Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, in the French occupation zone of postwar Germany. He studied law and Romance languages before turning to art, first at the Academy in Karlsruhe under Peter Dreher, then at the Düsseldorf Academy under Joseph Beuys. The Beuys inheritance is visible throughout: the shamanic authority, the belief that art must engage history directly, the use of unconventional materials. But where Beuys worked through performance and pedagogical gesture, Kiefer worked through painting, photography, and sculpture at monumental scale.
His first major project, Heroische Sinnbilder (1969) — also called Besetzungen (Occupations) — is a series of black-and-white photographs in which Kiefer reenacts the Nazi salute at European historic sites. He is usually photographed from behind or in profile, performing the Hitlergruß at the Colosseum, on Mediterranean coasts, in Germanic landscapes. The strategy is to identify with the perpetrator rather than the victim, forcing the viewer to confront inherited guilt and the aestheticization of fascist ideology. The photographs are not paintings, but they are the foundation of everything Kiefer painted afterward: the same confrontation with taboo, the same willingness to inhabit the symbol in order to exhaust it.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kiefer developed his mature material vocabulary: sand, straw, ash, lead, wood. Märkischer Sand (1980) incorporates actual Brandenburg soil; Margarete (1981) embeds straw in paint to literalize Celan’s “golden hair” from “Todesfuge”; Sulamith uses darkened, burned material for the “ashen hair.” The diptych insists on the impossibility of reconciling German cultural ideal and Jewish victim. The materials are not merely textured; they are historical — the earth as witness, the straw as both poetry and dust.
The Wege der Weltweisheit woodcut series, begun in the late 1970s, arranges German cultural figures — Wagner, Nietzsche, Heidegger — in forest compositions. The medium itself is loaded: woodcut belongs to German Expressionism and to Nazi propaganda simultaneously. Kiefer uses it knowingly.
In 1980, Georg Baselitz — not Kiefer himself — organized the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, insisting on showing Kiefer alongside his own work and that of Rainer Fetting. The exhibition provoked a public scandal in West Germany: critics debated whether Kiefer’s restaging of Nazi iconography was a necessary historical exorcism or a dangerous aestheticization of fascism. The controversy made Kiefer internationally famous and remains unresolved. He has rarely commented on it directly.
Andreas Huyssen’s 1989 October essay, “The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,” remains the major sympathetic reading: Kiefer confronts the past by inhabiting its visual language, turning the perpetrator’s symbols into material for mourning. The opposing reading — that the work is too beautiful, too monumental, too mythic to remain purely critical — persists in German criticism.
Kiefer is the most internationally celebrated of the core five, and the most contested. His market is blue-chip; his institutional presence is global; the argument about his intentions has never closed.
See also
- heroische-sinnbilder — the foundational photographic series
- margarete — the Celan response painting
- wege-der-weltweisheit — the woodcut cycle
- venice-1980 — the Biennale scandal
- Joseph Beuys — the teacher
- critical-disputes — for the critique vs. apologia dispute