The German artist Anselm Kiefer’s studio complex, which occupies seventeen acres of countryside near the town of Barjac, in the South of France, has to be seen to be believed. If a Bond villain also happened to be a painter-sculptor, he would operate from a place like this. A huge steel door slides slowly open, admitting the visitor to a world as strange and self-enclosed as Dr No’s Island of Death. Kieferland resembles a rural idyll under occupation. At almost every turn, a hilly and typically Provencal landscape of pastures, orchards, olive groves and woodland is interrupted by a series of large structures resembling jerry-built roadside shrines, each of which contains an installation of the artist’s work, or work-in-progress. Some of these ad hoc temples contain Kiefer’s huge, battered paintings. These resemble seascapes or depictions of the constellations of the night sky, to which various objects – pieces of glass, scraps of straw – have been collaged. Others house sculptural ensembles, such as a huge book-case filled with unopenable lead volumes, or a bunch of a hundred sunflowers, dried and dipped in white plaster and suspended upside down, like some gnomic tribute to the memory of Vincent Van Gogh.

That is just the start of it. At the bottom of one of the estate’s several hills, the artist has created an outdoor sculpture park roughly the size of two football pitches. Here, a small army of his assistants, aided by cranes and other such heavy industrial machinery, are hard at work erecting a group of tottering latterday towers of Babel from heavy concrete breezeblocks. Elsewhere, a network of underground caves has been excavated, which the artist uses as a series of sculpture studios. These are connected by tunnels, to make transportation of materials possible and to allow Kiefer to travel...

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