until Sunday April 08 2018

The Met Breuer
T : +1 (212) 731 1675
945 Madison Avenue
New York
United States

Throughout his nearly 50-year career, the German artist Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) has never been afraid to wrestle with the past. In 1969, toward the end of his studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, he photographed himself in his father's Wehrmacht uniform, posing before historic monuments and Romantic seascapes in Europe with his arm extended in an illegal Nazi salute. Six years later, the artist selected 18 of these images for a photo-essay titled "Occupations," which met with widespread public outcry. Indeed, while Kiefer's artistic provocation ran counter to the intense process of postwar denazification, which included the destruction of offensive monuments and other symbols of Germany's infamous history, it was also a threat to a kind of collective amnesia that had overtaken West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.