“The sirens of history: Anselm Kiefer’s Die Frauen der Antike,” Burlington Contemporary 12 (June 10, 2025).

In the late 1990s the German artist Anselm Kiefer (b.1945) began creating a series of sculptures of headless female figures on the grounds of his studio-estate ‘La Ribaute’ in Barjac, France. With their bodies cast from nineteenth-century bridal gowns, on which Kiefer placed symbolic objects, such as open books, movie cameras and piles of empty rolls of film, these sculptures evoke the systematic absence of women in history as well as a lost matriarchal past. Considering the work through the lens of Andreas Huyssen’s ‘memory art’ – works of art that foreground the dialectic of memory and forgetting, preservation and destruction, past and future – this article analyses how Kiefer’s sculptures figure the Homeric sirens as a critical counterpart to Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’. The discussion situates the work within the topographical context of La Ribaute and in relation to Kiefer’s longstanding engagement with women’s history and the mythical female figure, critically assessing the artist’s ambiguous relationship to feminist politics.

Read the article here.