Untitled (Heroic Symbols)
Anselm Kiefer German
Not on view
In 1969, near the end of his studies at the art academy in Karlsruhe, Germany, Kiefer staged photographs of himself in paramilitary costumes, at times in Romantic-style landscapes throughout Western Europe. Wearing jodhpurs and boots or a dark green coat, Kiefer reenacted the Nazi salute that was, by nature of Kiefer's own Germanness and by the horrendous history such a gesture invoked, a highly provocative subject. Kiefer's ironic title derives from the article "Heroic Symbols" that appeared in a 1943 issue of the propaganda journal Art of the German Reich. Published by the National Socialist party between 1937 and 1944, the magazine was one of the artist's sources of Fascist imagery.
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