At SLAM, Anselm Kiefer’s Material Transformations

When viewing works of art, we often forget that each piece’s foundation lies in the making. How was it crafted? Using what materials? What did it require of the artist to make this? How did it get where it is right now? How many people did it take to move and install the work? But these questions feel unavoidable when engaging with Anselm Kiefer’s work. His paintings are vast, 12×36 feet, and heavy—one weighs 1.3 tons. Their dense layering of material—tar, melted lead, steel—along with embedded poems, myths, history, literature and names, creates an atmosphere of explosive ingenuity. And with so many worlds of information compressed into each piece, it is nearly impossible not to be mesmerized.

What you are seeing is the result of an artist relentlessly at work. There needs to be space, lots of space around his paintings to frame both the layers of material and the layers of meaning. The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) has achieved this so majestically that it stuns in “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea,” which presents the artist’s work in a way that allows it to be experienced fully, in a venue and setting that feel perfectly matched. The museum was built in 1904 for the World’s Fair, then called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which attracted 20 million visitors and featured exhibits from 43 U.S. states and 62 countries. Known at the time as the Palace of Fine Arts, the building still feels appropriately palatial today.

Curated by the museum’s director, Min Jung Kim, the exhibition makes use of these expansive spaces with minimal labels, natural light, large windows and no stanchions in front of the works, as requested by Kiefer, to give the viewer an immersive, spacious and deeply personal experience. There is room to stand back or move in close and discover surprising details in the materials in the works displayed. You are not just seeing them two-dimensionally but three-dimensionally, in layers, as if they were alive. The show includes 40 works dating from the 1970s to the present, among them 20 works made in the last five years and five monumental, site-specific paintings.

According to Kim, the idea for the exhibition emerged from a conversation she and Kiefer had while standing on a balcony overlooking the grand Sculpture Hall at the museum’s entrance. Because Kiefer grew up along the Rhine and St. Louis sits at the confluence of two great rivers, he wanted to make work centered on moving bodies of water. The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers traverse nearly the entire continental United States, stretching a combined 2,340 miles, the two longest rivers in the U.S. These vast tributaries form an apt conceptual foundation for the exhibition, as does the venue itself, given SLAM’s longstanding commitment to 20th-century German art. The museum holds the largest collection of Max Beckmann paintings, along with two earlier large-scale works by Kiefer.

Born in Germany in 1945 at the end of WWII, Kiefer grew up amid the rubble and remnants of bombed landscapes and annihilated lives. Like the alchemists of old—Fulcanelli, Trismegistus, Paracelsus—he takes metal and organic materials and transmutes them into works of profound gravity. In the painting For Paul Celan, his favorite work in the exhibition, Kiefer used shellac, lead, clay, steel, chalk, charcoal, emulsion, oil and acrylic to create a surface that peels like the crusted bark of a tree, with hidden recesses glinting beneath. Inscribed within it are the opening lines of Celan’s 1963 unpublished poem: “Conversations with tree bark / peel yourself come peel me / from my word.” Celan had been forced into labor camps and both of his parents died in an internment camp in Romania; at 49, he took his own life. He has long been a vital poetic presence for Kiefer.

For the monumental Sculpture Hall, Kiefer created five site-specific paintings. In these works he used emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and the sediment of electrolysis on canvas. He told me he achieved the distinctive green color by placing copper on one side of a large pot of salt water and lead on the other, allowing the metals to oxidize. The copper settles at the bottom while the residue produces a luminous green. Across these massive surfaces, gold leaf shimmers subtly. The five paintings are dense with references and meaning. For Gregory Corso, titled after the Beat poet, is where the exhibition takes its name, drawn from the lines “unafraid / of becoming / the sea.”

In another grand, sunlit gallery with floor-to-ceiling windows, large collages of woodcuts on paper, with acrylic and shellac mounted on canvas, command the space. Maginot, measuring 129 15/16 in. x 12 ft. 5 5/8 in., refers to the Maginot Line, the fortifications in France built as a defense against German invasion that ultimately proved an expensive failure. Also in this gallery is an ensemble of six sculptures in bronze and plaster, each honoring the spirit of women throughout history. One stately sculpture depicts Sappho, the Greek poet who wrote about passion between women. In place of her head rises a towering stack of lead books.

Kiefer is a deeply thoughtful artist, continually reading and researching. “Becoming the Sea,” which left me spellbound, stands as a testament to his long and intense commitment to making. Now 80, he shows no sign of slowing down. The exhibition at SLAM is, in a word, spectacular.

“Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea” runs through Jan. 25, 2026, at the Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. Admission is always free.

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