Entering a golden courtyard through a hidden gate in a hôtel particulier in the Marais, you expect the noise and dust of Paris to still instantly. But in German artist Anselm Kiefer’s stately home in the French capital, you instead meet chaos. Assistants shriek as they lug giant boards across cobbles. Bricks totter, barbed wire sways, a motorised buggy whirrs. Sculptures of life-size, headless figures ballooning into white crinolines lend a surreal note. Through the din, a thin, greying, ascetic-looking man in black T-shirt and jeans carefully dabs lead on a large panel crusty with silver-blue impasto.

When I admire his fragmented women, Kiefer laughs dryly and inquires which one I identify with. Spidery graffiti on stone walls reveal that the martyr topped with a rack is the tortured St Catherine; the brick block-head belongs to Greek courtesan Phryne, who offered to rebuild Thebes; and a figure whose neck soars into a tower of charred books is Sappho but also, the artist adds, “a monument to all the unknown women poets”.