Anselm Kiefer
Weighty painting of history.
Anselm Kiefer makes enormous paintings with lead, ash and straw about Germany’s history and myths.
Anselm Kiefer was born in March 1945 in Donaueschingen in southern Germany, just a few months before the end of the Second World War. He grew up in a country in ruins that would rather forget the past. He first studied law and French before turning to art and studying in Freiburg and Karlsruhe. In the early 1970s he was in contact with Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf.
His first works to attract attention were provocative. In the series Occupations (Besetzungen) of 1969 he photographed himself giving the Nazi salute at sites around Europe. The aim was to force out a memory that Germans had repressed, but many found the pictures offensive. The question of how to give form to Germany’s history, myths and guilt became his life’s theme.
From the 1970s Kiefer made large paintings of desolate furrows, wooden floors and scorched landscapes. He mixed oil paint with straw, sand, ash, lead and photographs. In 1980 he represented West Germany at the Venice Biennale, which provoked debate. Around 1981–1983 he made series based on Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue, in which golden-haired Margarete and dark-haired Shulamith stand for the German and the Jewish. The straw in the pictures stands for Margarete’s hair. He has also made huge books of lead and entire libraries of lead folios.
In the early 1990s Kiefer moved to France. In Barjac in the south of France he converted a former silk mill into a vast complex of studios, tunnels, towers and pavilions. He has since worked near Paris. His interests have broadened to include Jewish mysticism, alchemy, astronomy and the myths of many cultures.
Kiefer is regarded as one of the most important artists since 1945. His honours include the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2008. Wim Wenders made the documentary film Anselm about him in 2023. His work shows that history is not over but something we carry with us, and that art can be a place for grief and memory.