It was to be expected that the Anselm Kiefer retrospective, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in December, would be accorded a rapturous reception, and so it has been.[1] Throughout the nineteen-eighties, as the art market soared and an almost unencompassable quantity of meretricious painting glutted the galleries, the museums, and the public consciousness, the emergence of a new master—an artist who could be seen as transcending the more compromising scenarios of the new art scene—was anxiously awaited. And no sooner was the need for such a redemptive figure openly acknowledged than a consensus of sorts seemed to settle on Anselm Kiefer as the leading candidate. This young German painter, born in 1945, seemed to have everything that the role called for: talent, vision, ambition, dignity, and the kind of gravitas that was so conspicuously lacking in so many other artists who were swamping the scene. He even seemed to be in possession of that rare thing in contemporary art: an interesting mind. Most important of all, however, was the fact that Kiefer had a subject guaranteed to win the nervous attention of the entire Western world: the nightmare of the Nazi era and its meaning for European civilization. Both the subject and Kiefer’s handling of it conferred an almost instant distinction on the artist, and he quickly became one of the mythic figures of the international art world.

Kiefer had a subject guaranteed to win the nervous attention of the entire Western world: the