It was shocking in the Sixties when the
painter Anselm Kiefer photographed himself
in various European locales performing the
Nazi salute.

“Too soon,” people said – even if it’s satire. Those
wounds were still raw. (Even Mel Brooks was a couple
years away from “springtime for Hitler.”)

Kiefer was born in Germany at the tail end WWII.
His themes haven’t changed – the atrocities of
authoritarianism and the awesome chaos of war. But
his work is shocking for a new reason. They speak to a
fresh hell come round again.

The painter is now 8o. A big new retrospective
show of his work just opened in Amsterdam
splashed across two galleries. Immense and brutish
canvasses, the paint thick as a three-day reduction
of a cannibal’s stew, yet laced with delicate personal
touches one critic likened to the whisper of a poet
in a thunderstorm. The show is relevant for all the
wrong reasons.

“We have a situation now like in 1933 in Germany,” he
told the New York Times.

Kiefer asks without asking: Have we really learned
anything? Except how to assume a defensive crouch
under some sturdy thing?

Or maybe we’ve learned that to begin again – and
there’s no escape clause here – you have to crash
to zero.

– Bruce Grierson