Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...role of interpreters of their culture and made northern Manhattan a Paris for the "New Negro." Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (Abrams; 200 pages; $35) documents this flowering, from the Paris-trained sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, who built her studio with her own hands, through Painter William H. Johnson, who renounced his academic style for a self-enforced primitivism, to James Van Der Zee, whose camera was witness to Harlem weddings, funerals and roaring good times...
...Kiefer's work is, in a sense, much more traditional than Beuys'. He is the modern incarnation of the grand-scale history painter, producing didactic machines rather than the ephemeral and koan-like events (talking to a dead hare, sweeping a pavement) that were Beuys' specialty. Kiefer wants to involve his audience completely in the drama of the painting's construction; in this respect, he has learned a lot from the example of Jackson Pollock. As when deciphering the web of drips and mottlings in one of Pollock's "all-over" abstractions, the eye crawls its way across a Kiefer...
Some treat his reflections on Nazism not as a walk around the rim of the deepest spiritual crater in European history, but as a modish and sinister nostalgia for Hitler. What other motives, the argument goes, can you assign to a painter who at 24 was photographed Sieg heil-ing outside the Colosseum or on the edge of the sea, as though "occupying" these sites in the name of the dead Fuhrer? Plenty, as it turned out. The shot of Kiefer saluting the Mediterranean is an acrid parody, the Nazi as Canute trying to raise himself to the level...
...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...
...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 in the '80s. He shuns publicity, permits virtually no photographs and spends most...