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Anselm Kiefer is the prominent Neo-Expressionist, who insistently dealt with the German history of Fascism, which was repressed to recall during the post war era in Germany. This paper focuses on the investigation of Anselm Kiefer’s art in terms of Walter Benjamin’s three main philosophic concepts: ‘melancholy’, ‘allegory’ and ‘constellation’.
Benjamin was against the concept of history as lineal progress that was rooted in rationalism and Enlightenment, resulting to the illustration of history as a process towards catastrophe. Kiefer shared this view of history and expressed into his work by the aesthetic of ruins. But at the same time, this ‘melancholic’ perspective, regarding history as a catastrophic loss, also involves the aspiration for redemption. This dialectic aspect of Melancholy is implicit in Kiefer’s art works, inspired by Durer’s 〈Melancholia I〉 and Klee’s 〈Angelus Novus〉.
The way how Kiefer visualized his melancholic view of history relates to Benjamin’s concept of allegory. The term ‘allegory’, which is a mode of artistic expression as well as an attitude, was denigrated for a long time as inferior to symbol, until Benjamin focused on it and reestimated its potentiality. In allegory, the relationship between a signifier and the signified is not fixed but rather arbitrary, having a great potential of meaning. This operation works the same as of the ‘constellation’, which means the process of getting to the ‘idea’ by arranging and forming various empirical phenomenon into the overall structure of particular aspects.
Kiefer’s works, as sedimentations of various fragments, can be referred to layered and fragmented complexity, which constitute the allegorical image of history as ruin. Those heterogeneous elements reverberate with cross-reference. Overlapping fields of forces are not easily assimilated to coherent interpretation and remain in permanent fluctuation. The create endless chains of semiosis, whose unifying signification is constantly deferred. Such allegorical mode is the only way to represent inevitably defective history and the dialectic melancholic gaze in it.

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