The visionary artist Anselm Kiefer has restlessly challenged and redefined recent German history and cultural shibboleths in an extraordinary body of work that spans more than six decades. Two months ago he turned 80, an anniversary marked by the staging of exhibitions from Amsterdam to the Ashmolean and the publication of this impressive study devoted to the notable women that thread their way through his work, endlessly shape-shifting.
Women are to be found everywhere in Kieferland: haunting, teasing, beckoning, seducing; imperious, impassive, poetic and unknowable. There are martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, Brunhilde and the Valkyries, Madame de Stael and Marie-Antoinette. There are women from the Bible – Mary, Lilith, Shulamith – and women from antiquity – Daphne, Gaia, Calypso, Medea and Sappho. But what to make of them? How to understand the role they play in his pictorial universe? Conversations and writings by the artist are gathered with a thoughtful essay by Petra Giloy Hirtz, alongside magnificent reproductions of Kiefer’s work.
We learn for a start that this is a man wholly in tune with his feminine side. When young, he would sometimes dress as a woman, photographing himself in a crochet dress for his then hero, the jailbird writer Jean Genet. ‘I have actually always followed women,’ he claims, and he included photographs of himself in women’s dress raising his arm in a Nazi salute among his ‘Heroic Symbols’ series – a provocative exploration of Germany’s Nazi past which scandalised the public at the start of his career. Cross-dressing was in itself a protest against fascism and its machismo, aligning Kiefer with the cancelled and the persecuted.
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