The Past is Never Past: Anselm Kiefer — Early Works at the Ashmolean

The Anselm Kiefer: Early Works exhibition, which opened this weekend at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, makes for unsettling viewing. When I first walked into the dimly lit and relatively small galleries, I didn’t immediately connect with any of the pieces on display. If anything, I was repulsed by them. The atmosphere felt heavy, the works sludgy, dark and dense — claustrophobic and oppressive. Yet, as I spent more time studying each work, I found myself gradually almost imperceptibly drawn to them— not by any sort of aesthetic beauty (for on first glance these are not obviously beautiful works), but more so out of an almost reluctant respect. There’s something almost perversely compelling about Kiefer’s explorations of Germany’s mid-20th century history, even as his aesthetic choices are as heavy as, well, one of Wagner’s operas.

Kiefer’s early work is best described as a reaction against his home country’s Nazi past. The exhibition curators leave no room for any other interpretation as to how in Nazi ideology nature had been subsumed into the nationalistic ethos of the time, tainting even seemingly neutral subjects. (Normally I find the current trend of overly intrusive curatorial ‘guidance’ an insult to my intelligence, but in this case, I actually found it helpful.)

A series of miniature watercolours, at first glance, gentle, colourful landscapes of woods, mountains, and rolling hillsides, takes on a darker, more foreboding air under this interpretation. What should at first glance be simple and pastoral instead quakes under the burden of history, as if the land itself is complicit in past atrocities. This not-so-subtle dis-ease extends throughout the exhibition, making even the most innocuous pieces feel loaded with significance.

One particularly arresting work is Kiefer’s Occupations series, which confronts us in the exhibition’s second gallery, where he photographed and sketched himself giving the Sieg Heil salute in various historically significant locations. These images remain deeply jarring and recall all-too-disturbingly a recent similar gesture made by Elon Musk, ambiguously (or not) echoing his Far-Right ideology.

Another work, the Brunhild paintings, directly evokes Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a work beloved by Hitler, adding yet another unsettling layer to Kiefer’s exploration of myth and ideology.

These images speak to themes of destruction and rebirth, repellant yet increasingly compelling. I found myself walking through it multiple times, absorbing the gloom, grappling with the history, and — unexpectedly — finding beauty beneath the thickly layered paint.

The resonance of these pieces, painted 40 to 50 years ago, feels all too relevant today as the world once again finds itself entangled with the charisma and brute force of would-be dictators, not only in Europe and China, but now most worryingly in the United States.

In the end, Kiefer’s early works do not offer comfort, but they do offer reflection. And perhaps that is the most vital function of art in any era — to disturb, to challenge, and to remind us that history is never as distant as we might believe or wish it to be.

Jon Malysiak is the Global Publishing Manager of StoryTerrace and the author of the novel Posh. Its sequel will be published in 2025.