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In this, of course, he is utterly different from his mentor, Joseph Beuys, who taught him at the Dusseldorf Academy in the early '70s. Lecturing, performing, always accessible to the young (and the press), Beuys was the Pied Piper of postwar German esthetic renewal. One does not need to accept his message that everyone is some sort of artist to recognize his achievement in giving back to Kiefer's generation the vast fund of German imagery, the sense of the primordial and the ritual that had been corrupted, made almost radioactive, by Nazism. Thanks to Beuys, younger German artists were able to connect with their own history and think about it without illusion, and Kiefer's work is the fruit of that process.
But Kiefer's work is, in a sense, much more traditional than Beuys'. He is the modern incarnation of the grand-scale history painter, producing didactic machines rather than the ephemeral and koan-like events (talking to a dead hare, sweeping a pavement) that were Beuys' specialty. Kiefer wants to involve his audience completely in the drama of the painting's construction; in this respect, he has learned a lot from the example of Jackson Pollock. As when deciphering the web of drips and mottlings in one of Pollock's "all-over" abstractions, the eye crawls its way across a Kiefer, mesmerized by detail: every square centimeter of those giant canvases is intended, somehow, to speak. What they were saying, particularly in the '70s and early '80s, was so literal that his German critics often got it quite wrong.
Some treat his reflections on Nazism not as a walk around the rim of the deepest spiritual crater in European history, but as a modish and sinister nostalgia for Hitler. What other motives, the argument goes, can you assign to a painter who at 24 was photographed Sieg heil-ing outside the Colosseum or on the edge of the sea, as though "occupying" these sites in the name of the dead Fuhrer? Plenty, as it turned out. The shot of Kiefer saluting the Mediterranean is an acrid parody, the Nazi as Canute trying to raise himself to the level of a natural force. But this eludes those who want to think that the demons raised in Nazi Germany can be buried by mere denial, beneath the concrete of the postwar economic miracle.
The ghosts come out anyway; and it is Kiefer's project to lay them by showing their relations to the real cultural history of Germany, bitterly polluted by Nazi appropriation. When Kiefer paints a Nazi monument, such as the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, he also evokes by implication the noble tradition of German neoclassicism that Speer froze and vulgarized. His charred, plowed landscapes, their heavy paint mixed with straw, are real agricultural terrain, but they are also frontier, no- man's land, graveyard and the biblical desert of Exodus.
What may be Kiefer's most humanly poignant cluster of images was provoked by Death Fugue, a poem written in a German concentration camp by Paul Celan, which runs in part:
death is a master from Germany
his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets
his aim is true . . .
he plays with the serpents and
daydreams death is a master
from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamite