Jul 5, 2009 10:20 am US/Eastern
CBS 2 At The Met: Anselm Kiefer
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Artist Anselm Kiefer tackles tough subjects. born in Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II, and the collapse of the Third Reich, Kiefer grew up in a divided Germany. so his edgy, contemporary style may not be surprising. Kiefer, who lives in the south of France, is best known for super-sized works, like "Bohemia Lies by the Sea" from 1996. You'll find it in the gallery right next to the special exhibition.
You'll see a different side of the artist in the Met's "Broken Flowers And Grass: Landscapes And Nature In The Drawings Of Anselm Kiefer."
Senior Consultant, Marla Prather tells CBS2's Dana Tyler that German culture, particularly Nazi themes, dominate the 28-works on display.
Prather says, "It's such an important theme of his work where he uses landscape as a kind of metaphor for human behavior or as a kind of receptacle for all of his ideas of history and mythology and he really folds those ideas into landscape whether it's a reference to German poetry or the old testament and so landscape is really at the very heart of his work."
At first glance, this watercolor by Kiefer from 1980, may remind you of a peaceful, golden field of wheat.
"But actually it represents a very, very difficult subject that goes back to one of Kiefer's deepest interests and that is the poet Paul Salon who was a Romanian Jewish poet who wrote a work called the death fugue in a Concentration Camp in 1945 and it was published in the early 1950s."
Nearby, another look at nature. Kiefer's winter landscape from 1970, is more personal.
Prather explains, "We notice that there is a head floating above this landscape and realize that in fact it's a disembodied head, seems to be lying back sleeping, it's almost a kind of erotic, loving image and it is a depiction of his then wife Julia."
Fast forward to the year 2000 and Kiefer's "Let A Thousand flowers bloom." He's cut and pasted several photographs he had taken while traveling in China.
"It makes reference to a campaign under the Communist Regime in the mid-1950s called "Let 100 Flowers Bloom, Let 100 Schools of Thought Contend, meaning that there was introduced into Communist China, a kind of promise of openness of intellectual discussion. A reprieve, if you will, in a moment when artists and intellectuals were invited to critique the Regime. But it sort of backfired and if anything the situation was more repressive afterwards."
"Broken Flowers and Grass: Landscape and Nature in the Drawings of Anselm Kiefer," at the Met until August 2.
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