Other items include a replica of the gate of Buchenwald concentration camp with its inscription "Jedem das Seine" (To each his own). Ironically the gate was designed by Franz Erlich, a student of the Bauhaus, which the Nazis detested. This conjunction is said to be "subversive" though it is not quite clear how. The gate and an anti-Semitic poster are the only overt references to the Holocaust, surely one of the seminal episodes in all German history. Goethe meanwhile is represented by no fewer than 10 different objects, while there is nothing on Beethoven.
The best of the artworks are Tilman Riemenschneider's Four Evangelists. Riemenschneider (c.1460-1531) is hardly ever seen on these shores but his facility as a carver, most particularly of limewood, mark him out as Dürer's equivalent in sculpture and a vital figure in the northern transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance. These four figures, 1490-92, are remarkable not just in their rendering of drapery, which has the angularity of manuscript illustrations, but their depiction of emotion. Each composition shows the saint seated with his gospel but their body positions are different and each head looks a different way. Together, they are a paragon in which Riemenschneider shows that sculpture can match the variety of expression and plasticity of painting. Here too is a composite image of Catholic Germany just 25 years before Luther intervened.
If the ambition of the exhibition ultimately exceeds its reach it has, appropriately, a forebear that carries a German name: the Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. The visitor doesn't need the historical overview to enjoy it as such — with the proviso that some of the objects are considerably more curious than others.
One of the contemporary artists represented in the exhibition is Anselm Kiefer, who is the subject of a major show at the Royal Academy (until December 14). Kiefer is the living German artist par excellence because his country's past — both ancient and modern — has always been the motive force behind his paintings and sculptures. He is an artist who works on a vast scale and who fills his work with repeated motifs: there are lead boats and eagles, huge books and fields of wheat, Norse myth and Egyptian gods, embedded objects from straw to diamonds, and philosophy from alchemy to Kant.
While such a personal iconography is almost impossible to unpick, what it transmits unequivocally — and often in literal form — is the weight of German history, and Kiefer's work can be seen as an attempt to get it out of his system. He was born two months before VE Day and so had no experience of the war itself. What he did experience, though, was the national sense of denial that followed. Even though he has lived in France for many years there remains a tangible connection to German Blut und Boden — it is the tilth from which grows everything he does. Kiefer is an unremittingly visceral artist but an undeniably powerful one too, one of the very best at work today.
The best of the artworks are Tilman Riemenschneider's Four Evangelists. Riemenschneider (c.1460-1531) is hardly ever seen on these shores but his facility as a carver, most particularly of limewood, mark him out as Dürer's equivalent in sculpture and a vital figure in the northern transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance. These four figures, 1490-92, are remarkable not just in their rendering of drapery, which has the angularity of manuscript illustrations, but their depiction of emotion. Each composition shows the saint seated with his gospel but their body positions are different and each head looks a different way. Together, they are a paragon in which Riemenschneider shows that sculpture can match the variety of expression and plasticity of painting. Here too is a composite image of Catholic Germany just 25 years before Luther intervened.
If the ambition of the exhibition ultimately exceeds its reach it has, appropriately, a forebear that carries a German name: the Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. The visitor doesn't need the historical overview to enjoy it as such — with the proviso that some of the objects are considerably more curious than others.
One of the contemporary artists represented in the exhibition is Anselm Kiefer, who is the subject of a major show at the Royal Academy (until December 14). Kiefer is the living German artist par excellence because his country's past — both ancient and modern — has always been the motive force behind his paintings and sculptures. He is an artist who works on a vast scale and who fills his work with repeated motifs: there are lead boats and eagles, huge books and fields of wheat, Norse myth and Egyptian gods, embedded objects from straw to diamonds, and philosophy from alchemy to Kant.
While such a personal iconography is almost impossible to unpick, what it transmits unequivocally — and often in literal form — is the weight of German history, and Kiefer's work can be seen as an attempt to get it out of his system. He was born two months before VE Day and so had no experience of the war itself. What he did experience, though, was the national sense of denial that followed. Even though he has lived in France for many years there remains a tangible connection to German Blut und Boden — it is the tilth from which grows everything he does. Kiefer is an unremittingly visceral artist but an undeniably powerful one too, one of the very best at work today.
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