"Art is difficult, it is not entertainment!" - Anselm Kiefer, German painter and sculptor.
Biography from: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württembürg, Germany, and raised near the east bank of the Rhine in the region of the Black Forest.
Kiefer was named after the nineteenth-century classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and planned from childhood to become an artist.
After studies at the university in Freiburg and the academy in Karlsruhe, he studied informally in the early 1970s with the artist Joseph Beuys on occasional visits to Düsseldorf.
Anselm Kiefer | Die fruchtbare Halbmond / La Mezzaluna fertile | Sammlung Essl Museum