Lead and ashes: Anselm kiefer, or the art of carrying germany

Anselm Kiefer was born in March 1945, two months before Germany’s surrender. His first breath coincided with the collapse of a world. Perhaps that is why his canvases always seem on the verge of buckling under their own weight. In his studio in Barjac, Provence, lead books stack like gravestones, rusted planes lie among sunflower fields, and cracked concrete towers rise toward an empty sky. Here, art is not an escape but a confrontation. And lead—this toxic, malleable metal—is its sacred material.

01The studio-laboratory: where history is kneaded into matter

Step into Kiefer’s studio, and you enter a post-apocalyptic landscape. The walls are encrusted with dried paint, the floors littered with metal debris, and the air smells of molten lead and cold ash. In one corner, a giant vat waits to transform sheets of metal into pictorial matter. Nearby, books with pages sealed by oxidation lie like relics of forbidden knowledge. It is here, in this organised chaos, that Kiefer practises a form of modern alchemy.

Lead is no arbitrary choice. This metal, used since antiquity for coffins and bullets, embodies both death and transformation. Kiefer melts it, hammers it, lets it oxidise until it becomes a second skin for his canvases. Sometimes he embeds objects in it: miniature planes recalling the Messerschmitts of the Luftwaffe, wheat ears evoking the scorched fields of war, or pages torn from burning books. "Lead is heavy, like history," he once explained. "But it’s also a metal that transforms. It can become something else."

This obsession with material is not merely aesthetic. It is philosophical. Kiefer studied with Joseph Beuys, whose work already explored the relationship between art and healing. But where Beuys used felt and fat to evoke organic rebirth, Kiefer chooses industrial, almost hostile materials. His canvases do not heal. They expose. They accuse. And sometimes, they hope.

02Words beneath the ash: when poetry becomes matter

If you look closely at Your golden hair, Margarete (1981), you will notice that the letters are not merely painted. They are engraved, as if with a chisel, into a layer of lead that seems to have been torn from a medieval roof. These words are those of Paul Celan, the Romanian Jewish poet whose work survived extermination. "Your golden hair, Margarete / Your ashen hair, Sulamith": the verse contrasts Aryan blondness with the blackness of hair burned in crematorium ovens.

Kiefer does not just quote Celan. He materialises him. The golden straw running through the canvas evokes both the wheat fields of the German countryside and the ashes of victims. The lead embodies the weight of guilt. "I do not represent the Holocaust," he has said. "I represent what it left behind: a void, an absence. And that absence must be filled with something. So I put in lead."

This approach is typical of Kiefer. His works are never illustrations but plastic equivalents of concepts. When he paints To the Unknown Painter (1983), a lead corridor leading toward a distant light, he does not depict an artist at work. He evokes the very idea of creation in a ravaged world. The corridor, with its striated walls and receding angles, resembles an abandoned subway tunnel—or a gas chamber. The light at the end is not a promise of salvation but a question: what can art still do after Auschwitz?

03The sun and the rust: symbols of a torn Germany

Sunflowers recur often in Kiefer’s work. These flowers, which inspired Van Gogh, symbolise far more than beauty for him. They are both homage and accusation. In Sulamith (1983), a field of withered sunflowers stretches beneath a leaden sky, while in the foreground, shelves of charred books recall Nazi book burnings. The flowers, once symbols of vitality, become silent witnesses to a complicit nature.

Why sunflowers? Because they have a peculiarity: they follow the sun’s path. This heliotropism, which evokes the quest for light, takes on a tragic dimension in the German context. "Germany too followed a black sun," Kiefer writes in his notebooks. "Hitler’s. And now it must live with that shadow."

Other motifs recur like leitmotifs: trains, recalling the convoys to the camps; ruined libraries, symbols of lost knowledge; planes, both a source of German engineering pride and instruments of destruction. In Breaking of the Vessels (1990), an installation of lead books and shattered glass, Kiefer draws on a Kabbalistic myth: that of the vessels that contained divine light and, by shattering, plunged the world into chaos. For him, the Shoah is a new cosmic fracture. And art, perhaps, an attempt at repair.

04The alchemy of disaster: when lead seeks to become gold

Kiefer has often been compared to an alchemist. Not just because of his use of lead—the metal the ancients sought to transmute into gold—but because his entire body of work seems driven by a quest for transmutation. In his studio, he burns, drowns, oxidises his canvases as if trying to accelerate time. "I don’t paint pictures," he says. "I make fossils."

This approach reaches its peak in the Nigredo series (1984), where Kiefer subjects his canvases to extreme treatments: flooding them, exposing them to the elements, or passing them through a blowtorch. The result evokes lunar landscapes, post-nuclear deserts, or the scorched walls of Berlin in 1945. "Destruction is part of the process," he explains. "As in alchemy, you must first reduce everything to ashes before you can rebuild."

Yet despite this violence, his works retain a strange beauty. The layers of paint, straw, and lead create textures that catch the light like Byzantine mosaics. The words engraved in metal gleam with a dull lustre, like inscriptions on an ancient tomb. Even in disaster, Kiefer finds a kind of grace. "Art must be ugly to be true," he has written. "But it must also be beautiful so we want to look at it."

05Barjac, or the utopia of the artist-architect

In 1992, Kiefer left Germany for the south of France. He bought a former silk factory in Barjac, a 35-hectare estate where he would gradually build his own world. Here, no museum, no gallery: only studios, concrete towers, sunflower fields, and monumental sculptures that seem to emerge from a fever dream.

Barjac is not just a workplace. It is a total work of art, a landscape shaped by the artist’s hand. Kiefer dug tunnels, erected towers, planted forests. He even built a fake Roman ruin, letting it collapse to turn it into a permanent installation. "I wanted to create a place where time no longer exists," he explains. "Where history and the present blend together."

This place is also a laboratory. It was here that he created The Seven Heavenly Palaces (2004), an installation of cracked concrete towers that evoke both New York skyscrapers and Babylonian ziggurats. Visitors who enter this labyrinth feel as if they are walking through the ruins of a vanished civilisation—or the foundations of a world to come.

Barjac is also a refuge. After decades spent confronting German history, Kiefer found here a space where he could work in peace. Yet even here, Germany catches up with him. The lead books, the rusted planes, the sunflower fields: everything reminds us that the past cannot be so easily buried.

06The weight of legacies: Kiefer and the German question

"Must a German artist speak of Germany?" This question has haunted Kiefer since the beginning of his career. In the 1970s, when most of his generation avoided the subject, he chose to confront it head-on. His early works, like the Occupations series (1969), in which he photographed himself giving the Nazi salute in front of European monuments, caused a scandal. Some saw it as gratuitous provocation. Others, a desperate attempt to break a taboo.

With hindsight, we understand better what drove Kiefer. "Germany cannot turn the page," he says. "It must live with its history, like a wound that never heals." His canvases are not indictments but observations. They do not judge. They expose.

This approach has influenced an entire generation of artists. Gerhard Richter, with his blurred photos of the RAF and the war, explored a similar path. More recently, artists like Christian Boltanski and Doris Salcedo have taken up the idea of memorial art, where matter itself becomes the medium of memory. "Kiefer showed that you could make art with history without lapsing into pathos," explains art historian Andreas Huyssen. "He turned guilt into something tangible, almost physical."

Yet Kiefer refuses to be reduced to the role of "Germany’s painter." "I am not a historian," he says. "I am an artist. My job is to ask questions, not answer them." Those questions remain, in every layer of lead, in every half-erased word. And they wait for someone—a visitor, a critic, history itself—to finally lift them.

07Art as burden: why Kiefer still haunts us

There is something exhausting about Kiefer’s work. Not just because of its monumental scale, but because it demands a kind of physical engagement from us. When you stand before Breaking of the Vessels, with its lead books stacked like gravestones, you cannot remain indifferent. The weight of the installation envelops you, grips you. You feel that this work does not give you a choice: you must carry it, if only for the duration of a visit.

Perhaps that is why Kiefer continues to fascinate, nearly sixty years after his debut. In a world where art is often light, ephemeral, consumerist, his canvases are blocks of resistance. They do not seek to please. They do not want to be "Instagrammable." They want to be lived.

"Art must be difficult," he has written. "It must force us to look at what we would rather ignore." And that is exactly what Kiefer does. He forces us to look at Germany, of course. But also at war, at guilt, at memory, and at that nagging question: how do we live with a past that does not pass?

Perhaps that is why his works always seem unfinished. Because history itself is not. The lead continues to oxidise. The words continue to fade. And we, the viewers, remain there, with this weight on our shoulders, wondering what we will do with it.