For a decade or so after WWII, German artists tried to match the victorious Americans, creating pale imitations of the Abstract Expressionist, Pop, and Minimalist movements that made the U.S. the center of the art world. But by the 1960s, something else began to happen. Younger German artists who were children or infants during the war years started to create something deeply, and sometimes disturbingly, German.

Untitled, 1969 View more images

Born in 1945, Kiefer is among the more junior members of his particular generation. He is also probably the most direct in connecting his art to Germany's tainted past, using images that would once have been unacceptably shocking. The exhibition at Harvard University's Busch-Reisinger museum includes one of the most notorious examples, "Occupations 1969," a bound volume of 18 printed, black-and-white photographs showing Kiefer in his studio or in front of various historical monuments, giving the Nazi salute.

When "Occupations" appeared in the Cologne art journal "Interfuktionen" in 1975, it created an uproar. Sympathetic critics describe these images as "ironic," "satirical," or as forcing the viewer to confront the "incomprehensible horror" of the Nazi era. But if the "Occupations" images are not neo-Nazi propaganda, neither are they trite anti-Nazi tracts. The bold Nazi poses and dramatic settings are exhilarating -- sometimes the compositions very directly imitate Romantic German work of the past. Are they a kind of ironic, post-modern conceptual art or something more sinister? Their aesthetic bite comes from walking along the cool edge of ambiguity.

Euphrates and Tigris, 1986-89 View more images

Like much of Kiefer's other work, including the famous, straw-encrusted canvases painted after pre-1945 illustrations of Hitler's Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the works displayed in this exhibition are based on photographs. His own snapshots of rivers, tableaux in his studio, and of himself, have typically been stained, etched with acid, painted over, cut into, and covered up almost to the point of obliteration. Their faded, monochromatic surfaces, stripped of the detached, industrial surfaces of normal photographs, look as if they were dug up from a bombed-out house. These are familiar post-war images of wounds, decay, and near-destruction.

But the works are also filled with bits and pieces of a broken German past. In "On the Rhine" (1968-91), Kiefer refers to the river whose near-sacred mythologies have made it a symbol of the German nation. "Alaric's Grave" (1969-89) includes a photograph of the Busento River, legendary resting place of the Visigoth king Alaric I, who died of an illness after sacking Rome in 410 A.D. "The Song of Balder" (1977-88) collages a photograph of river debris, a lead plate etched with pools and rivulets of acid, and a dried, brown sprig of real mistletoe. Balder, the Norse god of light, was beloved for his handsomeness, wisdom, and gentle nature. His treacherous death, by a twig of mistletoe, was prelude to the overthrow of the gods.

On the Rhine, 1968-91 View more images

Joseph Beuys, Kiefer's mentor and spiritual father to many German artists of his generation, took on the role of shaman or alchemist. Things he used to make his art, such as felt or lumps of fat, for example, were never just artist's materials, but were thought to have magical and symbolic qualities of their own. Indebted to Beuys in many ways, Kiefer uses lead and the silver in his photographic plates as an alchemist might, but he also exploits the metals' ambiguities. Lead is both protective, from X-rays and nuclear blasts, for example, and poisonous. As the traditional material for lining coffins, lead preserves the corpse (for the final resurrection) and yet it is lifeless, heavy, and dull. Silver shines when polished but, in a photograph, darkens to reveal the hidden image.

The labels and brochure for the "Surface Tension" exhibition tend to over-interpret their subject. Because Kiefer's art draws on such arcane material as alchemy, ancient Egyptian religion, German medieval history, and the Jewish mystical traditions of the Kabbalah, many who write about his work over-emphasize its cerebral side. But it is the essentially intuitive nature of Keifer's art that links him, perhaps more strongly than other artists of his generation, to the strongest traditions of Northern European art. Like Albrecht D?Edvard Munch, or Caspar David Friedrich, he is a maker of haunting images that, despite elaborate allegorical content, resist direct interpretation.

One of the most powerful images in the show, "The Heavenly Palaces: Merkabah," (1990) is a spread in one of Kiefer's many "artist's" books. Merkabah (the throne of God) is the climax of an intricate spiritual journey based on the esoteric teachings of the Kabbalah. But the image itself overwhelms its own symbolic content.

The Heavenly Palaces: Merkabah, 1990 View more images

Based on a photograph of an old brick factory Kiefer used as a studio, Merkabah shows a rough and battered brick floor punctuated by openings that were vents to the old kilns. Kiefer has added wrath-like shapes in ash and acrylic -- ambiguous forms that appear like wisps of smoke rising from the vents. The harsh, partly decayed industrial setting inevitably suggests smoke from a concentration camp crematorium or lost souls rising from hell.

The smoke-like shape is, in fact, a visual motif Kiefer has used both elsewhere in the book and in other works since the early 1980s. It is the image that drives the work, rather than its temporary connections to this or that system of signs. His mordant visual imagination creates fresh symbols out of the old. The intuitive artist in Kiefer never lets himself be trapped by his intellectual side. Consciously seeking to reclaim meaning from the post-war Germany, Kiefer makes more of it than anyone can explain away.

"Surface Tension: Works by Anselm Kiefer from the Broad Collections and the Harvard University Art Museums" exhibition will be on display at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum through October 6, 2002.

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