In another article, Jones called Kiefer's exhibition at the Royal Academy "an exciting roller coaster ride of beauty, horror and history".
So I decided to go and see it while my wife did some Christmas shopping in Fortnum and Masons, on the other side of the street.
Well, Kiefer's pictures certainly are dramatic. Most of them are enormous - one is more than 12 ft high and 25 ft wide - and some of them make use of materials like lead, ash, cracked clay and crumbling earth.
The engineer in me kept wondering how they managed to transport such huge objects that in some cases must be incredibly fragile and in other cases, incredibly heavy. Apparently, the Royal Academy allowed for an extended period to set up the exhibition.
The other question that bugs me is who would buy such enormous works of art? You'd need to have an extraordinary scale home to accommodate them.
Kiefer, by the way, has two really extraordinary scale "studios".
One of them is a 200 acre compound in the south of France. When he moved there in 1992 he needed 70 trucks to move the contents of his studio. Now, apparently, he'd need a lot more. A review in the Guardian by Michael Prodger says:
"There are Kew Gardens-size greenhouses that are used as immense vitrines containing a 12-foot lead battleship washed up on a choppy sea of broken concrete or a full-scale lead aeroplane sprouting sunflowers. Elsewhere there is a cathedral-like barn with six house-size paintings in it and an underground temple of Karnak, where the columns were made by digging out the earth from around the foundations of the buildings above. There are tunnels and subterranean hospital wards, a lead-lined room full of water and a series of pavilions, each bigger than a squash court, with doors that open like an altarpiece triptych to reveal a single work inside. Metaphysics and megalomania are mixed on a daunting scale, and the effect is overwhelming."
Kiefer now spends most of his time in his other "studio" - a 36,000 square meter former warehouse of a department store on the outskirts of Paris.
So what about Kiefer himself? He was born in Germany at the end of World War II and is fixated on history, particularly the horrors of the Nazi era. He managed to get into trouble in Germany by using the Nazi salute (which is illegal) to try and encourage Germans to address rather than suppress their recent past.
He's also fascinated by German legends, books, alchemy and the work of a poet, Paul Celan.
His paintings are incredibly powerful, partly because of their huge scale and partly because of the dramatic way in which they are "painted" - as noted, he "paints" with all sorts of odd materials. I particularly liked Winter Landscape and a series of views inside a wooden hut, as in this picture. I also liked his sheets of lead with diamonds embedded in them.
He also does lots of other non-painting stuff.
I liked his tanks of water containing rusting models of submarines, which were in the entrance courtyard of the Royal Academy. As Jonathan Jones writes in his review, they look like parodies of Damien Hirst's shark.
I really didn't "get" Kiefer's huge books. You can't actually turn the pages because they're so massive and so delicate - they make use of plaster. And the images I could see didn't do anything for me.
Overall, I think I should have done some research before going to the exhibition, so I had a better idea what I was looking at.
UPDATE: I hadn't realised that there was a TV documentary about Kiefer on BBC1 last Tuesday. Here's a link to it on iPlayer - it's only got a 4 week shelf life.
I came away from the documentary thinking Kiefer is quite extraordinary - the sort of artist I would like to be. His interest in history is really about time and death and rebirth - how the atoms that make up everything in the world are constantly recycled. One of the reasons he needs such big studios is that he never throws anything away - he says he's waiting until he finds a use for it.
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