Anselm Kiefer facts for kids

Grane (1980-1993), a woodcut with paint and collage, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945) is a famous German painter and sculptor. He creates art using many different materials like straw, ash, clay, and lead. His art often explores German history and difficult events, including the terrible time of the Holocaust. He also finds inspiration in poems and spiritual ideas.

Kiefer's art often looks at the past and deals with important, sometimes sensitive, topics from recent history. For example, his painting Margarete was inspired by a poem about the Holocaust. His works are known for being very large and for facing challenging subjects head-on. He also includes names of important people or places in his art. These are like secret codes that help him think about the past. Because of this, his art is linked to styles called New Symbolism and Neo–Expressionism.

Since 1992, Kiefer has lived and worked in France. He mainly works in Paris since 2008. In 2018, he also became an Austrian citizen.

Anselm Kiefer's Life Story

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany, just a few months before World War II ended. He grew up seeing the damage from the war, as his city had been bombed. In 1951, his family moved, and he finished high school in 1965.

He first studied law and languages at the University of Freiburg. But after a year and a half, he changed to art. He studied at art schools in Freiburg and Karlsruhe, where he learned from a painter named Peter Dreher. Kiefer earned his art degree in 1969.

In 1971, Kiefer moved to Hornbach and set up his art studio. He stayed there until 1992. The art he made during this time is known as The German Years. In 1992, he moved to France.

A 3D documentary film about Anselm Kiefer, called Anselm, was released in 2023. It was directed by Wim Wenders.

How Kiefer Creates His Art

Kiefer often gets his ideas from old stories, books, and libraries. In his earlier years, writers like Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann inspired him. Later, his art included ideas from different cultures, like ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern beliefs. He also explores ideas about how the universe began. Kiefer tries to find the meaning of life and show things that are hard to understand in his art.

Kiefer's Ideas About Art

Kiefer believes in a "spiritual connection" with the materials he uses. He feels like he is "pulling out the spirit" that is already inside them. To do this, he changes his materials using things like acid baths or by hitting them with sticks and axes.

He often chooses materials for their special qualities, especially lead. Kiefer first became interested in lead when he had to fix old pipes in his house. He started to like how it felt and looked, and he learned about its connection to alchemy. He especially likes how lead looks when it's heated and melted, showing many colors, like gold. He connects this to the symbolic gold that alchemists searched for.

Kiefer uses straw in his art to represent energy. He says this is because straw is golden in color and releases energy when it burns. The ash that is left behind then makes way for new creations. This shows his ideas about change and the cycle of life.

Kiefer also likes a balance between order and chaos in his work. He says if there is too much order, the art feels "dead," but if there is too much chaos, it doesn't make sense. He also cares a lot about where his art is shown, believing that his works "lose their power completely" if they are in the wrong places.

Anselm Kiefer's Artworks

Kiefer started his career by creating performances and taking photos of them. In these early works, he explored difficult parts of German history. He wanted Germans to remember and understand the losses caused by the terrible ideas of the Third Reich. In 1969, he showed his first art exhibition with these photos.

Paintings and Sculptures

Kiefer is most famous for his paintings. They have become very large and often include materials like lead, broken glass, and dried plants. This makes the surfaces rough and thick with layers of paint.

Around 1970, he worked with materials like glass, straw, wood, and plants. He knew that using these materials meant his art might not last forever. He wanted to show the materials in their natural form. The delicate nature of his art contrasts with the serious topics in his paintings. This idea of using everyday materials to express ideas was influenced by another artist, Joseph Beuys. This style is also typical of Neo-Expressionism.

In the years that followed, Kiefer included German stories and myths in his work. He also studied Kabbalah, a spiritual tradition. He traveled a lot, and these trips influenced his art even more. Besides paintings, Kiefer made sculptures, watercolors, photos, and woodcuts. He often reused figures from his woodcuts in different types of art, which helped connect all his works.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Kiefer made many artworks inspired by Richard Wagner's opera series, Der Ring des Nibelungen. In the early 1980s, he created over thirty paintings and watercolors that refer to Paul Celan's poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue").

A series of paintings from 1980 to 1983 show large stone buildings. These refer to famous Nazi-era architecture. For example, the grand plaza in To the Unknown Painter (1983) looks like the courtyard of Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin. In 1984–85, he made works on paper using manipulated black-and-white photos of empty landscapes with power lines. These works were a response to concerns in West Germany about nuclear missiles.

By the mid-1980s, Kiefer's art began to explore bigger ideas, like the future of art and culture in general. His work became more like sculptures and included ideas about national identity, shared memories, and spiritual symbols. A main idea in all his work is the pain that entire societies experience, and how life keeps being reborn and renewed. In the 1980s, his paintings became more physical, with unusual textures and materials. He started to include references to ancient Hebrew and Egyptian history, like in the large painting Osiris and Isis (1985–87). His paintings from the 1990s explored universal stories about life and meaning, rather than just national identity. From 1995 to 2001, he created a series of large paintings about the cosmos.

Since 2002, Kiefer has worked with concrete, creating tall structures. He also made paintings about the sea with boats and lead objects, inspired by the writer Velimir Khlebnikov. He returned to Paul Celan's work with paintings featuring ancient symbols. In 2007, he became the first artist in many years to be asked to create a permanent artwork for the Louvre museum in Paris.

In 2009, Kiefer showed two exhibitions in London. One series of forest scenes, enclosed in glass cases and filled with thorns, was called Karfunkelfee. In The Fertile Crescent, Kiefer showed large paintings inspired by a trip to India. The photos he took in India reminded him of many historical ideas, from the first human civilizations to the ruins of Germany after World War II.

In Morgenthau Plan (2012), he filled a gallery with a sculpture of a golden wheat field inside a tall steel cage.

Books as Art

In 1969, Kiefer started making books as art. His early books often had photos that he had worked on. His newer books are made of lead sheets layered with paint, minerals, or dried plants. For example, he put many lead books on steel shelves in libraries. These books symbolize the knowledge of history that is stored and sometimes forgotten. The book Rhine (1981) has 25 woodcuts that show a journey along the Rhine River, which is very important to Germany's history.

Kiefer's Studios

Kiefer's first big studio was in the attic of his home, an old schoolhouse. Later, he used a factory building as his studio. In 1988, he turned an old brick factory into a huge artwork with many installations and sculptures. In 1991, after working in Germany for twenty years, he traveled around the world. In 1992, he settled in Barjac, France. There, he turned his large property into a huge art project. It was an old silk factory, and his studio is enormous, showing his ideas about industry. He built many glass buildings, archives, and underground rooms for his materials and art.

A documentary film called Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) showed Kiefer's studio complex in Barjac and the artist at work. One critic said that Kiefer created an art project that spread over many acres, with miles of corridors and huge studio spaces.

In 2008, Kiefer moved from his Barjac studio to Paris. A large number of trucks moved his art to a huge warehouse outside Paris. A journalist wrote that Kiefer left behind the great art and buildings at Barjac, waiting for nature to take over.

Exhibitions and Recognition

Opening of the exhibition "Shevirat Ha-Kelim" (Breaking of the Vessels) at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2011

In 1969, Kiefer had his first solo art show in Karlsruhe. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980, a very important art event. He also had a solo show there in 1997.

Many large exhibitions of Kiefer's work have been held around the world, including in Chicago (1987), New York (1998), and London (2014). In 2007, Kiefer was asked to create a huge artwork for the first "Monumenta" exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. That same year, he became the first living artist since 1953 to create a permanent artwork for the Louvre museum in Paris.

In 2013, the Hall Art Foundation and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened a long-term exhibition of Kiefer's sculptures and paintings. This included a very long, wavy sculpture made of concrete and lead, and a steel building with paintings about naval battles.

In 2015, major museums in Paris and Leipzig held large exhibitions to celebrate Kiefer's 70th birthday. In 2018, he showed his first public art project in the United States at Rockefeller Center in New York.

Awards and Honors

Anselm Kiefer has received many important awards for his art:

• 1990 – Wolf Prize in Arts
• 1999 – Praemium Imperiale (Japan Art Association)
• 2008 – Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (first time given to a visual artist)
• 2011 – Leo Baeck Medal
• 2017 – J. Paul Getty Medal Award
• 2019 – Prize for Understanding and Tolerance (Jewish Museum Berlin)
• 2023 – Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Materials and Their Meaning

Because Kiefer's art-making process is very spontaneous, some of his works can change over time. He knows this happens and says that change is part of the process. He believes the main idea of his art will stay the same. This idea of transformation is important to Kiefer and appears in many of his works. This interest might come from his fascination with alchemy, an old practice that tried to turn common metals into gold.

He often chooses materials for their special qualities, especially lead. He likes how lead looks when it's heated and melted, showing many colors, especially gold. He sees this as the symbolic gold that alchemists looked for. He also likes how lead turns white when it oxidizes, and he sometimes uses acid to make this happen faster. Lead was also connected to old ideas about magic numbers and the planet Saturn.

Shellac, another material he uses, is similar to lead in how he feels about its color and energy. He also likes that it becomes warm when polished.

Using straw in his art also relates to the idea of energy. Straw is golden and gives off energy and heat when burned. The ash that is left then makes way for new creations, continuing the cycle of life through transformation.

Where to See Kiefer's Art

Anselm Kiefer's artworks are in many public collections around the world. You can find them in museums like:

• Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
• Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Tate Modern, London
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
• Tel Aviv Museum of Art
• Albertina, Vienna

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has 20 of his rare watercolors.

Images for kids

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  Faith, Hope, Love by Anselm Kiefer, Art Gallery of New South Wales

See also

In Spanish: Anselm Kiefer para niños