Anselm Kiefer and art after Auschwitz

the long version

Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz examines the possibilities and limits of painting in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Positioning Kiefer as a deeply learned artist who encounters and represents history in painted rather than written form, Lisa Saltzman contends that Kiefer's work is unique among postwar German artists in his persistent exploration of the legacy of fascism. Formally, thematically, and philosophically, Kiefer's work probes the aesthetic and ethical dilemma of representing the unrepresentable, the historical catastrophe into whose aftermath the artist was born. Kiefer's work mediates the relation between a deeply traumatic history that he, as a German born after the Second World War, and we, his post-Holocaust spectators, cannot fully know but to which his work bears witness and provides access.