Word: artes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...reference and pictorial techniques, and on the whole they do it without the megalomaniac narcissism that fatally trivializes the work of other artists to whom Kiefer is sometimes compared -- Julian Schnabel, for instance. Kiefer bears, in full measure, the tragic sense and redemptive hope against which most of the art of our fin de siecle has insulated itself, and his stature can only grow with time. Which is not to say, of course, that all his work is of equal value...
...Chicago show was organized by the late A. James Speyer (from 1961 to 1986 the Art Institute's curator of 20th century painting) and Mark Rosenthal of the Philadelphia Museum, who wrote its catalog. It will travel through 1988 to Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York City. An hour at it can be a fairly exhausting experience, like a slog toward a receding horizon across the plowed clay fields that are Kiefer's favorite landscape. His canvases are huge in size and engulfing in scale; he is, one notes, one of the few artists around who really do understand...
...subjects of his art include Egyptian legends, alchemy, the Cabala, the Holocaust, the story of Exodus, Napoleon's occupation of Germany, Albert Speer's architecture, the mythic roots and Nazi uses of German romantic imagery -- dark woods, lonely travelers, ecstatic moral conversions in the face of nature -- and much more besides. Among Kiefer's spiritual heroes are Richard Wagner, Frederick II, Joseph Beuys, Painters Arnold Bocklin and Caspar David Friedrich and Novelist Robert Musil. Kiefer is not an artist of ordinary ambitions. But his ambitions are not bound up in the cult of celebrity that has riddled the art world...
...Manhattan store boasts some 10,000 items, ranging from $10 wooden stairway spindles to the interior of an art-deco jewelry store for $135,000, complete with display cases and teller's cage. There are hundreds of marble fireplace mantels, pedestal sinks, lighting fixtures, wrought-iron gates and granite gargoyles. There are bigger chunks of history: a 5-ft.-tall, $3,500 brass-and-crystal chandelier found in a crate in Gimbel Bros.' basement, and a 9-ft.-high, 77-ft.-wide chestnut-paneled music room from a turn-of-the-century house in Southampton, N.Y. Cost: $30,000. Antique...