche est rose!

Puis il cueillit
Des fleurs pour faire
Tout en riant un petit lit;
De la bergère
Comme il rira
Le passant qui par là viendra !
Fleur des champs, terre jonchée -
Tandaradei!
Dit où ma tête était couchée.

À mon côté
J'aurais grand'honte
Si l'on savait qu'il est resté.
Nul ne raconte,
Même tout bas,
Nos doux jeux, nos plus doux ébats!
Un oiseau seul nous vit faire -
Tandaradei!
Mais petit oiseau sait se taire.

Can't wait to hear what Mr. Kiefer's opinion is of the huge space that his Paris dealer Thaddeaus Ropac is opening this fall, which is also being inaugurated with a show of his work.

(Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac)

Last night, art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, stood before a white architectural model on the top floor of the French Institute Alliance Française on East 60th Street, and presented his gallery's sprawling new space in Pantin, in the northeast of Paris. The compound, which formerly housed a 19th-century factory for heating systems, will consist of eight buildings with a total of 55,000 square feet. The main exhibition space, 22,000 square feet of space in four light-filled galleries, will be divided by convertible walls, which can be moved to transform the space. Anselm Kiefer will be the first artist to present work there in October. There will also be a multimedia space dedicated to performance, which will be inaugurated with work by Joseph Beuys that same month. The gallery will also have our buildings for private viewings, offices and archives.

Though he has galleries in Salzburg and Paris, Mr. Ropac decided that, with the entirety of the international art world in town for the Frieze Art Fair, and with post-war and contemporary auctions on tap here this week, "New York is the right place to announce a project like this."

In the light-filled Skyroom of FIAF, as guests nibbled on bacon-wrapped dates and shrimp cocktail and swilled wine and sparkling water, the dealer detailed the three new exhibitions he has planned for the fall.

First up is a large new body of work by Anselm Kiefer, "Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn)," an exhibition that deals with the Jewish mythical figures of the 15th and 16th centuries. Mr. Kiefer, who is known to work on a grand scale, provided an inspiration for the dealer's decision to build such a large new space.

"It was beautiful and we were very proud and happy to host him," said Mr. Ropac's, about Mr. Kiefer's show at the gallery in the Marais, "but we saw the limits because we couldn't show so many of his incredible monumental works." Mr. Kiefer's installation will consist of huge paintings, collages, books and sculpture, and it will be the first time he has dedicated a large body of work to the theme of the unborn, according to the dealer.

The building dedicated to performance art will open with an exhibition in honor of Beuys's legendary 1969 work Iphigenia, during which the artist walked around a stage with a horse, banging a cymbal and playing recorded excerpts of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. The exhibition, which will "baptize the space for future performances," will attempt to recreate all the vitrines, sculptures, drawings and manuscripts from that legendary performance. Simultaneous with this opening, the gallery in the Marais district will present another Beuys show, this one curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal, director of the Royal Academy in London, on the theme of "materiality."

The gallery is also in talks with some of its artists, including Terence Koh and Robert Longo, about staging performances in an effort to forge "interesting synergies" between the worlds of visual arts and performance. (Interestingly, the tony La Villette park, a hub for performances, dance and music, is just next door to the new space.)

"The ceiling height is 7 to 12 meters," said Mr. Ropac halting to estimate the conversion into feet. "Forty feet," someone in the audience called out. Mr. Ropac smiled, "So you can imagine," he said, "what we are able to do."

Mr. Kiefer.

Over the weekend German artist Anselm Kiefer announced that he's been trying to buy an abandoned nuclear power plant in western Germany. The plant was shut down by German utilities company RWE in 1988.

Though the plan has apparently been in the works for some time, Mr. Kiefer announced his intentions in an interview with Der Spiegel on Sunday.

"Now I am thinking about what to do there. I definitely don't want to paint cows and clouds onto it," he said, according to Reuters.

A spokesperson for the plant said the sale would happen next year at the earliest.