Anselm Kiefer, Lichtzwang, 1999

It's getting rarer and rarer to be able to look up at the night sky and see stars. Really see them. Sure, a wink or two here and there piercing through the smog could do the trick, but there's something about being able to  lay back and take stock of the heavens that's truly moving. Too often we move about in our own orbits thinking we're the center of the universe. The night sky gently, but beautifully, reminds us that we are next to nothing compared to the raging balls of gas millions of light years away. Anselm Kiefer captures the majesty of the night tableau with his panoramic painting, Litchtzwang.

When I stumbled across this painting on Artstor on a late Thursday evening, my mind immediately jumped to a striking passage in Cormac McCarthy's novel, All the Pretty Horses. As I viewed the painting slightly askew from my head's resting place on my outstretched arm, I realized I was staring at the Milky Way. The more I took the painting in, the more my eyes unfocused - most likely due to lack of sleep - and the image on my screen started to come alive with movement. For a minute, I felt like John Grady Cole as

“…he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.”