Word: anselme
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...seems from Anselm Kiefer's retrospective, which has just opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, that at 42 this German artist is the best painter of his generation on either side of the Atlantic. Given most of the talent we have, this may not sound like much of a compliment. Certainly Kiefer's limitations are inescapable: his drawing lacks fluency and clarity and his color is monotonous, though the former seems to reinforce the grinding earnestness of his style and the latter contributes to its lugubrious intensity. What counts, is that he is one of the few visual artists...
...image stream of German expressionism went underground, but not even Nazism could dry it up. It is the deep, continuous current of German modernism; it picks up different names, en route through the century; and here it is again, manifested in the work of painters like Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and, above all, its titular river-god, Joseph Beuys...
...curious thing is that though such painters are present by the acre, the one incontestably major figure of that generation, Anselm Kiefer, has only three paintings in the show, none among his best. Why this should be so is a mystery; but it is hard not to suspect that art-market pressures have been playing on the curators, since nearly all the recent artists in the show except Kiefer and Gerhard Richter (also ill-represented, and only with early work) are in the stable of one German dealer, Michael Werner...
...reputations will seem as obviously ridiculous -- though as sociologically interesting -- as the former cult of such late 19th century artists as Bougereau or Hans Makart. But whether there is any real genius in the offing is a moot point. America has no major younger expressionist artist, like Germany's Anselm Kiefer or England's Frank Auerbach. Though it has some gifted realist painters, notably William Bailey and Neil Welliver, none can be said to compare, in point of intensity and unsparing intelligence, with England's Lucien Freud or Spain's Antonio Lopez Garcia...
There were minor Grenadian fireworks, however, in Washington. Reagan Administration officials vehemently denied a charge by Richard Gabriel and Paul Savage, military historians at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., who claimed that a "significant" number of U.S. commandos were not counted in the official casualty toll. While hotly disputing that assertion, Pentagon Spokesman Michael Burch admitted that the names of only 88 of 115 injured servicemen were released, either to protect the identity of special U.S. forces or at the request of the wounded...