NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Nearly eight years ago I wrote a review leading off with the question, “What is it about Anselm Kiefer’s art that inhibits unfettered admiration?”
The article was about a set of big, brawny Kiefers from the collection of Andrew and Christine Hall of Fairfield, Connecticut, installed in two large galleries of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. While these sprawling works spoke to the depth and freedom of Kiefer’s imagination, I felt the same “abrading kernel of doubt” about them as I did with much of his art, which is often afflicted with bombast and “a queasily ingratiating antiquarianism.”
