A new exhibition highlights how German artist Anselm Kiefer was inspired by Vincent van Gogh

Washington Post

05-03-2025

AMSTERDAM — When he was just 17 years old, German artist Anselm Kiefer retraced the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh from the Netherlands through Belgium and into France.
Now, more than half a century later, the museum named for the Dutch master is joining forces for the first time with the neighboring Stedelijk modern and contemporary art museum in Amsterdam to stage a blockbuster exhibition of Kiefer's work, titled 'Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,' a reference to folk singer Pete Seeger's iconic pacifist anthem 'Where have all the flowers gone?'
Kiefer said he did not set out to make an exclusively anti-war exhibition, even though he closely follows world events including the conflict triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
'I don't say 'I do now an exhibition against the war.' This I don't do because this is a program; I'm not a programmatic artist,' he said. 'I do what is in me, what has to come out. And that is about all kinds of things, about the dead, about the war.'
Kiefer's sometimes bleak work, rooted in growing up in post-World War II Germany, might not immediately feel closely related to Van Gogh's vibrant and richly colored landscapes and vases of sunflowers.
But take a look at Kiefer's 2019 'The Crows,' alongside Van Gogh's 1890 'Wheatfield with Crows,' and the inspiration for the German's work jumps from the wall.
The brooding black birds aren't the only shared subjects that the two artists depict.
One of Van Gogh's most famous inspirations — sunflowers — also appear in Kiefer's works.
A huge dried sunflower hangs upside down in a glass cabinet, shedding its seeds on a book made from lead sheets, while 'Sol Invictus' shows a sunflower towering over the artist, who is lying in a yoga position known as the corpse pose.
The show also includes some of his sketches from his trip retracing Van Gogh's footsteps.
The 79-year-old German artist has a long relationship not just with Van Gogh, but also with the Stedelijk and Dutch collectors who bought some of his early works. The Stedelijk is showing early pieces such as a sculpture of an aeroplane resembling a B-1 bomber that is made of lead and called 'Journey to the end of the Night.'
The centerpiece of the Stedelijk is the installation for which the show is named. Built up around the museum's central staircase, it features paint-splattered clothes on hangers and flower petals spilling down paintings and into piles on the floor, among many things.
Kiefer said that he wrote one of the lines in the Seeger song, which was later also sung in German by Marlene Dietrich, on the wall as part of the installation: 'Who will ever learn?'
'This sentence makes the song philosophical,' he told reporters. 'You know, because we cannot understand. We cannot understand, for example, that today things happened in (19)33 in the world.'
Asked about the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party that surged in last month's German election , he said: 'It's horrible.'
The huge central work is made up of a long list of components including emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, golf leaf, sediment of electrolysis, dried flowers, straw, fabric and steel.
The straw features in many of Kiefer's paintings, giving them a complex surface that sometimes echoes Van Gogh's bold brush strokes.
'He's working like a sort of ... alchemist transforming material into an art,' curator Edwin Becker of the Van Gogh Museum told The Associated Press.
The exhibition opens March 7 and runs until June 9 at the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum.