Features February 1988
The Anselm Kiefer retrospective
On Anselm Kiefer’s art.
It was to be expected that the Anselm Kiefer retrospective, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in December, would be accorded a rapturous reception, and so it has been.[1] Throughout the nineteen-eighties, as the art market soared and an almost unencompassable quantity of meretricious painting glutted the galleries, the museums, and the public consciousness, the emergence of a new master—an artist who could be seen as transcending the more compromising scenarios of the new art scene—was anxiously awaited. And no sooner was the need for such a redemptive figure openly acknowledged than a consensus of sorts seemed to settle on Anselm Kiefer as the leading candidate. This young German painter, born in 1945, seemed to have everything that the role called for: talent, vision, ambition, dignity, and the kind of gravitas that was so...
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