The paintings Anselm Kiefer showed in November at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York are huge by any standards, but you feel so much easy, flowing energy in his arm, and it takes so little time to adjust to their scope, that you wish they were bigger. The pictures, most of which are landscapes, are all at least nine feet high and ten or twelve feet across; Landschaft mit Flügel—or Landscape with Wing—the largest painting in the show, is a bit more than ten feet high and a little over eighteen feet wide. The sizes themselves aren’t record-breaking; American artists have been working with roughly similar dimensions since the Forties. But Kiefer’s paintings of orangy-yellow fields are big in a new and different way. They aren’t wall-like, they don’t resemble vast, frieze-like Oriental screens, and they don’t convey a sense of unruffled, intimidating power. If anything, they’re close to the paintings from the Romantic era in the Louvre, the ranks of Gericaults, Delacroixs, and Courbets that make you gulp and then laugh the first time you see them because you never imagined paintings this big. Kiefer’s landscapes have the same combination of earnestness and theatricality. They’re the work of someone who has an almost hollow, yet engaging way of announcing that he must work big because he has great material in him.

Now thirty-seven, Anselm Kiefer has been talked of for the past few years as possibly the most distinctive and original of the many new