Floor 6: Anselm Kiefer (exiting Remembrance )
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Anselm Kiefer Gallery, which features the artist's very large mixed-media paintings on white walls. The lighting in this gallery is somewhat dimmed and each of Kiefer's paintings is gently spotlit by lights on the ceiling.
You've entered from the back left corner of the large square gallery, facing the far, front wall. Nine artworks by Kiefer are installed around the walls and against a freestanding wall horizontally bisecting the space. There are two benches in the gallery, each one on opposite sides of the freestanding wall. Directly to your right, on the back wall, is a video about Kiefer.
In the middle of the left wall is an entrance to the 6th Floor City Gallery, which spans the length of the entire 6th floor.
The exit to the William Kentridge Gallery is in the front right corner of the gallery. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"Always construction and deconstruction together. . . . I use fire, I burn the surface of my painting. . . . I don't illustrate at all, I create history, I do history, history is my mud, to work with and give form."
—Anselm Kiefer, 2009
Anselm Kiefer was born in March 1945, just two months before the end of World War II in Europe. In West Germany, where he grew up, physical scars of the war remained—as a child, he played in the bombed-out ruins of a neighbor’s house—but into the 1960s, many people still remained silent about the crimes of the Nazi regime. From the beginning of his art career, Kiefer was determined to confront this past and "reawaken memories."
The work on view here is primarily from the 1980s, when Kiefer explored the weight of the Nazi era and its memory in immense, thickly layered paintings that incorporate materials with symbolic associations, such as straw, ash, and lead. Kiefer points to the use and abuse of cultural memory by evoking sites and themes from German history—forests, plowed fields, monumental architecture, and real or mythic figures from different eras. The material presence of these works is also a powerful metaphor. The densely stacked, charred, and often fragile surfaces reference the accumulation of time, cycles of destruction and rebirth, and the potential for regeneration from the ruins of the past.
Historical Timeline:
1933–39
The Nazi regime begins as Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany in 1933. Six years later, Germany invades Poland, starting World War II. Blitzkrieg ("lightning war") tactics enable Germany to quickly occupy many European countries, leading to widespread destruction across cities and civilian life.
1941–45
Germany invades the Soviet Union and the Nazi regime's persecution of European Jews shifts to systematic mass murder. By 1945, six million Jews—around two-thirds of Europe’s pre-World War II Jewish population—are killed.
1945
Germany surrenders and bans the Nazi salute and other Nazi symbolism. Artist Anselm Kiefer is born in Donaueschingen and spends his childhood amid postwar destruction.
1947–49
The Cold War begins. Two years later, Germany splits into two territories: the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
1960–61
Adolf Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, is captured in Argentina in 1960. His televised trial in Jerusalem the following year shocks global audiences.
1968–69
West German students protest traditionalism and Germany's political authority, including many former Nazi officials. Anselm Kiefer begins his art career in 1969 with the series Occupations.
1970–71
German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneels at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial—a powerful symbol of apology and early reconciliation between West and East Germany. The next year, Kiefer creates Mann im Wald (Man in the Forest) one of his earliest paintings, which exploring Germany’s mythic origins and dark past.
1991
The Soviet Union collapses, creating fifteen independent nations. Russia gains a democratically elected leader, and the Cold War comes officially to an end.
Related Media
Artwork Label Text
Anselm Kiefer on materials.
SFMOMA interview (2016)
Single-channel video, with sound, 2:59 min.
Transcript
Anslem Kiefer:
I was always interested not to use color as illusion, but as a material. It would mean something to me.
And for this reason, I worked already with lead, and I discovered straw. It’s a wonderful material, you know; that's like manure. And manure is important. It's a transformation, you know: it ferments and it becomes something else. If it wouldn't be a metamorphoses transformation, then it would be just cow shit.
There, it was a straw painting. But then I took the straw away with the machete. You know, machete? I like this, you know, to treat the painting a little bit.
I learned something about the meaning of the material, because I think that, in the material, is already the spirit. So I made a sort of spiritual.
If I see a material, what shocks me a lot makes me thinking; then I know that there's something in, and then I have to find it out—by practicing, by thinking, by building something.
I remember when I discovered the lead. I was so attracted by this material, the lead, and I didn't know why. Then I found out into alchemy. It plays a big role: it's the first step on the way to get gold. And then I used it from, I think I started to use it in the 70s, and I used it until now.
And they warn me that it's dangerous and all, and I think it's lead and me—that's one thing that cannot be dangerous. I was always interested in airplanes, you know, but this is lead, so it's paradox. I like this because it's a plane out of lead. It’s fantastic, though, because it pretends something and it doesn't.
That's a geometric, cube—Dürer used in his Melancholia. The dust in combination with this geometric form is nice because it shows the order, the geometric order, and it shows the chaos, what dust is. So I like the opposition of these two things. That's the main question in my studio. I have a quite big studio, and there it's always important to have some edge between order and chaos.
If you do too much order, then it's finished—you know, it’s not good. If it's too much chaos, you cannot work anymore; it's too much ideas and things. So you have always find a very nice way between order and disorder.
Objects
9 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1981
Oil, straw, emulsion, and gelatin silver print on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
Tendrils of golden straw lit with painted flames dance across this gray canvas. As with many of Kiefer's materials and images, straw carries conflicting associations: It suggests abundance and warmth, but is also delicate and flammable. The artist has reflected, "Plowing and burning . . . [are processes] of regeneration, so that the earth can be reborn and create new growth toward the sun." Here, the slender bundles of straw refer to the blond hair of Margarethe, the female Aryan ideal in "Death Fugue" (1948), a poem by Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. This work's counterpart, Sulamith, is on view opposite.
Visual Description
Spanning just over nine feet tall by 13 feet wide, this large mixed-media work on linen—oil, straw, emulsion, and gelatin silver print—presents a row of forms made from bundled straw rising from a charred-looking ground. The background is a field of grays, scraped and brushed in vertical passes with thin, branching marks and scratches scattered across the surface.
Across the width, about a dozen long, figures emerge, each a slender, arched shape constructed from actual straw adhered in thick, ropey bands; the straw curves and then drops downward in long, wavering lines. Near the top of many forms, small painted flame shapes—white cores with orange-pink edges—appear at the tips. In a few places, the flame marks repeat lower down.
The bottom third is a band of blacks, grays, and dirty whites, built up with crusty textures and tangled material. The straw is interwoven with dark, clotted passages and pale, scraped highlights. Near the center, partially obscured by the vertical straw lines, black handwritten cursive text spells out the title of the painting, "Margarethe."
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1984–92
Acrylic, emulsion, and ash on canvas on lead
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1994
This painting depicts the exterior of the Hall of Soldiers in Berlin, the same unbuilt Nazi structure whose crypt is referenced in Sulamith (on view nearby). Here, Kiefer has turned the planned shrine to German military glory into a ruin. The canvas on which it is painted is literally burned and tattered, its underlying layers exposed like geological strata. By calling this a museum—a building designed to preserve culture—Kiefer may be suggesting the fragility and impermanence of culture, as well as its potential for regeneration.
Visual Description
A horizontally oriented painting over six feet tall and almost ten feet wide depicts an architectural façade under distressed gray layers, with a pale neoclassical structure half-revealed at center. The composition contains cool slate, charcoal, and ash-gray fields that look wrinkled and creased, as if thin sheets or skins of material have been laid over the surface and partially peeled away. In the middle, a lighter band exposes the building: a long colonnade with repeated vertical columns and several rounded arch openings, rendered in chalky whites, beige, and faint ochres, with dark voids inside the arches. The façade stretches horizontally, with lower steps or a platform indicated by parallel lines beneath it; on both far left and far right, smaller wing-like structures extend outward, suggesting a symmetrical complex.
Across the entire canvas, the surface is scarred by tears, holes, and abrasions—irregular areas where upper layers have broken off to reveal darker underlayers. The top edge shows scattered patches of exposed, lighter material and mottled textures. Along the bottom, warmer tones break through: rusty oranges and browned yellows seep and pool in a band. The outer perimeter remains darker and more intact, framing the central architectural image.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1982
Graphite and watercolor on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1995
Like The Museum (right) and Sulamith (nearby), this watercolor evokes the Hall of Soldiers in Berlin, an unrealized military memorial designed by Wilhelm Kreis, an architect who worked for Adolf Hitler's regime. Kiefer replaces the colossal victory statue that was to stand at the end of the main hall with an artist’s palette. Mounted (or perhaps impaled) on a stick, the lonely palette could be understood as a victim—a possible reference to Hitler's war on "degenerate" art. At the same time, it emits rays of light, suggesting the possibility of renewal through art.
Visual Description
A watercolor work on paper (just over three feet tall by two feet wide) depicts a large, tunnel-like interior space with a high barrel vault converging toward a distant central archway. Broad, concentric arcs in smoky grays and bluish violets sweep across the ceiling, layered with fine graphite lines that suggest a stone ceiling. Darker washes collect along the upper edges, creating a heavy, cavernous canopy.
In the lower half of the painting, a symmetrical corridor is flanked by vertical columns: to the left and right, repeating vertical elements read as columns or pilasters with narrow bays between them, rendered in pale beige, gray, and brown washes with sketchy linework. In the center, there is a circle with a dot that connects to a semi-blurred, straight line—resembling a stick—that is positioned upright with its bottom edge connected to the floor; this shape represents the artist's palette. Long, faint lines radiate from around the semicircular top of the vault ceiling and connect down to the circle, where they converge at the dot in the center.
The floor is a grid of large rectangular stones, its perspective lines leading inward to the center in shadow, emphasizing the hall’s scale and the low light. At the far end, a large, pale arch frames a lighter wall, and along the inner curve of the arch a small handwritten phrase appears. The words are partially legible and read approximately as the title of the artwork in German "Dem unbekannten Maler" in scrawled, looping handwriting.
The piece is in a dark wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1983
Oil, emulsion, shellac, acrylic paint, woodcut, and straw on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
This cavernous interior is modeled on the design for the Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldier, part of Adolf Hitler’s never-realized plans for Berlin. Kiefer renders the space with a blackened ceiling and, at its far end, seven flickering flames. Though originally conceived as a symbol of remembrance for fallen Nazi soldiers, the fire here suggests destruction and honors the persecuted._ _The canvas is inscribed with the name "Sulamith," a reference to the ashen-haired Jewish woman in Paul Celan’s poem "Death Fugue" (1948). Kiefer also created a painting (on view opposite) named for her Aryan counterpart, Margarethe, described in the same poem.
Visual Description
A large, roughly nine-foot-by-twelve-foot mixed-media painting (oil, emulsion, shellac, acrylic paint, woodcut, and straw on linen) presents a frontal view down a vast vaulted hall, its repeating brick courses compressing into a deep central vanishing point. The palette is predominantly black and charcoal with dense browns and rusty ochres, with thick impasto—a painting technique involving the thick application of paint—and scabbed surfaces. Concentric arch bands span from left to right, each ring articulated by short, chalky white marks that read like outlines of bricks and mortar joints. This area also contains intermittent warm gold-ochre patches.
Along both sides, blocky vertical supports and low wall segments form a corridor. Collaged elements comprised of woodblock prints that have been pasted to the surface appear as darker voids. At the center is a darker recess, shown in shadow, with seven small, flickering flames. The floor is rendered as broad, flat, slate-gray slabs divided into large rectangular sections that angle inward toward the center. In the upper left corner, handwritten in pale, chalk-like letters, the text reads "Sulamith."
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1971
Acrylic on muslin
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
In one of his earliest paintings, Kiefer depicts himself in a nightgown, standing in a small clearing in a dense forest, surrounded by towering trees. Holding a burning branch, he appears at once threatening and vulnerable. Forests have played an important role in Kiefer's life: He was raised in Germany’s Black Forest and later lived and worked in the Oden Forest. In this dreamscape, the forest serves as a highly charged symbol for German Romanticism and nationalism. The flame is another motif that recurs in Kiefer's later works, suggesting both a sign of life and a force of ruin
Visual Description
A large painting (about five-and-a-half-feet by six feet) in acrylic on muslin depicts a forest of tall, closely spaced trunks with a small solitary figure standing near the center foreground, holding a flaming branch. The composition is dominated by long, straight tree trunks painted in alternating bands of smoky gray, brown, and muted pink, rising from a pale, washed ground and extending beyond the top edge, creating a grid of vertical lines.
Near the middle, a man with curly dark hair, a mustache, and light skin (said to be the artist himself) stands facing forward in a knee-length white dress with long sleeves; his posture is still and slightly stiff, his feet close together. In his raised hand (to our left of his body), he holds a black, twiggy branch that erupts into flames—sharp red and orange—topped by a column of gray-white smoke that blends into the surrounding vertical strokes. The forest floor is a thinly painted expanse of cream, beige, and faint greenish washes with sketchy marks and drips, while translucent vertical runs of paint descend from the trunks and upper areas.
The painting is in a light wood frame.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1978
Woodcut, acrylic paint, and shellac on paper
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
This work presents a grouping of German writers, philosophers, politicians, and other intellectuals whose work and lives were used to legitimize Nazi ideology and its vision of empire. Composed of bold woodcuts—a medium with a long tradition in German art—it features a range of figures, from the legendary Germanic chieftain Hermann who led the victory over the Romans in 9 CE to the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Remarking on this selection, Kiefer has said, "I chose these personages because they were obviously misused by the powerful."
Visual Description
A nearly eleven-foot-square, large paper sheet combines woodcut imagery with acrylic paint and shellac, forming a black, white, and tan composition containing faces around a central blaze. Around the perimeter, dozens of portrait studies—mostly head-and-shoulders views—are arranged in rectangular panels showing men and a few women of varying ages, many with lined faces, short hair, or period hairstyles, rendered in sharp, carved-looking black outlines with pale highlights. Several portraits are shown in three-quarter view; some wear dark coats, high collars, or formal clothing, and a few panels suggest seated figures, including one to the upper right with a draped, reclining pose.
The center contains an almost rectangular black field from which a bright, white, flame-like form rises in multiple tongues. Beneath the flames, a tangled network of lines suggests piled debris, wood, or kindling. Across the entire surface, thick black strokes arc and whip diagonally, looping over portraits and the central inferno like slashes, cords, or sweeping marks of paint. Drips and streaks run vertically in places, especially through the darker areas.
Along the bottom margin, handwritten German text is visible in black, indicating the title of the piece: "Wege der Weltweisheit: die Hermannsschlacht."
The top of the paper sheet is attached to the wall with staples. A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around the piece.
Artwork Label Text
1985–88
Oil, acrylic paint, emulsion, resin, lead, soil, ashes, and photographs
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989
Visual Description
A vast, panoramic, mixed‑media artwork about eleven feet tall by twenty-two-feet wide presents a heavily distressed, stratified surface of gray and rust-red material, built up with paint and thick, gritty substances, including soil, ash, and resin. The top third is dominated by a slate-gray layer of lead sheets that look cracked and peeling. Its irregular, torn edge runs horizontally and exposes the underlayer beneath; vertical seams suggest joined panels or sections. Several circular white spots appear. Near the upper center-right, a large circular impression sits in the gray zone; resembling a manhole cover, it bears a ringed outline, faint interior markings, and the inscription "Ain Soph."
Below, the exposed field is a mottled, oxidized palette of brick red, burnt umber, and dark brown, marked by textures such as scratches, crusted ridges, bubbled patches, and vein-like trails. The circular form above connects to a thick rod of curled metal that thickens and swings downward toward the bottom left corner. Several slender, dark elements—like rods, wires, or splintered strips—run diagonally and vertically across the reddish area and are partially embedded.
Along the lower portion, small lumpy accretions or masses hang or protrude at intervals; a few are tied or anchored with thin strands. Weathered strips of paper are attached to several of these masses with handwritten cursive text in black charcoal. Each label contains a numbered Hebrew name. Several masses are also topped with clippings of black and white photographs of flames that curl around the edges and appear to emanate from their suspended forms.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1980
Oil, emulsion, shellac, gelatin silver print, sand, and charcoal on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
This work presents a historically and culturally charged landscape bursting into flames. The sand strewn across the expansive photograph alludes to the sandy soil found throughout the state of Brandenburg, a region that was once part of East Germany and that is associated with the country's Roman roots and military history. It is also the subject of "March Heath, March Sand," a traditional song from the 1920s that was subsequently popularized as a National Socialist hymn. Versions are still sung today in celebration of the area, reaffirming Kiefer's own reflections on the intertwinement and malleability of culture, place, and memory.
Visual Description
A large painting (nine feet tall by over 14 feet wide) depicts a black-and-white photograph of a burned or ravaged landscape obscured by broad sweeps of ochre-brown paint, with scattered pale flames rising across the surface. The composition contains earthy browns, grays, black, and off-white, creating the impression of ash, mud, smoke, and scorched terrain. Across the upper left, handwritten German text reads "Wege" followed by fainter words that appear to read "märkischer Sand."
The lower half contains several flame-like forms painted in white with pink and orange accents, especially clustered toward the left and center, while smaller flames appear farther back to the right, suggesting fire dotted across a field. Loose linear marks and drips run vertically and diagonally through the image, and sand is strewn across the piece. In the lower left, circular looping lines appear both as large, concentric circles as well as three small coils arranged in a row. The horizon is indistinct, with smoky gray passages and dark vertical marks. Thick horizontal and diagonal brown bands sweep from left to right across the middle and right side, partially burying the scene.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.
Artwork Label Text
1982
Oil, acrylic paint, resin, straw, and paper on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1997
The thirteen numbered clumps of straw here represent the "mastersingers" (contestants in medieval German music competitions) memorialized in Richard Wagner’s opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (1868). Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Wagner's work and used the composer's ideas to support his ideal of German empire. The city of Nuremberg is also significant as a location of mass rallies glorifying National Socialism, and later as a site of war-crime trials in the 1940s.
Visual Description
A large canvas, about nine feet high by twelve feet wide, presents a heavily built-up surface of paint, straw, and paper, combining smeared gray-black paint with thick tangles of straw and torn material. Across the top, a lighter band of scraped, cloudy paint carries the handwritten title "Die Meistersinger" in dark script, centered near the upper edge. Below this, the surface becomes denser and darker, with layered strokes, drips, and smeared paint in charcoal, slate gray, and muddy brown. Bluish, shredded-looking paint masses hang near the upper left and upper middle.
Thirteen distinct straw clumps are embedded and piled across the painting, forming rough mounds and streaks that jut outward and cast small shadows, especially concentrated through the center and right half. Scattered among these straw clumps are small, square, yellow paper markers stenciled or printed with black numbers—legible examples include "1" near the upper right, "3" left of center, "5" lower left, "7" near the lower center, and "13" at the lower right. Under and between the straw, faint hints of red, white, and blue appear as obscured patches, while the bottom edge shows darker vertical drips and smeared paint.
A low museum stanchion has been placed on the floor around this piece.