Van Gogh/Kiefer review— everything about this exhibition is wrong

Times

7 days ago

Some people were meant to come together — Lennon and McCartney, Fonteyn and Nureyev, Ant and Dec. But nowhere in God's swirling universe was it ever a good idea to pair Anselm Kiefer with Vincent van Gogh. Yet that, absurdly, is what the Royal Academy has chosen to attempt in a show that jars like fingernails scratching a blackboard.
A modest handful of Van Gogh paintings and drawings take up a corner of the event. But the vast majority of the space, the papal portion, is devoted to the huge, sprawling, doomy responses of Kiefer. On and on they go, ever bigger and less delicate. An elephant is trying to piggyback a mouse, with ludicrous results.
We'll get on to Kiefer and his bombastic hugeness later in this lament, but first we need to shed a communal tear for poor old Vincent: the neon sign saying 'roll up, roll up' that gets attached to everything these days by anyone seeking attention. If you've been to Arles in the south of France, where Van Gogh cut off his ear during his heartbreaking mental collapse, you will know what I mean. Arles today is a collection of Van Gogh memorabilia masquerading as a town.
• Why the Van Gogh Museum deliberately slashed visitor numbers
More dismaying still is the preposterous belief by artistic peacocks that they have a special insight into Van Gogh's intentions — that they can see things through his eyes. We saw it most ridiculously in Julian Schnabel's 2018 film At Eternity's Gate, where the supremely arrogant Schnabel cast a 62-year-old Willem Dafoe as the 37-year-old Van Gogh and found himself so out of sync with reality that the sketchbook he employed to frame the story turned out to be a forgery.
My point is that Van Gogh's extraordinary popularity has not only made him the go-to artist on the ker-ching front, but that the powerful Van Gogh magnet distorts the direction and values of the iron filings it attracts.
Which brings us to Kiefer. In this preposterous two-hander, the Wagnerian painter of charred wheatfields that are only a tiny bit smaller than real wheatfields is presenting himself as an heir to the humble Dutch genius who helps us to see the beauty of small things. The two of them, Kiefer says, have a special affinity. To prove it, a smattering of Van Gogh's art is shown alongside a Panzer division of the colossal, bellicose, gnarled, dark and doomy slabs of Teutonic angst that have poured out of Kiefer.
The unlikely union goes back to when Kiefer was 18 and spent a few weeks following in Van Gogh's footsteps from the Netherlands to Belgium to France. He recorded this gap year adventure in a diary and some imitative drawings in which he tried to view the landscape with the endearing clumsiness that he admired in Van Gogh.
Kiefer's student fascination with Van Gogh is the only occasion here where he shows any signs of being genuinely responsive or sensitive. Student adulation out of the way, the rest of the journey has him ignoring Van Gogh's artistic lessons in a manner that becomes increasingly absurd. Van Gogh's madness is but a thimbleful of unease compared with the gigantic, trembly, obliterating megalomania of Kiefer.
• The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for June 2025
Where it can, the show tries to compare a Van Gogh source with a Kiefer reply. Van Gogh painted the small field he could see from his asylum window, so Kiefer gives us his trademark mega-fields where the barrenness of the modern soul is evoked with yard after yard of blackened stubble. Van Gogh painted sunflowers, so Kiefer, who now lives in France, where he owns and runs an empire of creative spaces, crushes up entire wastelands of horticulture and glues them to a canvas covered in gold leaf. I think he was after the glistening of the setting sun, but the results feel as rich and kitsch as gold taps in a Monaco bathroom.
There's even a sculpture of a single sunflower rising from a collection of lead books, where, alas, the drooping bloom reminds you instantly of an outdoor shower. This time it is the sunflower's seeds that are covered in showy gold.
In key instances, the comparison between the two artists has to remain conceptual since the Van Gogh original that triggered a Kiefer response is not available. We see it most notably in The Starry Night, a gigantic Kiefer sky of swirling straw inspired by Van Gogh's Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which cannot be lent.
Van Gogh's ecstatic view of a swirling cosmos filling the sky above Saint-Rémy is probably his most famous painting. It captures, so perfectly, so memorably, an elated moment of looking up at the stars on a clear Provençal night and feeling the intoxication of the cosmos.
But where Starry Night is tiny, Kiefer's version takes up an entire Academy wall. I am not sure I have seen a bigger picture squeezing itself into an art gallery. Up, up, up it looms, a colossal sprawl of wood, wire, shellac and straw in which Van Gogh's ecstatic stars have been replaced by what feels like the shattered remains of an African village hit by a tornado.
• Read more art reviews, guides and interviews
Everything here is wrong: the scale, the texture, the atmosphere, the immodesty. An image that in Van Gogh's gentle hands captured the excitement of a fabulous night sky has been turned, by Kiefer, into a grim, effortful slab of doom.
In the catalogue, Kiefer, without a shred of self-awareness, explains his responses by bringing up string theory and the ideas of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. You don't need to see through Van Gogh's eyes to know, immediately and fully, what a grave misreading that must be.
Kiefer/Van Gogh is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, to Oct 26
What exhibitions have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments below and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews