Anselm Kiefer at the Gagosian in NY

Some artists select and distill, content to paint still lifes and domestic interiors or, as in the extreme case of Giorgio Morandi, the same few objects and shapes over and over again as if to demonstrate the richness— or impossibility?— of vision. And then there's Anselm Kiefer, who… but there's no one like Anselm Kiefer.

Picasso, Schwitters, Masson, Rauschenberg—all brought the material world directly onto their canvases and made it part of the compositional result. With Kiefer, the idea is not to bring the natural world into the canvas, but to bring the canvas into the natural world— to give it the status of a uniquely living thing.

You don't approach a Kiefer; rather, it confronts you. It's like being set down in a zoo of exotic predators who've agreed, for the moment, not to pounce, but who could at any moment devour you.

Forbidden Nazi salute

Kiefer was born in 1945, Germany's Year Zero, in Donaueschingen. Postwar Germany was a conspiracy of silence, in which the late war was best forgotten as quickly as possible, especially the episode that had not yet acquired the name of the Holocaust.

Artists, too, can lie, but not as easily as most other people, and the neo-Expressionist painters who began to emerge in Germany in the early 1960s found themselves grappling with the unacknowledged legacy of the Nazi era. Kiefer broke through by facing it directly and personally.

In a series of mixed media works, he depicted himself with his arm raised in the Nazi salute— an image banned in Germany then and now. His point was that to ban the most infamous symbol of the Nazi era was to whitewash the past, if not consign it to oblivion. What, though, was a culture without its past, especially one that had defined itself above all else in terms of its historical consciousness?

Criticized by Jews

Nazism was not only the central fact of German history for Kiefer; it was the only fact, the one that had swallowed all the rest. And the Holocaust was its nihilistic core, the black hole into which everything else disappeared.

Kiefer began to deal with the Holocaust programmatically in the 1980s, and it has remained his most critical and recurrent theme ever since. This process led him into Jewish history and lore, and many of his works have Biblical references and Kabbalistic symbols. This tendency has led to criticism from another quarter, namely Jews who see Kiefer as a German gentile appropriating Jewish tokens, and— in one particularly daring work— incorporating a length of human hair into the design of his canvas.

But Kiefer never exploits his subjects, and the moral seriousness of his work is beyond question. A large-scale recent exhibition in Tel Aviv acknowledged as much.

Double-edged snake

Kiefer pursues a variety of other subjects, from alchemy to astronomy, and he has explored other cultural traditions. The Jewish theme was very much to the fore in his 2010 exhibit at Gagosian Gallery, "Next Year in Jerusalem", and it returns unmistakably if obliquely in his current one, "The Morgenthau Plan," which consists of 16 large canvases and two sculptures— actually, two "gardens" of large, wilted sunflowers stuck in cement bases, one of which has a coiled black snake wending its way between the stalks, head raised to strike.

This image may seem sinister— the snake in a Garden of Eden-turned-desert— but symbols are often double-edged in Kiefer, and this one recalls the one he used in one of his earliest major works, Resurrexit, with its suggestion of aspiration and renewal.

Morgenthau's radical plan

Kiefer presents not individual works but related sequences or projects. "The Morgenthau Plan" is to a certain extent an exception, in that Kiefer began creating the large floral works of which the series chiefly consists without a specific concept in mind, and only came later to consider the title for the whole.

It refers to the plan for a pastoral, de-industrialized Germany envisioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, in 1944. That plan was a far more radical version of the punitive Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany after World War I; what Morgenthau wanted, as a Jew well aware of the scope of the Holocaust, was to permanently eliminate not only Germany's war-making capacity but to reduce its citizens to a passive labor force, not unlike the subservient population the Nazis planned in a conquered Russia.

This idea was never remotely practical, but for Kiefer it held an ironic resonance. The German landscape he depicted in his early works was a frozen, devastated wasteland— sometimes a battlefield, sometimes ominously bisected by railway tracks that suggested (but never depicted) the terminus of the death camps. This was the moral condition of Germany in the Year Zero. But suppose Morgenthau had had his way— or suppose Germany had never risen from its ashes in any form, indeed that nature had simply reclaimed it?

No sign of people

Kiefer's giant floral landscapes, with their tall, nodding stalks and sometimes drooping, sometimes exploding crowns, suggest a country gone literally to seed, but one that still harbors ghosts. Virtually no sign of actual human presence can be discerned (although one canvas shows a trampled path).

How are we to take these large, mysterious, and strikingly beautiful paintings?

Kiefer canvases are invariably thickly textured and layered with meaning. The works in the present exhibit began, Kiefer tells us, as photographs pasted onto large sections of canvas, although they are fully overpainted, and their relation to the final subject matter is unclear.

Do they represent a Morgenthau Germany as it might have been if a thousand years of history had literally been plowed under? Would such a scourging actually have had a moral basis?

Between Hitler and Beethoven

Kiefer's history paintings of the 1970s represented an attempt to pose the dilemma of the Nazi era against iconic figurations of the German past. They offer no easy answers. The Morgenthau Plan was, implicitly, a judgment that no reconciliation was possible between the world of Hitler and that of Goethe and Beethoven, and that the Germans could no longer act as custodians of their own culture. Does Kiefer, after 40 years, still harbor similar doubts?

The subtitle he attaches to several of these works, Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, suggests an ironic take on Morgenthau, evoking as it does Mao Zedong's notorious slogan of the 1950s. But Kiefer is never straightforwardly explicable, even when seemingly most direct.

This mystifying quality is not a shortcoming, and most certainly not an aversion to making hard choices. Rather, it's a recognition that, for a man of his time and place, some choices can't be made.

Barren landscape

Some works in the Gagosian exhibit display other facets of Kiefer's art. Nigredo— a term referring to the darkest distillate of the alchemical process— presents what looks like a darkened landscape under the last of evening light. The title, as is usual in Kiefer, is written directly on the canvas, and many of the strokes suggest a scribbling or notation.

This technique is carried forward in many of the other canvases; in one of them, the strokes can be plausibly read as marching troops (or the echo of their image) on a barren landscape that appears to be an alkali flat. Fadensonnen, whose full, translated title is Threadsuns: There Are Still Songs to Sing Beyond Mankind, references the Roumanian-Jewish Holocaust poet Paul Celan, whom Kiefer repeatedly cites in his work and who haunts this series too.

Two works feature Kiefer's signature attachments as well, in one a rusted light artillery piece and a machine gun of World War II vintage, and in another a large, protruding metal wing. These references suggest a continued brooding on the history of the 1940s in which the war and the Holocaust— the once-proud assertion of German military and racial superiority, and the moral abyss in which it resulted— are inseparably connected.

Epic ambition

What is absent, however, is any representation of the human form, with the exception of two tiny medallions depicting the head of a towheaded young boy or boys, tucked into the lower half of Grosse Eisenfaust Deutschland, and all but invisible in the thick, dark impasto of the canvas. Are we to take them as tokens of an all-but obliterated innocence that yet survives the desolate landscape?

Some elements of Kiefer's iconography lend themselves to decipherment, at least on an overt level, but their relations remain riddling. The viewer must, I think, read them as part of a palimpsest that gradually unfolds itself to the patient eye, but which resists final interpretation.

The more casual observer may contemplate the evident fact of Kiefer's pictorial authority. His work is epic in its ambition, and in an age of small talents and small choices he has staked out the widest and most challenging terrain. Technically and stylistically, Kiefer is both the bearer of a great tradition and an invigorating original.

Look only at the colossal seascape, Von den Maas bis an die Memel, in its convex lead frame, and you know you're in the presence of an artist who can both sum up an entire genre of Western art and take it in fresh directions. This is restorative in the best sense, and, if you don't want to vex yourself with abstruse symbolism and the details of a forgotten World War II plan, you can more simply enjoy some of the best landscape painting since Monet and Nolde.