Anselm Kiefer, Early Works
Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford

THE exhibition of Anselm Kiefer’s Early Works at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is profound and timely. 

Like all exhibitions of this internationally renowned artist, it begins with recent pieces. Soon to be 80 years old, we start with Autumn (1973-74), a large-scale painting of cool greys and warm browns with gold leaves — wandering in the forest of his years. Forest (Wald) lies in the mythology in many cultures — early Hinduism with its renunciates going into the forest to meditate until they find the “Absolute.” In the dark and twisted forests of northern Europe, where writers like the Grimm Brothers worked their terrifying stories, the tall tree soldiers of Nazi mythology are marching as one.

Autumn precedes his early and controversial work; Occupations, a series of actions where he dons his father’s Wehrmacht greatcoat and gives the banned straight right hand salute in significant European places. Fur Jean Genet (1969) is one of these artist’s books

Done as a young artist exploring the spiritual breeding grounds of fascism, the works pose the question — what would you have done then? How would you have behaved? The emotional pain of realising what his forefathers had done gets a sort of exorcism in this work.  

Kiefer said “That overcoat became a historical burden for me to bear in the first gesture of an artistic career dedicated to raking through history so that it would not be forgotten, or repeated.” For Kiefer, this is how an artist can create work in the tradition of German culture after Auschwitz.

The exploration of the German history of blood and soil is what he, as someone born in Germany, is all about; the land and the nation, and our relationship to both.  

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It can be a progressive thing of course — this is the basis of the national liberation struggle. Mandela’s speech at his presidential event was full of it. Guerilla warfare of recent history was about knowledge and love of the land. Love of countryside (to use the twee English expression) doesn’t make you a fascist of course, but Kiefer asks in whose interest the love of land is evoked.   

That this enquiry is made by an artist who paints, draws and makes sublime large scale works means that you have a confluence of form and content that makes for greatness in art.  

The exhibition also explores Kiefer’s work in the German tradition of woodcuts. He inherited his carpenter grandfather’s tools and the forest surrounding his home represented refuge and safety. There is a collage of woodcut portraits of German figures, themes and myths, which had been appropriated by the Nazis to underpin the ideology of the Third Reich. There is a fascinating painting Landscape With Head where a side protuberance contains a portrait of his grandmother. Her eyes are shut — but as you get closer they appear to open. Draw back and they close again. Did the artist intend this? Does he even know it? There is nothing about it in the very extensive catalogue and the eloquent curator Dr Lena Fritsch, who showed the press gang around hadn’t noticed it. 

Eyes open — eyes shut — towards a land soaked in blood and tears. A landscape to die for!

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There is also a playful exploration of kitsch with a trio (not triptych) of paintings from American “how to draw” books. It’s as if a Weimar Republic expressionist painter had picked up the books to mock them. There’s some tasty brushstroke for sure — and, oh the irony! of Kiefer let loose on those books. Literary references are Rilke and Celan, and an artist’s book dedicated to Jean Genet — a beautiful thing of 24 original photographs, juxtaposed with watercolours, text, hair and canvas strips. There are other artists’ books, like huge sketchbooks. 

To describe Keifer’s work as multilayered, multimedia feels mealy mouthed, as do the recent cliches of identity and belonging. This is visceral gut stuff. 

Much of the work feels organic — some could have been made of mud of many colours and things of tender beauty like Die Etsch (early 1970s) — water colour and gouache of the river Adige — with its soft blues and greys — spotted with blossoms of red for the blood that was shed. 

Ride to the Vistula — a large work of oil sand wood shavings and charcoal is extraordinary. The big head of a dobbin of a horse is juxtaposed against the river-ribboned mudscape. No fancy Brunhilde horse this one. This is immersive art all right — for the artist — evoking the start of WW2 when the Polish cavalry was their only defence and Poland was invaded. 

An archaeologist told me that it takes 90 years for human cells to stop interacting with bio-organisms in mud, and that that’s why the trenches of WW1 could only be excavated in the early 21st century, as before that it’s considered wet mud. Many of Kiefer’s paintings remind me of wet mud. Artists, like archaeologists do their own excavations. This angry, poetic show speaks to us now. 

If Arts Council money were bid for to put on this show they’d require the ticking of the box “contemporary relevance.” It’s there plain enough. 

Runs until June 15. £16.20/£15.20, unemployed half price, students free. For more information see: ashmolean.org