Your Golden Hair, Margarete

Anselm Kiefer

1980 · Watercolor, gouache, and acrylic on paper · Modern and Contemporary Art

This work’s title comes from "Death Fugue" by the Romanian-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (1920–1970). Widely read in postwar Germany, the poem is set in a concentration camp and narrated by the Jewish inmates, who suffer under the camp’s blue-eyed commandant. Singing "your golden hair, Margarete / your ashen hair, Shulamith," they contrast German womanhood, personified by Margarete, and Jewish womanhood (Shulamith was King Solomon’s dark-haired beloved in the Song of Songs). Here, as in most of Kiefer’s more than thirty works devoted to Margarete, the German heroine is represented by only a symbol of her "golden hair"—sheaves of wheat in the countryside.

Artist

Anselm Kiefer

Date

1980

Medium

Watercolor, gouache, and acrylic on paper

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Gift of Cynthia Hazen Polsky, in memory of her father, Joseph H. Hazen, 2000