Author Description

The highly regarded German artist Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) began his career in the late 1960s, during a period when his country's intellectuals were involved in facing up to their nation's recent history - the Holocaust and the Nazi rape of Europe. Kiefer's work has continually dealt with these heretofore "taboo" subject matters, as well as with other elements of German culture and history, and it has effectively incorporated the provocative usage of both traditional and nontraditional materials. Kiefer is best known for his very large works, and this publication provides an unusually detailed look at the least-known aspect of his oeuvre, his smaller works on paper. There are fifty-four works on paper in this volume, and they cover the years from 1969 to 1993. They entered the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995. Fifty-one are in a great variety of media - watercolors, acrylics, and painted-over photographs, for example - and they are thought to represent about one-fourth of the unique works on paper that Kiefer created between 1969 and the end of the 1980s. The remaining three are very large works composed of numerous woodcuts made slightly earlier and mounted together. The entire group comprises a comprehensive sampling of Kiefer's talent for blending biting commentary and humor.