Kiefer returned to his photographs of northern Norway for inspiration here, infecting this picturesque fjord with bright pink sores in heavy gouache. The title, Kranke Kunst, inscribed on the border, connotes the infamous 1937 Munich exhibition "Entartete ‘Kunst’"(Degenerate "Art"), for which the Nazis assembled more than 650 modern works from German public collections in order to demonstrate that such art was unacceptable, sick, and "un-German." Ironically, the subject here is the very land that, through medieval Icelandic literature (the Edda), is known as the chief source of knowledge about German mythology.
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New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper, 1969–1993," December 15, 1998–March 21, 1999, no. 13.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Landscapes by Klee and Kiefer," January 19–September 30, 2001, no catalogue.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Broken Flowers and Grass: Nature and Landscape in the Drawings of Anselm Kiefer," March 24–August 2, 2009, no catalogue.
London. Royal Academy of Arts. "Anselm Kiefer," September 27–December 14, 2014, no. 18.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art [The Met Breuer]. "Provocations: Anselm Kiefer at The Met Breuer," December 13, 2017–April 8, 2018, no catalogue.
R. H. Fuchs. Anselm Kiefer. Exh. cat., Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Eindhoven, 1979, unpaginated, ill. (color), calls it "Kranke Kunst".
R. H. Fuchs. Anselm Kiefer: Aquarelle 1970–1980. Exh. cat., Kunstverein Freiburg. Freiburg, 1981, unpaginated.
Nan Rosenthal in "Recent Acquisitions. A Selection: 1994–1995." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 53 (Fall 1995), p. 68.
Nan Rosenthal. Anselm Kiefer: Works on Paper in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1998, pp. 39–41, 93, no. 13, ill. (color).
Jerry Saltz. "Boom and Bust." Village Voice (February 2, 1999), p. 141.
Christian Weikop inAnselm Kiefer. Exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts. London, 2014, pp. 44–45, 225, no. 18, ill. p. 92 (color).
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