Anselm Kiefer is a German artist, born in Donaueschingen on 8 March 1945, who makes huge, heavy works out of lead, straw, ash and earth. His subject is Nazism, the war and what postwar Germany would rather not look at. He began in 1969 by photographing himself giving the Nazi salute in front of monuments across Europe, and today he has works in the Louvre and in the Panthéon in Paris.
His paintings carry things that do not belong on a canvas: real straw, burnt ash, shellac, molten lead. People type his name to find out who made them, and whether the man who posed for those photographs was a Nazi.
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In the summer and autumn of 1969, Kiefer was a student at the art academy in Karlsruhe. He took a camera to France, Switzerland and Italy and photographed himself raising his arm in the Nazi salute, in front of the statue of Louis XIV in Montpellier, among the tombs of the Alyscamps in Arles, at the Colosseum, in Pompeii, on the crater of Vesuvius.
In the studio he wore a heavy military overcoat from his father's attic or a crocheted dress, and on Vesuvius a suit and sunglasses. The gesture had been a punishable offence in Germany since 1945.
He called the series Occupations, and later gave it the title Heroic Symbols, borrowed from a 1943 article in a Nazi art magazine. In 1975 eighteen of the photographs appeared in a German art magazine, and many readers could not get past the salute. They read a provocation, or a confession. Kiefer said something else: "I used myself as the material. Like color."
Look at the pictures again and the salute stops being heroic. In the photograph held by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, the saluting man is drawn as tall as a classical ruin behind him, a way of mocking the Nazis' delusions of grandeur. The real question was what a painter does next with a country that would rather not look.
What You'll Discover
What a Germany of rubble handed him.
Who the two women in his straw are.
What the lead is there to carry.
Where he built a village of ruins.
What France asked him to remember.