It seems from Anselm Kiefer's retrospective, which has just opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, that at 42 this German artist is the best painter of his generation on either side of the Atlantic. Given most of the talent we have, this may not sound like much of a compliment. Certainly Kiefer's limitations are inescapable: his drawing lacks fluency and clarity and his color is monotonous, though the former seems to reinforce the grinding earnestness of his style and the latter contributes to its lugubrious intensity. What counts, is that he is one of the few visual artists in the past decade to have shown an unmistakable greatness of vision.
His ambitions for painting range across myth and history, they cover an immense terrain of cultural reference and pictorial techniques, and on the whole they do it without the megalomaniac narcissism that fatally trivializes the work of other artists to whom Kiefer is sometimes compared -- Julian Schnabel, for instance. Kiefer bears, in full measure, the tragic sense and redemptive hope against which most of the art of our fin de siecle has insulated itself, and his stature can only grow with time. Which is not to say, of course, that all his work is of equal value.
The Chicago show was organized by the late A. James Speyer (from 1961 to 1986 the Art Institute's curator of 20th century painting) and Mark Rosenthal of the Philadelphia Museum, who wrote its catalog. It will travel through 1988 to Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York City. An hour at it can be a fairly exhausting experience, like a slog toward a receding horizon across the plowed clay fields that are Kiefer's favorite landscape. His canvases are huge in size and engulfing in scale; he is, one notes, one of the few artists around who really do understand the scale of images and do not paint big just to look important.
A list of his materials, apart from paint, would include paper, staples, canvas, rough foil formed by throwing a bucket of molten lead on the canvas and letting it cool there, sand, gold leaf, copper wire, woodcuts and lumps of busted ceramic. It is highly unlikely that more than a few will survive for 50 or even 25 years. Kiefer carries a disregard for the permanence of his materials to such an extreme that the lead will not stay in place and the straw on some canvases is already rotting, though this does not seem to discourage collectors.
The subjects of his art include Egyptian legends, alchemy, the Cabala, the Holocaust, the story of Exodus, Napoleon's occupation of Germany, Albert Speer's architecture, the mythic roots and Nazi uses of German romantic imagery -- dark woods, lonely travelers, ecstatic moral conversions in the face of nature -- and much more besides. Among Kiefer's spiritual heroes are Richard Wagner, Frederick II, Joseph Beuys, Painters Arnold Bocklin and Caspar David Friedrich and Novelist Robert Musil. Kiefer is not an artist of ordinary ambitions. But his ambitions are not bound up in the cult of celebrity that has riddled the art world in the '80s. He shuns publicity, permits virtually no photographs and spends most of his time behind the locked gates of his studio in the unremarkable German town of Buchen. "Live like a bourgeois, think like a god" -- if any painter has taken Gustave Flaubert's famous injunction to heart, it is Kiefer.