‘Van Gogh’s paintings are a feast despite everything. One believes in him. He defies all adversities; he does the impossible; he does not give up. His path – from what he set out to achieve to what he did – is visible in almost all his paintings. Every one of his forceful brushstrokes is an eruption, a manifestation of defiance’, affirms Anselm Kiefer, but the same might apply to the artist himself.
The Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, collaborating for the first time on a common project, present Anselm Kiefer – Sag mir die Blumen sind (Where have all the flowers gone?), a landmark exhibition dedicated to the influence that Vincent van Gogh’s work has exerted and still exerts on the German artist. The title is taken from an anti-war song, written in 1955 by the American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger and popularised by Marlene Dietrich, who performed it in German in 1962.
The exhibition can be viewed as a “diptych” across the two museums, bringing together about twenty-five paintings, twelve early drawings and three films by Kiefer, in addition to eight paintings and four drawings by Van Gogh. On one part, the Van Gogh Museum’s presentation demonstrates the vast degree to which Vincent’s work has fascinated Kiefer. ‘Kiefer’s recent pieces – displayed here for the first time – show how Van Gogh continues to influence his work today’, says Emilie Gordenker, the Van Gogh Museum’s director. A stone’s throw away, the exhibition at the Stedelijk showcases Kiefer’s central themes, but also underlines the Dutch museum’s key role in garnering recognition for his work. This long relationship ‘will be expressed in the two special spatial installations’ designed by Kiefer for the occasion, says Rein Wolfs, the Stedelijk Museum’s director, and it is ‘truly remarkable to see these installations amid several of his iconic works from the 1980s. In this way, Kiefer looks back at the past and towards the future.
Born on 8 March 1945 in the town of Donaueschingen in the Black Forest, as a child, Anselm Kiefer played in the rubble of post-war Germany. He made his debut on art scene of his homeland in the late sixties, becoming one of the first artists of his generation to question his country’s identity and collective memory, as well as the mythology and atrocities of the Third Reich. Throughout his lengthy artistic career, history, poetry, philosophy, myth, religion and science continually converge. Today, Kiefer is celebrating his eightieth birthday in Amsterdam in a two-part exhibition that reveals Vincent van Gogh’s legacy in his oeuvre for the first time.
Van Gogh Museum. In the footsteps of Van Gogh
In 1963, at the age of eighteen, the young Anselm received a grant that enabled him to travel ‘in the footsteps of Van Gogh’. The pilgrimage started in The Netherlands, through Belgium, Paris, Arles and Saint-Rémy in the south of France. He kept a diary and made three hundred sketches, ‘The journey was like an initiation for me’, recalled Kiefer in his words for the catalogue (taken from a lecture he gave at the Tate Britain in 2019). These drawings ‘were clearly influenced by Vincent van Gogh, an influence that continues today’. But, looking back, he remembered that it was not so much the emotional aspect or the unhappy life of the Dutch artist that fascinated him: ‘What impressed me was the rational structure, the confident construction of his paintings, in a life that was progressively slipping out of his control’.
Entering the Van Gogh Museum’s Kurokawa wing, which houses the exhibition, is an entirely new experience, as we are accustomed to seeing dozens of paintings and drawings that progressively unfurl in a narration. Now, Kiefer’s works, almost eight meters long, greet the stunned visitor. ‘The biggest challenge was to envisage the effect of selecting the Kiefer works in our rooms. We have never dealt with such huge monumental paintings’, Edwin Becker, chief curator of exhibitions, tells me. The result is perfect: the Kurokawa wing is elliptical and ‘the works on the curved walls, divided in three or four parts, are bending slightly with the curved walls, so they embrace you in a way, so you feel surrounded by the power of these paintings’, comments Becker. In front of these huge paintings, we feel transported into the images.
Looking at Kiefer’s The Crows (Die Krähen), inspired by Van Gogh’s famous Wheatfield with Crows, we want to step into it and walk down that desolate road leading to nowhere. There are no bollards.
Crows are often seen as harbingers of death, and this belief persists in the collective imagination for Van Gogh’s iconic painting (below), which widespread credence insists on linking to his suicide. With this completely golden sky and the blurred, ethereal birds, Kiefer presents them to us as guides between heaven and earth. The messy straw – dry, dead, tangible, together with the radiant spirituality of the sky, create a forceful and unexpected contrast. And yet, somehow, also a sense of peace.
Speaking of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (here exhibited on the opposite wall), Kiefer described being struck by the ‘strange reversal of the perspective. The vanishing lines do not converge at the horizon. The central path does not end at the horizon. It terminates earlier and leads nowhere. The vanishing point is on the bottom edge of the painting […] The universe has been up-ended’. And so, Kiefer wondered, ‘what does he depict? Not the wheatfield, not the romantic memory of a specific summer’s day. The painting is almost abstract. What remains is the memory of something specific that has almost completely disappeared.
Some treasures of the Dutch master, such as the two small Sunflowers Gone to Seed, little more than a painted sketch from life (21 x 24 cm, on show), have taken root in Kiefer’s work over the years and recur in pictures. One of them is Sol Invictus (1995), a vast faded sunflower which towers over a body lying on the ground, naked, apparently dead. The scene is one of solitude, out of this world, colourless. This is not just an unknown body… It is a ‘self-portrait’ in the Hatha Yoga position called savasana, a meditation pose intended to make the subject aware of being part of the cycle of nature, recognising a desire for fusion or union with the cosmos. Sunflower seeds rain down on the artist, a regenerative force.
Anselm Kiefer, Sol Invictus, 1995, collection of the artist. Photo © M. Guzzoni/Artlyst 2025
Vincent’s universe is echoed in another powerful painting, which Kiefer entitles Eros und Thanatos (Eros and Thanatos), Freud’s two fundamental drives inspired by Greek mythology (love and death): the life drive, which implies the principle of survival, and the death drive, which manifests itself in self-destructive tendencies. The artist places us in front of a scythe, which appears in the centre of the picture, not painted but fundamental – a tool for cutting ripe wheat, but also a personification of death. For Van Gogh, the theme of The Reaper was a subject he reflected on at great length, and to which he returned repeatedly in many painted versions. In his canvases, golden yellow predominates in a sea of wheat, with the little reaper, a figurine that blends into the whole. In a letter of 1889 to his brother Theo, Vincent wrote: ‘Phew – the reaper is finished, I think it will be one that you’ll place in your home – it’s an image of death as the great book of nature speaks about it but what I sought is the “almost smiling”’.
What did Van Gogh mean by the “almost smiling”? The answer can be found in a passage by Théophile Silvestre who, in Eugène Delacroix. Documents nouveaux (1864), wrote: ‘Thus died, almost smiling, on 13 August eighteen hundred and sixty-three, Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix, a painter of high breeding’. Van Gogh said artists ‘perpetuate themselves passing on the torch, Delacroix to the Impressionists, &c’.
He was right. Here is an extraordinarily moving work De sterrennacht, which Kiefer dedicates to Van Gogh, inspired by his famous The Starry Night (1889). The title is in Dutch this time, in tribute to the painter. Never exhibited before, we are faced with a monumental sculptural painting, hyper-textured and stratified, made of oil, acrylic, straw, gold leaves, wire and sediments of electrolysis. It is more than eight meters long, and almost five meters high (above, image 1). We approach it to see the finer details, the layers, the transformations, but then we immediately move back in an attempt to attune to this landscape where Kiefer’s cosmic theme takes a new direction. In his own words, after having described Vincent’s starry night, Saul Bellow comes to his mind: ‘All we can do is follow the lead of Saul Bellow’s stressed-out hero Moses E. Herzog, and “hitch our agony to a star”’. Kiefer’s thought is not far from the lines of Van Gogh who, in 1888, inspired by Walt Whitman, wrote ‘just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star’.
There are numerous similarities between the two painters, including a passion for reading. Van Gogh was an avid reader; in his letters, he quoted hundreds of authors, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Shakespeare, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and the Goncourt brothers, among others. Books not only inspired him continuously but often entered his work, becoming the main protagonists of some of his paintings. As an artist who was always on the move, his library was stored in his head. Kiefer’s library, instead, is constantly at hand, on the shelves of his Croissy studio. It is ‘vast, encyclopaedic, a veritable Alexandria embracing every subject that has caught his philosophical imagination […] Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Georg Trakl, Martin Heidegger, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gershom Scholem, Robert Fludd, latterly and playfully James Joyce…’, writes Simon Schama in his contribution to the catalogue. Nonetheless, literary references are like daily bread for both artists, and for Kiefer, many are inscribed in the work itself, in italics, and become an integral part of it.
Stedelijk Museum. Between past and future
Climbing the historic staircase of the Stedelijk Museum, we become enveloped in a spectacular painterly installation, Sag mir die Blumen sind (Where have all the flowers gone?), which also gives the exhibition its title. Kiefer takes up the words of Seeger’s anti-war song, and inscribes them in the work, thus connecting all its elements with a thin thread of writing. The upper part of these vast canvases is populated by human shapes that stand out against a gold-coloured background. They are inspired by figures of women at work, captured by Kiefer while travelling in India, or old photographs of psychiatric patients by the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.
(Top Photo)
Walking up and down, we are confronted with an array of uniforms encrusted with thick layers of paint and clay. Dried rose petals dot this great “fresco” of the human condition, la condition humaine, and are scattered on the floor, reminding us of the circle of life and death again. The uniforms do not have a precise connotation, thus they are universal, in various sizes, even that of a child. ‘Of course’, comments Becker, ‘it is as well a hint to the concentration camps of the Second World War, but also, in general, uniforms make human beings of all ages “uniform, universal”, so you are losing your individual identity…’. The madness of war, the destiny of man, merges with the beauty of art.
As his starting point, Kiefer used the Heraclitean proposition, “panta rhei” (everything flows). The face of the Greek philosopher and other pre-Socratic philosophers is lightly sketched, barely visible between one uniform and another. Walking back and forth, these uniforms become real presences; the rose petals move, the installation comes alive, and it dialogues with us. And we cannot help but think of the tragedies of our time, of the rubble that fills our minds. The artist himself had the idea of working in this large space, which is not a room you just enter and exit. It contains within it the notion of passage, as do our lives.
Anselm Kiefer has a strong and long-standing relationship with the Netherlands, where, in the 1970s, his work gained its earliest recognition from collectors and museums such as the Stedelijk. ‘The taboos Kiefer experienced in Germany were unknown in The Netherlands’, writes Antje von Graevenitz in her essay “Welcoming Anselm Kiefer in the Netherlands”. And this in a country where the memory of the German occupation and the bombings ‘remained extremely raw’. The first warm welcome dates back to 1973, when Kiefer was invited to a group exhibition of Dutch and German artists to the Goethe-Institut/Provisorium. Then came the first collectors, who played a crucial role in disseminating his art, even in subsequent exhibitions. In the early 1980s, the Stedelijk acquired two fundamental works, Innenraum (1981) and Märkischer Sand (1982). In 1986, the then-director Wim Beeren dedicated a solo exhibition to him, Anselm Kiefer. Bilder 1986-1980, and edited the catalogue. Other vital acquisitions followed, enriching the museum’s collection.
Today, the artist returns here to celebrate his 80th birthday with a second new installation that seems to be a compression of time. Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder (the title is taken from Goethe’s Faust ) is like a “monument” to cultural memory and to an artistic practice that has long accompanied his work: that of photography, starting in 1968, using his father’s camera, the first witness and source of inspiration. These are thousands of photographs that, from the very high ceiling of the room, uncoil along the hundreds of lead ribbons to which they have been applied – from the famous photo with the Nazi salute in his father’s uniform, the giant towers he built at La Ribaute, the landscapes, the desolate architecture, the performances of the 60s and 80s . . . Many are illegible, they seem to have vanished into memory. On the ground are large reels: empty, they have unwound time. As Daniel Arasse, who has dedicated years of study to the German artist, wrote, ‘Kiefer allows us to contemplate culture in its raw state – a culture that, complex and elaborate as it is, nevertheless recalls primitive, primordial truths from a time before history’.
The exhibition also features three films, including the splendid, unknown film Noch ist Polen nicht verloren… (Poland is not yet lost… 1989), which Kiefer directed in Warsaw shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain. His words, along with the images of that population moving through the station of the Polish capital, are revealing: ‘Art takes material from life… and the traces of life shine through the eventual work of art. At the same time, the distance to life is essential. That’s the actual content of art. Life leaves its traces… just as the battles between life and art… leave scars. The deeper the scars… the more interesting they are for the work.’
Van Gogh would have fully approved.
Anselm Kiefer – Sag mir wo die Blumen sind Van Gogh Museum – Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 7 March – 9 June 2025
Kiefer/Van Gogh will go on display at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 28 June – 26 October 2025
Further reading:
The exhibition catalogue, Anselm Kiefer. Where Have All the Flowers Gone includes contributions by Anselm Kiefer, Simon Schama and Antije von Graevenitz; on Kiefer and photography, see In the Beginning. Anselm Kiefer & Photography, with essays by Heiner Bastian, Sébastien Delot, Jean de Loisy and Christian Weikop (Thames & Hudson, 2024); Anselm Kiefer, Daniel Arasse (Thames & Hudson, 2015).