Anselm Kiefer

The innovation of Anselm Kiefer's majestic art has been to combine history painting's grandeur of scale and concept with Abstract Expressionism's emphatic materiality and worked surface. This unusual combination has made for works of Wagnerian ambition, as Kiefer draws on German history, literature and mythology to attack what Herfried Munkler, writing in the Louisiana Museum's new Kiefer monograph, describes as a uniquely German bourgeois yearning for "clear patterns of behavior defined by virtues and values." The tragic dimensions of this yearning bestow upon Kiefer's post-Holocaust canvases an immense gravity, conveyed through a sober, murky palette and scrawled poetical inscriptions. Kiefer often burns materials, or adds sand, to embellish this mood of weathered decay. This new monograph surveys works from the beginning of Kiefer's career in the late 1960s (including spreads of his early book works) to 2010.