Morgenthau Plan

Anselm Kiefer

2012 · Acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on inkjet prints mounted on canvas · Modern and Contemporary Art

Throughout his nearly fifty-year career, Kiefer has never been afraid to wrestle with history. His art—particularly in its worked and layered surfaces weathered by time and nature—is a visceral and poetic consideration of the past as a means to understand our collective present and, by implication, our future. This monumental work references a plan, devised by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau during World War II, to destroy Germany’s factories and turn the country into farmland after the Allied victory. Here, Kiefer imagined this pastoral outcome, with postwar Germany as a vast green country blooming with flowers.

Artist

Anselm Kiefer

Date

2012

Medium

Acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on inkjet prints mounted on canvas

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Denise and Andrew Saul Fund, 2013