Anselm Kiefer

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(b Donaueschingen, 8 March 1945). German painter. He studied law in 1965-6 at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t in Freiburg, before starting to study art there in 1966 as a pupil of the painter Peter Dreher (b 1932). In 1969 he studied under Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in Karlsruhe, and in 1970 he moved to the Staatliche Kunstakademie in D?sseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. From this time onwards history and myth were the central themes in his work: he was not concerned with reviving the history painting; rather, he attempted by means of drawing and symbols to expose the many-layered quality of historical processes, in order 'to approach in an unscientific way the centre from which events are controlled' (Kiefer, Art, 1990). On a journey through Switzerland, Italy and France in 1969 Kiefer produced the photographic series Occupations (see 1991 exh. cat., pp. 93-4), in which he photographed himself saluting in a pose that imitated Hitler. In this and in later books he presented his personal way of coming to terms with German history, literature and art history. His central concern was to experience history as a prerequisite for understanding it.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The controversial work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) was a complex examination of many themes, from alchemy to his country's Nazi past, often explored through such unconventional materials as lead and straw.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, southern Germany, on March 8, 1945, during the final days of the collapse of the Third Reich. Growing up in a divided postwar Germany, he would eventually confront through his art the German burden of the Nazi legacy. As a young man in the mid 1960s he first studied French and law before pursuing the study of art at academies in Freiburg and Karlsruhe in the late 1960s.

An early conceptual art exercise entitled Occupations (1969) remains one of his most controversial works. It consisted of a series of photographs of Kiefer dressed up in military garb while performing a Sieg Heil salute in such countries as France and Italy. He acted out this pompous military act of occupation from the Roman Colosseum to the seashore. Was this a disturbing nostalgia for past Nazi glory or was it a satire of dreams of empire? "I do not identify with Nero or Hitler," Kiefer once stated, "but I have to reenact what they did just a little bit in order to understand the madness. That is why I make these attempts to become a fascist."

In the early 1970s Kiefer studied occasionally with the artist Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf. Kiefer's art would not follow the public performances and personal myth-making of Beuys' art. Nonetheless, Beuys was one of Kiefer's strongest influences, as can be seen in his desire to create art that was in a dialogue with history and the role of the artist in transforming materials.

In 1971 Kiefer married and moved to the small village of Hornbach in the Oden Forest of West Germany. He began to lead a reclusive life in an old schoolhouse that became his home and studio. Except for personal photographs that he used in his art, he did not want to be photographed and granted few interviews (he preferred to be paraphrased rather than quoted). In 1976 he wrote a cryptic autobiography that consists of a brief list of names, words, and phrases of personal significance.

Kiefer's art of the 1970s began to grapple with complex investigations of myth, religion, and history. At first the settings for his paintings were the dense forests of his region and the heavy timber structure of his attic studio in the schoolhouse, as seen in Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) where three burning chairs represent the Christian Trinity. His art began to present the mythic and historical figures of German culture, especially those who had been celebrated during the Third Reich. He explored such Wagnerian themes as Brunhilde-Grane (1978) and created pantheons of German cultural heroes, as in the assembled woodcut portraits of Ways of Worldly Wisdom - Arminius's Battle (1978-1980). Kiefer's paintings often have their titles written boldly across them (and sometimes specific names as well), allowing the works to be read both as images and conceptually as linguistic fragments. He did not create an easy art; many of his works require a rather extensive understanding of literature and history.

A recurrent theme that began to emerge in 1974 was the land, often specific German landscapes that are broad, cultivated plains. However, these were not pantheistic tributes to a bountiful nature, but were dark, tortured fields suggestive of scorched earth after some apocalyptic battle. The romantic love of German land evoked by the 19th-century painter Casper David Friedrich now reached an angst-ridden dead end in the tar-like blacks and ash-like grays of Kiefer's paintings.

Kiefer also examined that taboo subject in postwar Germany, the Third Reich. By the early 1980s many of his paintings were based upon images of the sterile and overscaled Neo-Classical architecture of Hitler's megalomaniacal dreams.

One of Kiefer's most powerful series of paintings was based upon Paul Celan's 1945 poem "Death Fuge," which was written in a Nazi concentration camp. The poem contrasted the Aryan blonde hair of Margarete and the dark "ashen hair" of the Jewess Shulamite. In Your Golden Hair, Margarete (1981) a limp arc of bundled yellow straw is attached to a painting of one of Kiefer's devastated fields, as the Nazi blonde ideal was made grotesque. For Shulamite (1983) he painted a cavernous room based upon a Nazi memorial hall. The room appeared to be blackened with soot as a candelabrum burns in the back. This hellish, over-like environment was evocative of the Holocaust that consumed Shulamite. Fire, both as a destructive and redemptive force, was a common theme in Kiefer's art.

Kiefer was deeply interested in alchemy - the medieval folly of attempting to change such base materials as lead into precious gold. For Kiefer, the artist was an alchemist, converting raw materials such as paint and canvas into objects of great profundity. The aspirations and limits of art were symbolized by the motif of the winged palette that seems to be woefully earth bound, such as in the 1985 sculpture Palette with Wings where the wings were made of such metals as lead. In 1989 he exhibited sculptures of grounded lead bombers evocative of this same Icarus-like theme.

By the mid-1980s Kiefer was moving away from specifically German subject matter to more universal themes, often dealing with a "New World" where Kiefer freely manipulated the culture of the past into painted environments of the artist's making. After a trip to Israel in 1984, he began to draw extensively from such ancient sources as the Old Testament. In his painting of the Holy City Jerusalem (1986), an alchemist field containing lead and gold leaf was presented with the "ironical" addition of attached iron skis. For such complicated paintings as Osiris and Isis (1985-1987) he juxtaposed ancient Roman ruins and Egyptian mythology with the transforming power of nuclear energy.

Throughout his career Kiefer was a maker of books, one-of-a-kind works like medieval manuscripts. His most monumental expression of this interest is The High Priestess/ Zweistromland [Land of Two Rivers] (1985-1989). This sculpture consists of two bookcases (labeled after the rivers Tigris and Euphrates) containing about two hundred lead books, all on a superhuman scale. Some of the books were blank; others contained such things as obscure photographs of clouds or dried peas. It was a many layered work dealing with the artifacts of knowledge.

Kiefer's art began in the milieu of the late 1960s; the conceptual side of his work has often been present, as has the use of unconventional materials associated with process art (in Kiefer's case, lead, straw, sand, etc.). His mature works were expressively painted, often on an enormous scale, which led to comparisons by critics with Jackson Pollock, the great American Abstract Expressionist. Kiefer's rise to public prominence in the early 1980s coincided with the emergence of Neo-Expressionism, the Post-Modern return to painting and historical subject matter, as well as the growing international interest in contemporary German art. A major retrospective of Kiefer's art toured the United States in 1987-1989.

Kiefer's art was often more appreciated outside of Germany. When his work was featured by West Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale it caused a great deal of controversy at home for his resurrection of the ghosts of German nationalism, particularly Hitler's Third Reich. However, a neo-Nazi interpretation of Kiefer's art was dismissed by many as a superficial reading of his work. He even received an individual exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 1984.

Anselm Kiefer was considered by some to be the most significant artist of his day. While his art emerged during a time when Germans began to discuss their country's difficult past, it evolved into a more universal examination of the complexities of art, culture, and human existence. He published A Book by Anselm Kiefer in 1988.

Further Reading

The most thorough discussion of Kiefer to be found in English was the exhibition catalogue Anselm Kiefer by Mark Rosenthal (1987). Specific works are featured in A Book by Anselm Kiefer, introduction by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., and Susan Cragg Ricci (1988) and in Armin Zweite, Anselm Kiefer: The High Priestess (1989). An informative discussion can be found in Paul Taylor, "Painter of the Apocalypse" in The New York Times Magazine (October 16, 1988). A good example of a critical critique was Andreas Huyssen, "Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth" in October (spring, 1989). Kiefer's art was placed into the broader context of contemporary German art in Jack Cowart, editor, Expressions: New Art from Germany (1983); Christos M. Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal, and Wieland Schmied, editors, German Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1905-1985 (1985); and Thomas Krens, Michael Govan, and Joseph Thompson, editors, Refigured Painting: The German Image 1960-88 (1989). For a summary of Kiefer's art see Howard Smagula, Currents: Contemporary Directions in the Visual Arts (second edition, 1989).

For additional information, see School Arts (March 1993); Art in America (September 1993); and The Independent (May 5, 1995).

Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer To the Unknown Painter (Dem unbekannten Maler), 1983
Born	March 8, 1945 (1945-03-08) (age 64)
Nationality	German
Field	Sculpture

Anselm Kiefer Grane, Woodcut with paint and collage on paper mounted on linen, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Anselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen. He is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the theological concepts of Kabbalah.

In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting "Margarethe" (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan's well-known poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue").

His works are characterised by a dull/musty, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats. In most of his works, the use of photography as an output surface is prevalent and earth and other raw materials of nature are often incorporated. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or places particularly pregnant with history. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with a style called "New Symbolism."

Anselm Kiefer is represented in Paris by Yvon Lambert Gallery^[1].

Contents 1 Life and work 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

Life and work

In 1951 he moved to Ottersdorf and attended grammar school in Rastatt. In 1966 he left law and Romance language studies at University of Freiburg to study at art academies in Freiburg, Karlsruhe, and Düsseldorf. Kiefer began his career as a photographer with performances in which he mimicked the Nazi salute calling for Germans to remember and to acknowledge the loss to their culture through the mad xenophobia of the Third Reich. In 1969 at Galerie am Kaiserplatz, Karlsruhe, he presented his first single exhibition "Besetzungen (Occupations)" with a series of photographs about controversial political actions.

By 1970 while studying under the tutelage of Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, his stylistic leanings resembled Georg Baselitz' approach. He worked with glass, straw, wood and plant parts. The use of these materials meant that his art works became temporary and fragile, which Kiefer himself is well aware of. The fragility of his work contrasts with the stark subject matter in his paintings. This use of familiar materials to express ideas was influenced by Joseph Beuys' art practice, in which Beuys used fat and carpet felt. It is also typical of the Neo-Expressionist style.

In the 1970s he incorporated German mythology (see also: Jonathan Meese) in particular, and in the following decade he argued with the Kabbalah. He went on expanded journeys throughout Europe, USA and the middle east, in which the latter two journeys further influenced his work. Besides paintings, Kiefer created sculptures, watercolors, woodcuts, photographs and books.

By the 1980s, Kiefer’s themes widened from a focus on Germany's role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involved not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult symbolism, theology and mysticism. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life.

In 1990 he was awarded a Wolf Prize. In 1999 the Japan Art Association awarded him the Praemium Imperiale for his lifetime achievements. In the explanatory statement it reads:

"A complex critical engagement with history runs through Anselm Kiefer's work. His paintings as well as the sculptures of Georg Baselitz created an uproar at the 1980 Venice Biennale: the viewers had to decide whether the apparent Nazi motifs were meant ironically or whether the works were meant to convey actual fascist ideas. Kiefer worked with the conviction that art could heal a traumatized nation and a vexed, divided world. He created epic paintings on giant canvases that called up the history of German culture with the help of depictions of figures such as Richard Wagner or Goethe, thus continuing the historical tradition of painting as a medium of addressing the world. Only a few contemporary artists have such a pronounced sense of art's duty to engage the past and the ethical questions of the present, and are in the position to express the possibility of the absolution of guilt through human effort."

Since 1992 he established in Barjac, France and transformed his 35-hectare studio compound La Ribaute into a Gesamtkunstwerk, which can literally be entered. His studio is enormous and in many ways is a comment on industrialization. He has created there an extensive system of glass buildings, archives, installations, storerooms for materials and paintings, subterranean chambers and corridors.

From 1995 to 2001, Kiefer started a cycle of large paintings of the cosmos. He also started to turn to sculpture, though lead still remains his preferred medium.

Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition, Velimir Chlebnikov, was first shown in a small studio near Barjac in the South of France then moved to White Cube in London and finished in the Aldrich Museum in rural Connecticut. The work consists of 30 large paintings—six-feet high and around 10-feet long—hanging on two banks of 15 on facing walls of an expressly constructed grooved steel building that mimics the studio in which it was originally created. The works are cluttered with items such as string, gloves, sunflowers and miniature warships. While most of Kiefer’s works explore the ambitions and failures of humans, this work illustrates the ability to love and create despite our tendency for evil and vanity.^[2]

The builder and arts patron Hans Grothe will present 30 to 50 of the artist's works in the yet-to-be-constructed Anselm Kiefer Museum near the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin in 2007.

A large sculpture by Kiefer, titled "Etroits sont les vaisseaux", was subject of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2007. Due to its size, the 6 ton, 80 foot sculpture was deemed a structure subject to local historic district rules and the Southport, Connecticut owner was ordered to remove it from his lawn.^[3]

In 2008, Anselm Kiefer was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Art historian Werner Spies said in his speech, that Kiefer is a passionate reader who takes impulses from literature for his work.^[4]

See also

• Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany

References

1. ^ Yvon Lambert
2. ^ Robert Ayers (June 27, 2006), Anselm Kiefer at Aldrich Contemporary, ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/18155/anselm-kiefer-at-aldrich-contemporary/, retrieved 2008-04-16 
3. ^ References to be added here. See Southport Historic District.
4. ^ "Friedenspreisträger Kiefer: Eklatant und lästig", ZDF Heute, www.heute.de, 2008-10-19

External links

• White Cube: Anselm Kiefer
• Gagosian Gallery: Anselm Kiefer
• Kiefer takes us round his London White Cube show (BBC Collective)
• Anselm Kiefer at SFMOMA (2007)
• Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy (2007)
• Anselm Kiefer at The Hirshhorn Museum (2006)
• Anselm Kiefer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1999)
• Anselm Kiefer at Fundación Proa (1998)
• Telegraph review (2007)
• Guardian review (2007)
• Guardian review (2005)
• Artnet review (2002)
• Interview (2007)

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