Anselm Kiefer

Of all the artists to provoke the term Neo-Expressionism, Anselm Kiefer is its most convincing exponent. Neo-expressionism placed European art in the vanguard for the first time since World War 2. Neo-expressionism was a reaction against abstraction and the cool boredom of minimalism. This form of expressionism developed in the 1960s and 1970s and arrived via several international exhibitions in the early eighties: Venice Biennale and Documenta 7, held in Kassell. Kiefer is the most central European of painters: “a poet in paint” that is thoroughly Teutonic and postmodern. Kiefer was taught by Beuys at the Düsseldorf academy. The evidence can be seen in his work which “still carries Beuys’ imprint in its materials- tar, straw, rusty iron and lead” (Hughes, 1991, p.407).

Resurrexit, 1973.

Varus, 1976.

Nürnberg –Weistpiel-Weise 1981

Kiefer’s subject is Germany’s past. The heavy weight of history is incredible. A Kiefer composition can draw upon Goethe’s Faust and the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon. Margarethe (1981) and Shulemith (1983) both make reference to the Old Testament and Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, a Holocaust memorial:



Paul Celan: Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents
he writes he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink
you death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
He plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith

(N.B. some texts spell “Shulamith” as “Sulamith”; I am assuming that this is incorrect).

Margarete, 1981.

Shulamith, 1983

Margarete is the blonde personification of Aryan womanhood while Shulamith is the sybol of Jewish womanhood. For the painting Shulamith, Kiefer appropriated Wilhelm Kries’ Funeral Hall for Nazi war heroes, built in 1939 to create a blackened crypt: a Nazi monument becomes a Jewish one.

Aschenblume (AshFlower), 2004.

Kiefer has been posted here because of his mixed-media approach and his ability to fuse an all-overness design into his paintings similar to Pollock with a politically engaged message. Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Kiefer had “thoroughly assimilated and advanced the eshetic lessons of Jackson Pollock’s doubleness of special illusion and material literalness on a scale not just big, but exploded, enveloping, discomposed” (Wheeler, 1991 p.314).


Hughes, R., (1991) The Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson.
Wheeler, D., (1991) Art Since Mid Century New York and London: Thames and Hudson.