Throughout his nearly fifty-year career, Kiefer has never been afraid to wrestle with history. His art—particularly in its worked and layered surfaces weathered by time and nature—is a visceral and poetic consideration of the past as a means to understand our collective present and, by implication, our future. His monumental series of works, both in sculpture and paint, Morgenthau Plan reference a plan, devised by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau during World War II, to destroy Germany’s factories and turn the country into farmland after the Allied victory. In these works, Kiefer imagined this pastoral outcome, with postwar Germany as a vast green country blooming with flowers.