It was spectacularly hot and sultry as we walked round the grounds of La Ribaute, the silk mill where Anselm Kiefer lived and worked for a period of fifteen years before moving to the warehouse of La Samaritaine in the outskirts of Paris.   I had forgotten the intensity of its classicism, the names of gods defining the experience of the ruins.   We walked further and saw more than on our previous visit last summer, conducted through the fields and installations by the silent gardien as it got hotter and hotter.   I had not registered the intensity of the experience of the natural environment, the ants invading the lead, the orchids and herons, the artificial lakes, the birdsong.   It is reminiscent of an eighteenth-century landscape park, like Stourhead or Stowe, the natural environment elaborated to balance the artworks placed in a circuit to be experienced in sequence.

There is talk of La Ribaute being taken over by the French and German government jointly.   I don’t know anywhere so expressive of late twentieth-century historical sensibility, much more so than most museums.

This is the converted silk mill:-

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