Half a century after Kristallnacht, the Holocaust is a treasure trove of super-strength imagery that artists are inclined to adapt with little apparent hesitation. In some cases, there’s an honest if dangerous effort to bring the unimaginable into line with the needs of the contemporary imagination; elsewhere images are presented in such a way that their precise relation to Hitler’s Final Solution is veiled, even obfuscated. The Anselm Kiefer retrospective, currently at the Museum of Modern Art on the final leg of a four-city, nation-wide tour, is a phenomenon that has brought an aestheticized fascination with Nazi Germany to the attention of an enormous public.[1] Kiefer’s mammoth images of charred tracks of earth are if nothing else a tabula rasa upon which many critics have inscribed their own overheated associations. And these associations have been abetted by curator Mark Rosenthal’s text for the catalogue, which marshals the forces of art-historical scholarship to lend Kiefer’s jazzy reputation as a contemporary tragic hero some weight, some dignity, some mythic resonance. Meanwhile, for those of us who are disinclined to take our Zeitgeist readings from the media or the Museum of Modern Art, the appearance of the Holocaust as a motif in half a dozen shows by contemporary Americans suggests that Kiefer is hardly alone as he stirs the once irreducible facts of annihilation into a modern artist’s metaphorical stew.
Despite all the attention that’s been focused on Anselm Kiefer, people seem uncertain about how to react to his