On our way back to the airport in Paris, Jeanne and I managed to squeeze in a 15-minute stop at Anselm Kiefer’s Nymphäum at Thaddaeus Ropac in Pantin. Fifteen minutes is nowhere near enough for Anselm Kiefer. But it was enough to remind me why he remains one of the most compelling painters alive. I have loved Kiefer’s work ever since seeing his monumental exhibition at the Doge’s Palace in Venice a few years ago. Alongside Gerhard Richter and the recently deceased Georg Baselitz, he belongs to that remarkable generation of post-war German artists who spent decades wrestling with memory, history, mythology and the ruins of the twentieth century. In Nymphäum, Kiefer turns to the nymphs of Greek mythology. Yet these are not the graceful figures of classical painting. They emerge only partially from forests, water, darkness and layers of paint. They appear and disappear at the same time. What struck me most is how the exhibition is also a conversation with other artists across centuries. One painting echoes Edvard Munch’s The Scream, although Kiefer lets the scream dissolve into vegetation and geological time rather than existential panic. Other works recall Gustav Klimt, where illuminated city windows shimmer like mosaics behind foliage. The exhibition text also points to resonances with Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings, and even Aby Warburg’s famous studies of the “Ninfa” figure wandering through Western art. This has always been one of Kiefer’s great strengths. His paintings never stand alone. They feel like archaeological sites where myths, literature, philosophy, religion, art history and personal memory have all been buried together and are slowly re-emerging through the surface. The result is strangely beautiful. The nymphs in these paintings are neither fully present nor fully absent. They survive as traces, memories and transformations — much like culture itself.

06/14/2026 15:04:02