The impressive American reception of the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer is largely based on his ability to evoke powerful images of Germany's recent past. That quality has been raised to the status of singularity by art critics in major newspapers and journals from coast to coast whose commentaries accompanied Kiefer's comprehensive retrospective from Chicago and Philadelphia to Los Angeles and New York in 1987-89. His swift rise to the heights of international stardom appeared as miraculous as Athena's birth from the head of Zeus. According to these reviewers, Kiefer has burst upon the the art world with surprising force because of his aesthetic challenge to what they view as Germany's amnesia toward the legacy of the Nazi past. The critics have taken great pains to decipher his oversize paintings as emanations of a genius or at least of an artistic hero who operates on a higher plane than the standard fare of postmodernist art. In the exhibition catalog, an impressive and thorough introduction to all aspects of Kiefer's oeuvre, Mark Rosenthal, then curator of twentieth-century art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and co-organizer of the show, presents the German painter in Olympian isolation, as an artistic loner who has taken on the Nazi past almost single-handedly. The critics' preoccupation with Kiefer's singularity tells as much about their sense of artistic relevance as it does about Kiefer himself. Moreover, it highlights the state of exhaustion in artistic paradigms of what art should be as much as it reveals the neglect of what has been going on in the arts east of Paris. While German painters are rarely considered to be harbingers of aesthetic currents, their innovative potential is most often recognized when it appears in expressionist guise. In the case of Anselm Kiefer this expectation provides a key for the sudden transformation of professional curiosity into outright enthusiasm-a transformation that led the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, for example, to give his highly complimentary review of the retrospective in Art in America the title Our Kiefer, a reflection on Francis Ford Coppola's controversial naming of the American version of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's movie Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland, Our Hitler. While Schjeldahl reiterates with particular pleasure that Kiefer's assimilation and refinement of Jackson Pollock's manner of combining spatial illusion and material literalness makes him an American-