Kiefer anselm biography of abraham lincoln

Anselm Kiefer's monumental, often confrontational canvases were groundbreaking at a time when painting was considered all but dead as a medium. The artist is most known for his subject matter dealing with German history and myth, particularly as it relates to the Holocaust. These works forced his contemporaries to deal with Germany's past in an era when acknowledgment of Nazism was taboo.

Kiefer incorporates heavy impasto and uncommon materials into his pieces, such as lead, glass shards, dried flowers, and strands of hay, many of which reference various aspects of history and myth, German and otherwise. Influenced by his contemporaries Joseph Beuys and Georg Baselitz , as well as by postwar tendencies in Abstract Expressionism and Conceptual art , Kiefer is considered part of the Neo-Expressionist movement, which diverged from Minimalism and abstraction to develop new representational and symbolic languages.

Born just months before the end of WWII, Kiefer translated his sense of German shame and guilt over the atrocities of the holocaust into artworks that also incorporated his interests in national mythology and Jewish mysticism.

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For his notorious first body of work, Kiefer created a series of photographic self-portraits that confronted, head on, the history of Nazi Germany. Dressing in his father's military uniform and posing in the Hitlergruss salute, Kiefer had his photograph taken in various politically significant locations in Switzerland, France, and Italy, including national monuments and classical ruins.

This photograph shows the artist with his back to the viewer, facing the sea in a Romantic posture inspired by the German artist David Caspar Friedrich. As in Friedrich's painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog , Kiefer's image depicts a man with his gaze turned outward, simultaneously dominating the landscape before him while being engulfed by it.

By posing in a traditionally Romantic stance and extending his arm in the Nazi salute, Kiefer connects these two seemingly disparate periods of German history to suggest that Germany's love of country has been an enduring part of their history at least since the early th century. The imperialist and nationalistic attitudes of the Romantic era, instigated by Napoleonic invasions, were manipulated by the leaders of the Third Reich, leading to the tragedies of the Holocaust.

While this work is stylistically very different from his later work, this series introduced themes that would become central to Kiefer's explorations of Germany's legacy and national trauma. Kiefer presented Occupations in his first solo exhibition at the Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe, Germany in Although his mentor, the artist Rainer Kuchenmeister, praised the work, the exhibition received negative criticism from Kiefer's colleagues and from the wider German public.

Exhibited at the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, this monumental painting created controversy and was met with widely conflicting opinions. The painting depicts a cavernous, empty wooden room reminiscent of medieval architecture with tapers burning at intervals along the wall.