Anselm Kiefer, “Orithyia” (2024), emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis and charcoal on canvas; 110 1/4″ x 18′ 8 13/32″ (collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.318; © Anselm Kiefer)
The Saint Louis Art Museum marks the German master’s 80th birthday with a powerful retrospective
Mottled, cracked surfaces suggest corrosion, counterpointed with patches of gold leaf. Thick oils, acrylics and sediments of oxidized copper are dabbed and dappled in ways so physical you almost want to run your hands over them. (Please don’t.) Sheets of lead curl away from surfaces like birch bark. But there are also identifiable images.
Such is the art of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most important German artists of the 21st century. Marking his 80th birthday year, the Saint Louis Art Museum is presenting the first major American retrospective of his work in two decades. It’s a powerful one, dense with resonances, historic, mythic, literary and personal.
Of roughly 40 works in all, more than 20 have been created in the last five years. Organized by SLAM director Min Jung Kim, and thoughtfully arrayed, the exhibition includes five enormous new works created for the museum’s vast Sculpture Hall, in the Beaux Arts monument looming over Forest Park. Titled “Becoming the Sea,” the exhibition includes links between two rivers with personal associations for Kiefer, the Mississippi and Germany’s Rhine, but also far deeper meanings.
Long known for its important collection of 20th-century German art, especially Expressionism, the St. Louis museum claims the largest collection anywhere of works by Max Beckmann, who taught at Washington University for two years in the late 1940s. A 1983 SLAM exhibition of newer German art, which traveled to seven other museums, was a major force in sparking American interest in Kiefer.
Born in Donaueschingen in the last days of World War II, Kiefer witnessed vast devastation but also rebuilding. After early years near the source of the Danube, he grew up on the Rhine, across from France. Rivers, sources of life but also destruction, are symbols of natural processes, of nothing staying the same, of everything ultimately flowing into forces larger than itself. We never step in the same river twice. “For Kiefer,” as Kim writes in a catalogue essay, “rivers are not only landscapes but living metaphors of time, memory, and identity.” (Delayed by photographing the site-specific installations, the catalogue will be published in 2026, but in the meantime there’s an informative Visitor Guide.)
Ultimately rivers are tributaries toward oceans — thus the exhibition’s title, from verses by American beat poet Gregory Corso. Even a human life is a tributary within a larger scheme. “When we die,” Kiefer wrote in a letter to Kim, “we dissolve into our smallest particles, which lose themselves in the universe. Our death is an end and at the same time a new beginning.”
Of the 30-foot-high canvases in the Sculpture Hall, “Am Rhein (On the Rhine)” and “Anselm fuit hic (Anselm Was Here)” show the artist on the river’s edge, shaded by vividly textured leafy trees opening on a golden sunlit sky. But personal associations with the Mississippi animate two other big paintings. In 1991, when Kiefer came to SLAM to supervise installation of his haunting glass-and-lead “Bruch der Gefäße (Breaking of the Vessels),” sadly not on display now, he was given a boat tour of the river.
“Missouri, Mississippi” recalls gigantic locks between the eponymous rivers, churned-up impasto of turquoise and green rendering the crash of waters pouring over, with a golden sky behind. In the more muted top half of the vast canvas a female body sprawls over a topographical map of the Mississippi and its tributaries.
Female water spirits figure in both German and Native American mythology and folklore, three from the latter giving their names to “Lumpeguin, Cigwe, Animiki.” They hover, gravity-free, in a gold-leaf sky over a silhouetted Mississippi River bridge that’s no longer there.
Female figures are portrayed in both two and three dimensions in one of the exhibition’s most striking galleries, everything in black and white. Here woodcuts, another favored Kiefer medium, play prominent roles. In “Die Reintöchter (The Rhinemaidens)” the three Rhinemaidens of Richard Wagner’s operatic epic “The Ring of the Nibelung” are shown as corpses in ungainly sprawls in the black-streaked river.
Five statues of spreading white dresses are capped not with heads but with symbols evoking women from history and legend. The poet Sappho is imagined with a stack of lead-leaved books, the Christian martyr Eulalia with a whip with which she was tortured. “Melancolia” alludes to a 1514 Albrecht Dürer engraving of a winged female figure representing melancholy. Here her “head” is a bronze-and-glass box based on the geometry of a solid block in the background of the Dürer.
Lead, a humble material heavy enough to be a weight but paradoxically soft and pliant — and potentially poisonous — is a recurrent motif. Some of the most arresting works in the SLAM show include sheets of lead boldly curling off canvases. “Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love),” dabbed and smeared with rough oils, acrylic and emulsion, suggests turbulence and wear and tear, both marine and amatory.
“Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea” continues at the Saint Louis Art Museum, One Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park, St. Louis, through Jan. 25. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday–Sunday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday. Closed Monday. For more information, 314.721.0072 or www.slam.org.
Wonderful. Thank you!