Anselm Kiefer is the artist of ruins. Of memory. Of war. Starting with the one he wages with his gigantic works. “While I paint, my pictures undergo destruction, repair, transmutation. I massacre them, I beat them up… My mind is at war. War is within me,” he confided to Vincenzo Trione in Prologo celeste – Nell’atelier di Anselm Kiefer. But now war is everywhere; from anguished memory, it then became an all-purpose to metaphor and has now returned to being raw news. The rubble, once the backdrop to his German childhood, has become the landscape of Gaza, of Ukrainian neighborhoods, and the destruction seems not to be stopping. For this reason, speaking with “the greatest living artist,” as he was described by the retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts some dozen years ago— or, at the very least, one of the greatest—has particular resonance today.
The pretext for an audience with the painter-philosopher was the opening of his exhibition at Milan’s Palazzo Reale, devoted to the great female alchemists of history. It opened on February 7, in the same hall where Pablo Picasso once exhibited his Guernica. Other times, similar folly.
You were born amidst the rubble of postwar Germany. Today, people are once again dying under bombardment in Europe and along the shores of the Mediterranean. Pope Francis spoke of a “third world war fought piecemeal.” Has the Old Continent learned nothing from its mistakes? “I was not born after the war, but just before its end, on March 8, 1945. That makes a difference. The night before I came into the world my parents’ house was bombed: we weren’t there, but if I had been delivered twenty-four hours earlier, we would probably all have died. As for today, the European quagmire is still fertile, and from it bubbles of senselessness continue to surface.”
In 1953 Picasso exhibited in the Sala delle Cariatidi—newly restored after the bombings—the painting that came to symbolize the shocking absurdity of war. Today, you are exhibiting your own work there on the regenerative and redemptive power of female alchemists. Is this continuity or rupture? “Without doubt continuity. It expresses my love for women who, yesterday as today, do not fully have the right to be recognized for their work. Take Sappho: a great poetess whom we know of through quotations made by men. Or Maria the Jewess, Mary Anne Atwood, or Rebecca Vaughan, who either did not sign their works, or used a male pseudonym, or at most the initials of their real name. The time has come to give them back what they deserve. To put them in the front row, like the revolutionaries in the Jacobin clubs without whom the French Revolution would not have existed.”
You yourself are a kind of alchemist. You set fire to your paintings, bury them, and let them be transformed by the elements: is yours a collaboration between human being and nature, or something else? “I call on nature to lend a hand,” he says in German, waiting for an assistant to translate from an otherwise impeccable English—like the French he displayed in the legendary nine lectures at the Collège de France in 2010. In his world-atelier at Croissy, half an hour’s drive from Paris, despite the snow outside, Kiefer joins our call wearing a black T-shirt. The same one he wears in Anselm, Wim Wenders’s magnificent documentary, where he is seen cycling through the hangars of his studio—about 36,000 square meters in all—almost a small city fashioned in the image his mind (“It is exactly as big as it needs to be for the dogs to think they are outdoors,” as writer Christoph Ransmayr puts it). “You can’t do things alone. Big projects need big help. More than an assistant, though, I would say that nature is my idol. I was away for almost a month, for example, and when I returned, I found many surprises on some of the works I had left. It’s not easy to surprise me, but it still happens. Otherwise, I’d get bored.”
Alchemy has often been dismissed as pseudoscience or superstition. You instead treat it as a profound form of knowledge. Don’t you think this message could be misconstrued in the wake of the pandemic, which saw trust in science waver? “I see no contradictions. Isaac Newton, for instance, was both a scientist and an alchemist. It’s simply a kind of science with more intuitive elements. Once I did a work on ‘string theory,’ and three important physicists who came to see it confirmed that it accurately described the concept! Even when mathematicians discover new formulas, they define them as beautiful before they find them interesting. These are dimensions that complement one another.”
In a world still dominated by power politics—Venezuela being the latest case in point—you seem to locate the possibility of salvation in female figures erased from history. Are you, in a far subtler way than my crude summary, saying that there is too much testosterone going around? “To tell the truth, I’m always in favor of testosterone! (he laughs, for the first and only time) but it has to be governed by laws and by intellect. Women have a stronger connection to the earth. They are superior to those men who suffer from an inferiority complex and do everything they can to keep them from emerging.”
Going back to your Germany, what impression does the unprecedented and massive rearmament program make on you? “On this point I am truly torn. On the one hand, I think we will have to spend much, much more money on rearmament—as Europe—because we are directly threatened. In fact, if you consider cyberattacks, we are already at war with Russia. On the other hand, however, I am also very frightened by the idea of Germany once again becoming a military power.” Because, he adds, the Germans have been the most powerful—but also the most horrific.
In this regard, it is worth recalling that between 1968 and 1969 the young Kiefer caused a scandal with a cycle (a term the Master prefers to “series”—and he also dislikes “informal,” when applied to his non-classically figurative style, and “site-specific”) of photographs titled Occupations, in which, wearing his father’s Wehrmacht uniform, he performed the Nazi salute in various European cities, Rome included. He was, of course, branded a fascist. He replied, however, that first, he wanted to counteract the oblivion surrounding that nefarious period, and yet could not know what he himself would have been in 1930 or 1939; and second, that although hurt by such accusations—already voiced when he had twisted the knife in the wound of German history by resurrecting Parsifal and other bloody legends glorified by the Reich—he did not call himself antifascist, because that would have been an insult to the true antifascists of the time.
His works are never pacifist in any simple sense: they show violence, they do not remove it. Whether in the “petrified fighter jets” shown in Berlin during the Second Gulf War, or in the naval battles and submarines installed in the Doge’s Palace in Venice.
How do you live with the contradiction of creating beautiful works from morally repulsive material? “This is the artist’s inevitable condemnation: to see horrible things and draw beauty from them. Nature is what you see. Art, instead, grasps the truth that the eye alone cannot grasp. The artist’s task is not to find a consolatory beauty, but to bear witness to the intolerable.”
You have worked on the historical sense of guilt (Schuld) of your country. What impression does it make on you to witness the destruction of Gaza by Israel? “Gaza has become a pile of ruins. It is certainly a horrific contradiction and a very difficult situation,” comes the telegraphic reply of the unequalled portrayer of rubble. In a particularly moving passage of Wenders’ film, Kiefer tries to imagine how hard it must have been for the poet Paul Celan to write in German, given that his parents were killed in the camps. Celan then goes to visit Martin Heidegger in his mountain retreat, hoping to extract from him a word of apology for his Nazi past. All in vain—an omission that, on screen, prompts the painter to comment: “After all, we all remained silent.” A silence which, in obviously different circumstances, now echoes in relation to the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Palestinian civilian victims.
In an interview, some time ago, you said that “humanity has something wrong in its mental construction and that, if man were an airplane, he would always crash to the ground” because he is badly designed. Do you still think this is true? “Whoever built our world was wrong; they must have been a little crazy. Just look at nature alone: on the one hand, we have a series of animals that evolve to protect themselves as best as possible from being preyed upon. On the other, there are those that develop characteristics to prey better: is there a more idiotic contradiction? I’ve been called a pessimist for statements like these, but I find that category completely useless. As I see it, a pessimist is someone who knows exactly what should not happen, while an optimist is someone who knows just as exactly how things should be. Well, I don’t know at all how the world should be. I try to do something through art, I keep the hope that it might be of some use, without knowing anything about the final design.”
How much time has passed since, at just seventeen, Kiefer won his high school’s prize for a series (or a cycle) of sketches in the manner of Van Gogh. The young nerd of those days has become an unquestioned authority. Through studies as demanding as they are idiosyncratic, he has formed a highly personal idea of the world: “I read a lot of philosophy, scientific journals, and newspapers, but only on paper. The smartphone is an absolute impoverishment!” In the world of before, when his wife went out, he only knew that, at some point, she would return, whereas today he could know where she is at any given moment.
Technology, he says, has killed waiting—one of the most important ingredients for any kind of inspiration. As a child, among the ruins, his only toys were a few chipped bricks. Years ago, in the hilly region of the Odenwald, two hundred kilometers from where he was born, he bought an entire disused factory. His are not simple studios, but multifunctional organisms that serve as laboratory, workshop, refinery, library, and storage spaces where entire worlds are piled up. Kiefer, Trione reports, compares Croissy to CERN: he too conducts research into the beginning of the universe.
What can frighten someone who, thinking back to the shattered homeland of ’45, states: “For me it is the most edifying thing there is. I can’t take my eyes off it. It’s so wonderful because it is the beginning, where everything is possible.” Elsewhere he is even more explicit: “For me, ruins are the most beautiful thing that exist.” I rather agree with the idea that the world is “a tragedy that goes on. Art has the task of showing it.” I ask him, by way of conclusion, what is the thing that unsettles him most today: “Before, there were the two blocs, East and West. Even though at certain moments we came close to nuclear confrontation, we lived under the illusion of a world order. Today that illusion has shattered. Complexity has blown apart its boundaries: a crisis begins and, just when it seems to be on the way to resolution, another starts. Like the tunnels dug by a mole that connect everything to everything else, without anyone on the surface realizing it.” I point out that another great German had used the image of the mole as a revolutionary midwife of a new order. He, who has read Capital, especially appreciated the writer who described, like no one before him, the functioning of the internal combustion engine.
Too bad for the Marxists who came afterwards, he comments, they were definitely not up to the task.
Kiefer titled his torrential and highly conceptual French lectures Art Will Survive Its Ruins. Drawing inspiration from the intarsias of Lorenzo Lotto, he named his alchemical procedures Putrefactio, Dissolutio, a dissolution that occurs through cauterization and burning (Verbrennen), lignification (Verholzen), immersion (Versenken), or burial in sand (Versanden). Last comes Coagulatio. It is no joke to hold together a lead boat, a sunflower glazed with plaster and resin, pigments, debris, ash, straw, iron oxide, and linseed oil, just some of the materials in the powerful geological stratifications on which the artist performs continuous core drillings. The result is to be considered “not an end but a beginning,” which nevertheless “conceals the end enclosed within it.” The thirty-eight large canvases of The Alchemists, in dialogue with what remains of the Caryatids, are only the latest manifestation of this.
This interview was originally published in Italian in Il Venerdì (Repubblica) on January 22, 2026.
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