Word: painterly
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...young artist named Adolf Hitler applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He was rejected. He tried again in 1908, and was once more turned down. Living in near poverty, he struggled on as a street-curb painter in Vienna. But then his career took another turn, and when he became Fuhrer in 1934 he ordered his paintings rounded up and destroyed those he thought were forgeries. Several hundred works survived...
...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...
...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...
...show in Chicago confirms Germany' s Anselm Kiefer, 42, as the best painter of his generation on either side of the Atlantic...