Anselm Kiefer and art after Auschwitz
By: Lisa Saltzman.
Contributors: Kiefer, Anselm, 1945-
Series: Cambridge studies in new art history and criticism
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 173
Subjects: Kiefer, Anselm, 1945-  -- Psychology.; Kiefer, Anselm, 1945-  -- Criticism and interpretation.
Description: Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz examines the possibilities and limits of painting in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Positioning Kiefer as a deeply learned artist who encounters and represents history in painted rather than written form, Lisa Saltzman contends that Kiefer's work is unique among postwar German artists in his persistent exploration of the legacy of fascism. Formally, thematically, and philosophically, Kiefer's work probes the aesthetic and ethical dilemma of representing the unrepresentable, the historical catastrophe into whose aftermath the artist was born.

Kiefer's work mediates the relation between a deeply traumatic history that he, as a German born after the Second World War, and we, his post-Holocaust spectators, cannot fully know but to which his work bears witness and provides access.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 125-170) and index.
Based on the author's doctoral dissertation.