Anselm Kiefer - Hardcover

Celant, Germano

4.6

25 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8861301010 ISBN 13: 9788861301016

Publisher: Skira, 2007

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German artist Anselm Kiefer is one of the most important and controversial artists of the post-world war II art scene. Begining with the work he showed at the 1980 Venice Biennale, he has interpreted the great political and cultural issues at the heart of the modern European sensibility, through media as diverse as painting, photography, artist’s books, installations, and sculpture. Kiefer’s wildly expressive work receives all the space and fluent interpretation it demands in this superb high-quality production. The book’s approximately 300 full-color images trace Kiefer’s creative evolution and present his great themes in their full scope and power. The author interprets Kiefer’s art as a site where distinctions between modern and postmodern senses of representation, history, cosmology, and nature become thematic. He addresses individual works and gives the historical, biographical, art-critical, and philosophical setting for each.

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Review:

Writing about one of the most important and complex artists of our times requires the erudition, clarity, and broad view of a Daniel Arasse, author of the gorgeously illustrated Anselm Kiefer. Avoiding a straightforward chronological survey, Arasse plunges directly into Kiefer's major themes and the ways they reflect the artist's subtly evolving perspectives on German history, the role of the artist, and the meaning of life. Arasse illuminates Kiefer's use of Jewish kabbalistic symbolism, his relationship to philosophers and writers from Nietzsche to Celan, and the rich trove of metaphor to be found in his use of lead, straw, books, and images of railroad tracks and artists' palettes. Never succumbing to art-speak, Arasse--whose French text has been deftly translated into English--marshals his arguments with lucid elegance. The approximately 400 full-color plates, including full views and close-ups, are magnificent. This is surely one of the major art books of our time. --Cathy Curtis

About the Author:

Germano Celant is an art historian and senior curator for Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He is contributing editor to ArtForum and Interview. He is internationally acclaimed for his work on “Arte Povera”.

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