Kiefer, Anselm

Anselm Kiefer

Writing about one of the most important and complex artists of our times requires the erudition, clarity, and broad view of a Daniel Arasse, author of the gorgeously illustrated Anselm Kiefer. Avoiding a straightforward chronological survey, Arasse plunges directly into Kiefer's major themes and the ways they reflect the artist's subtly evolving perspectives on German history, the role of the artist, and the meaning of life. Arasse illuminates Kiefer's use of Jewish kabbalistic symbolism, his relationship to philosophers and writers from Nietzsche to Celan, and the rich trove of metaphor to be found in his use of lead, straw, books, and images of railroad tracks and artists' palettes. Never succumbing to art-speak, Arasse--whose French text has been deftly translated into English--marshals his arguments with lucid elegance. The approximately 400 full-color plates, including full views and close-ups, are magnificent. This is surely one of the major art books of our time. --Cathy Curtis

German artist Anselm Kiefer is one of the most important and controversial artists of the post-world war II art scene. Begining with the work he showed at the 1980 Venice Biennale, he has interpreted the great political and cultural issues at the heart of the modern European sensibility, through media as diverse as painting, photography, artist’s books, installations, and sculpture. Kiefer’s wildly expressive work receives all the space and fluent interpretation it demands in this superb high-quality production. The book’s approximately 300 full-color images trace Kiefer’s creative evolution and present his great themes in their full scope and power. The author interprets Kiefer’s art as a site where distinctions between modern and postmodern senses of representation, history, cosmology, and nature become thematic. He addresses individual works and gives the historical, biographical, art-critical, and philosophical setting for each.

Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory

Through Celan's linguistic innovations and Kiefer's intense exploration of past and present, artistic creation becomes both an expression of horror and an act of commemoration.

The art of Anselm Kiefer is rich with references to writers, philosophers, and poets, and his relationship with Paul Celan has been the most complex and intense of these dialogues with the past. Celan's poetry, inextricably linked with the memory of the Holocaust, has haunted Kiefer's work for more than twenty-five years and has influenced him on every level, from the naming of works and exhibitions to the incorporation of symbolic materials from Celan's imagery—sand, straw, hair, and ashes—into his paintings.

Like other German artists of his generation, Kiefer began by questioning his own artistic heritage, focusing on the iconographic and mythological elements of German culture that had been taken over by Nazi propaganda, and subsequently repressed and buried deep in the collective unconscious. It was his encounter with Celan's work in the early 1980s that first enabled him to escape from the vicious circle of fascination and disgust at the cultural ties that bound him to the Third Reich, leading him to confront the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish memory as a whole and to embrace this body of traditions within his art.

Magnificently illustrated throughout with reproductions of Kiefer's best-known works, this book explores the intricate web of associations between the poet and the painter, a network that is extended to embrace other artistic and literary figures such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Joseph Beuys. 157 illustrations, 140 in color.

Anselm Kiefer: Heaven And Earth

A retrospective volume of Anselm KieferÂ’s work, this catalog addresses the artistÂ’s entire career through the lens of one compelling theme.

From his earliest sculptures to his recent highly textured paintings, Anselm Kiefer has woven themes of heaven and earth into his work, exploring the polarities of these ideas while struggling to define the transcendent quality that places art squarely in between. Destruction and rebirth, glory and shame, sin and redemption all figure largely in KieferÂ’s often-controversial depictions of GermanyÂ’s physical and cultural landscape. This catalog of more than sixty reproductions includes KieferÂ’s first work, "Heaven," as well as numerous other rare early works. It features watercolors produced specifically for the publication as well as an interview with the artist.

Anselm Kiefer (Art & Design)

Erotik im Fernen Osten oder: Transition from cool to warm

Anselm Kiefer is best known for his brooding forests and somber fields encrusted with debris, and for his haunted monuments reeking of the Nazi past. This series of delicately executed watercolors—landscapes and a surprising sequence of erotic nudes—reveals a wholly different side to the artist.

In 1974 Kiefer traveled to the coast of Norway. Three years later, using photographs he had taken during his trip as an aide-mémoire, he painted Erotik im Fernen Osten oder: Transition from cool to warm, a work that incorporates his deepest aesthetic and philosophical concerns. In these lyrically expressive seascapes and landscapes, the icebergs and frigid skies of Norwegian winters are rendered in deep blue, violet, and purple tones. As the sequence gives way to lush female nudes, the palette grows brighter, and there is a virtual explosion of color and form that evokes seasonal changes. The spontaneity and simplicity of these images are expressions of Kiefer's warning against intellectual, as opposed to visceral, understanding.

With splendid reproductions of each of the series' sixty-five watercolors, as well as images from two other books by the artist, this publication demonstrates Kiefer's brilliant use of the book form as a means of artistic expression. 95 color illustrations.

Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz examines the legacy of German-Jewish culture in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Positioning Kiefer as a deeply learned artist who encounters and represents history in painted, rather than written form, Lisa Saltzman contends that his work is unique among post-war German artists in his persistent exploration of the legacy of fascism. Formally, thematically, and philosophically, Kiefer's work probes the aesthetic and ethical dilemma of representing the unrepresentable, the historical catastrophe into whose aftermath the artist was born. Kiefer's work mediates the relationship between a deeply traumatic history that he, as a German born after World War II, and his post-Holocaust spectators cannot fully know, but to which his work bears witness and provides access.

This book examines the legacy of German-Jewish culture in the aftermath of Auschwitz. Kiefer's work mediates the relationship between a deeply traumatic history that he, as artist and second generation German, and we, as post-Holocaust spectators, cannot fully know, but to which his work nonetheless bears witness and provides access.

Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba

In the chaos of Milan's swiftly-converting industrial quarter, one massive space has been set aside for contemporary art. Merkaba documents Hangar Bicocca's first installation, the seven title towers, from the prototype stage to installation by cranes and pulleys to the spotlight. Each precarious-looking spire of cement and lead boxes has a name of its own as well. "Falling Stars," "Sternenlager," "Die Sefiroth," "Tzim-Tzum," "Shevirat Ha-Kelim," "Tiqqun" and "The Seven Heavenly Palaces." Their towering silhouettes, some as many as 50 feet high, are as mystical as their titles suggest, but they also seem to make reference to all that is changing and staying the same in the city where they stand, home both to early sacred and secular towers and contemporary skyscrapers. Kiefer, known best for his reckonings with German history, proves that he can work the same alchemy elsewhere.

Anselm Kiefer: Velimir Chlebnikov and the Sea

Born in Germany in 1945, Anselm Kiefer is one of Europe's most esteemed expressionistic painters, known for his exploration of the deep, mythological currents that guide Western history. This catalogue reproduces what is perhaps the most significant project that Kiefer has presented in the United States in 20 years. Called "magnificent," and "powerful" by London's Daily Telegraph, Velimir Chlebnikov is a monumental suite of 30 new paintings housed inside a steel pavilion designed by the artist. Made in tribute to the visionary Russian avant-garde philosopher Velimir Chlebnikov (1885-1922), the works are inspired by Chlebnikov's writings--in particular, his esoteric theories about the forces that cause human conflict. Featuring reproductions of the paintings, installation shots and an texts by Harry Philbrick of The Aldrich Museum, this publication is the definitive record of the Chlebnikov project, which is now housed in a private collection and unavailable to the public. Limited stock available.

Anselm Kiefer: Stelle Cadenti

Bildersprache: Celan-Motive bei Laszlo Lakner und Anselm Kiefer (Celan-Studien)