Morgenthau Plan
Throughout his nearly fifty-year career, Kiefer has never been afraid to wrestle with history. His art—particularly in its worked and layered surfaces weathered by time and nature—is a visceral and poetic consideration of the past as a means to understand our collective present and, by implication, our future. This monumental work references a plan, devised by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau during World War II, to destroy Germany’s factories and turn the country into farmland after the Allied victory. Here, Kiefer imagined this pastoral outcome, with postwar Germany as a vast green country blooming with flowers.
Artwork Details
- Title: Morgenthau Plan
- Artist: Anselm Kiefer (German, born Donaueschingen, 1945)
- Date: 2012
- Medium: Acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on inkjet prints mounted on canvas
- Dimensions: Overall: 129 15/16 × 224 7/16 × 3 1/8 in. (330 × 570.1 × 7.9 cm)
3 panels, each: 129 15/16 × 74 13/16 × 3 1/8 in. (330 × 190 × 8 cm) - Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Denise and Andrew Saul Fund, 2013
- Object Number: 2013.429a–c
- Rights and Reproduction: © Anslem Kiefer
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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