Word: kiefer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dusseldorf Academy in the early '70s. Lecturing, performing, always accessible to the young (and the press), Beuys was the Pied Piper of postwar German esthetic renewal. One does not need to accept his message that everyone is some sort of artist to recognize his achievement in giving back to Kiefer's generation the vast fund of German imagery, the sense of the primordial and the ritual that had been corrupted, made almost radioactive, by Nazism. Thanks to Beuys, younger German artists were able to connect with their own history and think about it without illusion, and Kiefer's work...
...Kiefer's work is, in a sense, much more traditional than Beuys'. He is the modern incarnation of the grand-scale history painter, producing didactic machines rather than the ephemeral and koan-like events (talking to a dead hare, sweeping a pavement) that were Beuys' specialty. Kiefer wants to involve his audience completely in the drama of the painting's construction; in this respect, he has learned a lot from the example of Jackson Pollock. As when deciphering the web of drips and mottlings in one of Pollock's "all-over" abstractions, the eye crawls its way across a Kiefer...
...other motives, the argument goes, can you assign to a painter who at 24 was photographed Sieg heil-ing outside the Colosseum or on the edge of the sea, as though "occupying" these sites in the name of the dead Fuhrer? Plenty, as it turned out. The shot of Kiefer saluting the Mediterranean is an acrid parody, the Nazi as Canute trying to raise himself to the level of a natural force. But this eludes those who want to think that the demons raised in Nazi Germany can be buried by mere denial, beneath the concrete of the postwar economic...
...paper, staples, canvas, rough foil formed by throwing a bucket of molten lead on the canvas and letting it cool there, sand, gold leaf, copper wire, woodcuts and lumps of busted ceramic. It is highly unlikely that more than a few will survive for 50 or even 25 years. Kiefer carries a disregard for the permanence of his materials to such an extreme that the lead will not stay in place and the straw on some canvases is already rotting, though this does not seem to discourage collectors...
...include Egyptian legends, alchemy, the Cabala, the Holocaust, the story of Exodus, Napoleon's occupation of Germany, Albert Speer's architecture, the mythic roots and Nazi uses of German romantic imagery -- dark woods, lonely travelers, ecstatic moral conversions in the face of nature -- and much more besides. Among Kiefer's spiritual heroes are Richard Wagner, Frederick II, Joseph Beuys, Painters Arnold Bocklin and Caspar David Friedrich and Novelist Robert Musil. Kiefer is not an artist of ordinary ambitions. But his ambitions are not bound up in the cult of celebrity that has riddled the art world...