Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor whose monumental works confront history, memory, mythology, and the Holocaust’s legacy through dense materials and layered references.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung: The ongoing German effort to confront and reckon with the Nazi past. Kiefer’s art challenges postwar Germany’s silence and contested ways of remembering Nazi history.
Margarethe: Anselm Kiefer’s painting that invokes Margarete, a character in Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge.” Its golden straw evokes the poem’s German figure and the cultural history that surrounds her.
Operation Sea Lion: Nazi Germany’s planned but unexecuted invasion of Britain during World War II. Kiefer’s 1969 photographs in the pose of a Nazi salute staged the provocation that launched Occupations.
Impasto: A painting technique in which paint is applied thickly enough to create a raised surface. Kiefer’s heavy surfaces turn paint into a terrain that records gesture and erosion.
Paul Celan: A German-language poet whose work bears witness to the Holocaust, including the poem “Todesfuge.” Celan’s poem provides the literary framework for Kiefer’s paired paintings Margarethe and Shulamith.
Holocaust: The systematic genocide of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Its aftermath and the problem of representing mass atrocity recur throughout Kiefer’s work.
Shulamith: Anselm Kiefer’s painting named for the Jewish woman in Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge.” Its dark, monumental interior answers Margarethe with an image tied to Jewish loss.
Occupations (Kiefer series): Anselm Kiefer’s 1969 photographic series showing him performing the Nazi salute at sites across Europe. The series forced suppressed German history into public view through a deliberately unsettling gesture.
Collage: An art-making method that combines separate materials or images within one work. Kiefer embeds photographs, text, and objects to make works accumulate distinct histories.
Georg Baselitz: A German painter known for expressive, often inverted figures and engagement with German history. Baselitz and Kiefer brought the unresolved German past into prominent postwar painting.

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Cy TwomblyRelated: Kiefer’s monumental historical imagery offers a later, distinct response to myth and the weight of the past.