Early Works: Anselm Kiefer – an 'aggressively confrontational' exhibition

Depicts a tangled pantheon of historical German figures, set within a forest and connected by rings of tree trunks

Anselm Kiefer's Ways of Worldly Wisdom – The Battle of Hermann (1977)

(Image credit: Anselm Kiefer, Courtesy of the Hall Art Foundation; Courtesy Herald St, London; Courtesy Christie's)

published 21 February 2025

In 1969, a 24-year-old art student called Anselm Kiefer decided to confront "the amnesia of West Germany's postwar identity" head-on, said Claudia Barbieri Childs in The Art Newspaper. Wearing his father's Wehrmacht greatcoat, which he had found in the attic, he staged a series of performances in which he gave "the banned straight-armed Nazi salute", often in front of "historically charged landscapes and monuments". The resulting images, developed into photo montages, were scandalous – the first significant works in a career dedicated to investigating his country's conflicted historical memory.

A selection of these pictures form the nucleus of this new exhibition dedicated to Kiefer's "challenging" early work. Featuring 45 photographs, paintings, prints and watercolours the now-world-famous artist created between 1969 and 1982, the show contains some hellish imagery: "gaunt helmeted soldiers and storm-tossed U-boat crews, leaf-shorn forests, blood-spattered rivers and objectified nudes". It is an event evocative of "a conflicted time", when Germany began to come to terms with its dark recent past.

Born in 1945, Kiefer was marked by history from the start, said Evgenia Siokos in The Daily Telegraph. The night of his birth, his family home in Donaueschingen in the Black Forest "was destroyed in a bombing raid"; his very existence was "intertwined with the complexities of Germany's evolution as a state". Here, we see the beginnings of his poetic interrogation of "Germanic identity", "from the mythological heroes of the Teutonic age" to the ghoulish leadership of the Third Reich.

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A constant source of inspiration is the Nibelungen saga and Wagner's operatic adaptations of it: "Brünhilde - Grane" (1978), for instance, is an "apocalyptic" woodcut depicting the titular warrior queen and her horse "engulfed by flames"; she appears again in an "erotically charged" watercolour that sees her "straddling a flaming woodpile". Yet compelling as all this is, the show is too small to properly express Kiefer's genius. It left me "wanting more".

There are some "duds" here, said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. But for the most part, Kiefer's work is powerful, "visceral" and "aggressively confrontational". You have the sense of "an artist making a whole nation deal with itself". There are "stark" woodcuts of Kant, Nietzsche and "ancient Germanic leaders", a whole pantheon of idols co-opted by the Nazi regime for propaganda purposes. There's a small watercolour of a forest that feels full of war, blood and death. The waters of a lake appear to be stained by "shame". Even a simple still life of a jug and a loaf of bread asks whether "you can still paint pretty images after the horrors of the Holocaust". These are works that address "demons you can't exorcise, traumas you can't – and shouldn't – forget".

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