Anselm Kiefer – The Seasons as an Allegory of Being

With his monumental work Autumn (2015/16), Anselm Kiefer (born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, lives and works in Croissy-Beaubourg near Paris) created an impressive pictorial condensation of his artistic worldview. The work measures 330 × 570 cm and consists of oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, wood, and lead on canvas—materials that Kiefer has understood for decades in his work as carriers of history, memory, and transformation. Autumn is part of a series of four monumental seasonal paintings, which also includes Spring, Summer, and Winter. This series of works, which in its materiality and symbolism forms a comprehensive allegory of the cycle of life, is now in important international private collections: Spring in a collection in the USA, Summer in France, Autumn in a German private collection, and Winter in a collection in Switzerland.

In Herbst, Kiefer condenses the motif of transience into an image of almost geological gravity. The surface, crisscrossed by dense layers of paint, lead, and organic material, bears the traces of a process that oscillates between painting and sculpture. Lead—that material so characteristic of Kiefer, symbol of both hardship and knowledge—appears here in the form of an open book in the upper part of the picture: an alchemical sign of transformation, memory, and insight. The book seems to float above the earthy landscape, a metaphor for the spiritual memory of nature, for the storage and passing of knowledge.

The landscape itself is one of austere beauty. In earthy tones, with gray-brown and ochre layers, Kiefer evokes a wounded but living earth. Branches and bodies of water structure the space, as if we were standing on the threshold between becoming and passing away. The view into the depths, which suggests the reflection of a pond or a body of water, is reminiscent of romantic landscape painting, but Kiefer's landscapes are never idyllic—they are ciphers of historical experience, parables for the cycle of destruction and rebirth.

In the context of the four seasonal images, autumn unfolds as a moment of transition. Spring shows the energy of new beginnings in brighter, upward-striving compositions, while summer celebrates the maturity and abundance of nature in its golden yellow and leaden surfaces. Winter, on the other hand, brings the cycle back to its quiet essence—to the stillness, reflection, and silence of matter. Autumn stands between these poles: an image of decline, but also of preparation for something new, a visual parable for transformation and cycle.

As in many of his works, Kiefer draws on mythological, literary, and natural philosophical references. For him, the seasons are not merely an observation of nature, but a poetic-metaphysical framework in which life and history overlap. The interplay of organic material and heavy matter reflects this idea: nature passes away, but it stores memory—just as Kiefer's paintings themselves are carriers of condensed time.

This idea is particularly evident in Autumn. The composition balances between melancholy and energy. The viewer looks at a landscape that remembers itself—at earth that writes and remains silent at the same time. The layering of paint and lead is not only a painterly gesture, but also an archaeological act: each layer is sediment, each trace an imprint of time.

This group of works belongs to Kiefer's late cycles, in which the artist makes nature the central vehicle for his philosophy of history. As in earlier series—such as the poppy fields, sunflowers, or sky soils—he works here with the dialectic of transience and permanence, of matter and spirit.

Autumn thus stands as a symbolic composition for Kiefer's overarching exploration of the finitude and renewal of all being. At the same time, the seasonal paintings mark a return to a contemplative view of nature, which for Kiefer is always also an exploration of history—with nature as an archive, a memory, and a parable of life itself.