Anselm Kiefer | Explore & Learn | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1995 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired fifty-four works on paper by the German artist Anselm Kiefer (born 1945). Kiefer made these works between 1969, when he was a student at the art academy in Karlsruhe, Germany, and 1993, shortly after he moved from Germany to the outskirts of the town of Barjac in southern France.

Kiefer is best known for his large paintings, such as Bohemia Lies by the Sea (1996). Like his paintings, unique oversize books, and performance art presented in the form of published photographs, most of Kiefer's works on paper refer to subjects drawn from Germany and its culture: history, myth, literature, art history, music, philosophy, architecture, and folk customs. Many of the works evoke the uses to which the visual and verbal propaganda of the Third Reich put the same subjects.

Kiefer's interest in exploring the possibility of coming to terms with the Nazi past by transgressing postwar German taboos against the icons of the Third Reich is replete with irony. One reason is that the heaviness of his subject matter is so often rendered lightly, in delicate lyrical or caricatural watercolors or in painted photographs and woodcuts that conspicuously use slapdash techniques (see examples on this site). The works on paper also demonstrate Kiefer's use of mockery and humor as tools of expression.

This feature is adapted from "Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper in The Metropolitan Museum of Art" written by Nan Rosenthal. The book is available for sale in the Met Store.

The publication is made possible by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

• Selected Work

Photograph Credits