“Under the lime tree / On the heather, / Where we had shared a place of rest, / Still you may find there, / Lovely together, / Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.” So go the first lines of “Under Der linden,” a song written by the medieval German lyric poet Walther von der Vogelweide. Anselm Kiefer, deeply influenced by German history, and an artist who’s said, “I live in language,” has produced a new series of monumental paintings inspired by Walther and his “Under Der linden.” The pictures were painted in Barjac, France, where Kiefer was struck by the glowing fields—the cycle of beauty and decay, fertility and oblivion, the seed and the scythe. —L.J.