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Anselm Kiefer Extensive Notes
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Lecture notes of 17 pages for the course The Arts at 11th Grade (Anselm Kiefer Notes)
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Anselm KieferAnselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württemburg,
Germany, and raised near the east bank of the Rhine in the region of the Black Forest.
Kiefer was named after the nineteenth-century classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and
planned from childhood to become an artist. After studies at the university in Freiburg
and the academy in Karlsruhe, he studied informally in the early 1970s with the artist
Joseph Beuys on occasional visits to Düsseldorf. Before moving to Barjac, in the
Languedoc region in the south of France, in 1992, Kiefer made art at home in
Hornbach and then in a large converted brick factory in Buchen. He recently moved
from the south of France to Paris.
The great majority of Kiefer's works since his emergence in the late 1960s through
the 1990s refer to subjects drawn from Germany and its culture.
The great majority of Kiefer's works since his emergence in the late 1960s through the
1990s refer to subjects drawn from Germany and its culture: German history, myth,
literature, art history, music, philosophy, topography, architecture, and folk customs,
even going so far as to exploit clichés or commonplace icons—for example, Wagner's
operatic Ring cycle, Goethe's poetry,
or the mythical mountain resting
place of Emperor Frederick I
(Barbarossa, ca. 1125–1190).
Either
directly or by strong implication,
many of these references to
German culture and history also
evoke the uses and misuses to
which the visual and verbal
propaganda of the Third Reich
subjected them. As Kiefer has said
in reference to this national legacy
of World War II, "After the
'misfortune,' as we all name it so
euphemistically now, people
thought that in 1945 we were
starting all over again. . . . . It's
nonsense. The past was put under
taboo, and to dig it up again
generates resistance and disgust."
Cultural critic Andreas Huyssen, in
a 1992 essay, commented on the
reception of Kiefer's works in the
1970s and 1980s, noting that the
artist's Germanness functioned very
differently in the United States and
Germany. While Americans have often understood
Kiefer to be a sole struggler against the repression Seraphim, 1983–84.
of Germany's fascist past,
Vergangenheitsbewältigung ("coming to terms with Oil, straw, emulsion, and
the past") has been the dominant theme in German
intellectual life since the early 1960s. Kiefer's work, shellac on canvas, 126 1/4 x
begun toward the end of the decade, developed in 130 1/4 inches.
that context. "For German critics," Huyssen wrote,
"the issue was rather how
,Kiefer went about dealing with this past. To them Kiefer's deliberate strategy of opening a
Pandora's box of fascist and nationalistic imagery amounted to a kind of original sin of the post
Auschwitz era."
In 1969, during a trip through Switzerland, France, and Italy, Kiefer staged a series of photographic
self-portrait called Occupations, in which he dressed in paramilitary clothes and struck a pose that
imitated Hitler in various natural and monumental settings. It was a provocative gesture that Kiefer
layered with additional meanings—in one image, he is photographed from the back against the
backdrop of the sea, much like a Romantic wanderer in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
Three histories converge in a single photograph: the early nineteenth century, the 1930s, and the
time of the work's making in the late 1960s. For Kiefer, understanding history begins with its
invocation, restaging, or excavation.
Layers of multiple histories and media are hallmarks of Kiefer's work. He is best known for his
paintings, which have grown increasingly large in scale with additions of lead, broken glass, and
dried flowers or plants. Their encrusted surfaces and thick layers of impasto are physical
evocations of the sediments of time and meaning they convey. The subjects and themes of these
large-scale pictures are developed by the artist in associated works on paper—series of sketches,
watercolours, and altered or collaged photographs. These drawings develop the artist's themes
through experimentation—as preliminary or intermediary studies—and result in beautifully finished,
stand-alone works of art.
Kiefer is an avid reader and deeply interested in how literature and philosophy are produced and
disseminated. Since the late 1960s, in addition to paintings, drawings, and photographs, he has
made a number of large-scale, unique artist books. He regards the medium of these books as
something fluid, somewhat like cinema. Early examples are typically worked-over photographs; his
more recent books consist of sheets of lead layered with the artist's characteristic materials of
paint, minerals, or dried plant matter. Heavy but pliant, lead has been used by Kiefer throughout his
career for its various alchemical or deleterious connotations. Indeed, touching and turning the
pages of these later leaden volumes would expose the reader to the books' toxic substance.
Kiefer's interest in exploring the possibility of coming to terms with the Nazi past by transgressing
postwar taboos against visual and verbal icons of the Third Reich is replete with irony. In his large
scale paintings or recent sculptures, the weight of history is viscerally palpable. The drawings, on
the other hand, can appear delicately lyrical or caricatural. The photographic works in particular
suggest to what extent Kiefer's work is linked to conceptual art of the time and his interest in
mockery and humor as tools of expression. They also suggest how this post-Duchampian art
insists on its own built-in contradictions, which requires, by way of interpretation, the participation
of the viewer.
Ian Alteveer
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Citation
Alteveer, Ian. "Anselm Kiefer (born 1945)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kief/hd_kief.htm (October
2008) Further Reading
Auping, Michael Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth. Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum, 2005.
Huyssen, Andreas "Kiefer in Berlin." October 62 (Fall 1992), pp. 84–101.. n/a: n/a, n/a.
Rosenthal, Mark Anselm Kiefer. Chicago: Art Institute, 1987.
Rosenthal, Nan Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kief/hd_kief.htm
, Your Golden Hair, Margarete , 1980
Watercolor, gouache, and acrylic on paper; 16 3/8 x 21 7/8 in. (41.6 x 55.6 cm)
In the early 1980s, Kiefer made more than thirty paintings, painted photographs, and
watercolors that refer in their titles and inscriptions to the Romanian Jewish writer Paul Celan's
"Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), a poem composed in German in late 1944 and 1945. Celan's
parents, along with many other Jews from Czernowitz, Romania, where he had been raised,
were killed in the Trisnistria camp in eastern Romania in 1942. Celan himself endured two
years of forced labor under the Germans, after which he exiled himself to Paris until his suicide
in 1970.
Celan's "Death Fugue," widely read and anthologized in postwar Germany, is set in an
extermination camp. Its narrative voice, in the first person plural, is that of the camp's Jewish
inmates who suffer under the strict watch of the camp's blue-eyed commandant. Singing "your
golden hair, Margarete / your ashen hair, Shulamith," the narrators contrast German
womanhood, as personified by Margarete, to whom the commandant addresses letters at night
(she is named after Goethe's heroine, Gretchen, in Faust), and Jewish womanhood (Shulamith
was King Solomon's dark-haired beloved in the Song of Songs). Here, as in most of Kiefer's
Margarete works, the German heroine is depicted only by the synecdoche of her "golden hair,"
in the form of sheaves of wheat in the countryside.
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