Anselm Kiefer: Early Works review An artist under the shadow of the Nazis . (This link opens in a new tab).

By Nancy Durrant

It’s one hell of a moment for an exhibition of the early works of Anselm Kiefer. It was probably conceived as celebratory — the German artist’s 80th birthday lands on March 8; this show at the Ashmolean opens just before an unprecedented presentation across two Amsterdam museums, the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk.

But with the rise of the AfD in Germany, and a shift to the right across Europe, a return to these works, created between 1969 and 1982, has suddenly become urgent. Then, already rocking the specs but still in possession of a head of floppy hair — as seen in his quietly explosive Heroic Symbols, a self-portrait from 1970 in which he wears his father’s Wehrmacht overcoat and raises his arm in a banned salute — Kiefer was part of the first generation of German artists to confront the country’s horrific recent history head-on.

This isn’t the Kiefer we most often see now, working in semi-abstraction on a monumental scale, filling pristine commercial galleries and big institutions with vast installations.

Here are mostly domestic scale paintings, prints and watercolours — many of the latter rather lovely — decisively figurative, but exploring the subject that still obsesses him today: the far-reaching infiltration of German culture and psychology by Nazism, and how an artist might work towards countering that.