Latest news with #AnselmKiefer
Yomiuri Shimbun
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Anselm Kiefer Solo Exhibition Held in Kyoto's Nijo Castle; Post-WWII German Master Presents ‘Solaris'
Why has humanity continuously repeated tragedies? This question came to mind while viewing a solo exhibition of artworks by German artist Anselm Kiefer at Nijo Castle in Kyoto. The exhibition, which ended Sunday at the World Heritage site, featured selected works of the 80-year-old master, who represents a post-World War II artists' circle in the country. Kiefer is known for massive works that touch on themes related to mythology, religion and science. The artist, born in 1945, overlayed Japanese and Western histories and senses of beauty, and posed this deep question in a world where war has continued unabated. This was Kiefer's first large-scale exhibition in Japan in about 30 years. The items on display comprised 33 artworks, mainly newer ones, including paintings and first work that greeted visitors was an about 9-meter-tall lead sculpture titled 'Ra,' which was placed outdoors. As if resisting the unescapable force of gravity, a pallet with wings extending widely demonstrates the power of imagination, making visitors wonder if the work may be able to take flight. Most of the artworks were displayed inside dimly lit buildings and illuminated only by natural light. The castle is famous for its kinpeki-shohekiga — screen or wall paintings mainly using gold and blue colors — which was invented by the Kano school of artists. The traditional space suited Kiefer's works painted using gold colors, fascinating visitors. Entering the spacious Daidokoro area of the castle's Ninomaru-goten Palace, visitors saw a painting symbolizing the exhibition. The work is about 4 meters high and about 10 meters wide and titled 'For Octavio Paz.' The large-scale painting harshly depicts scorched earth immediately after an atomic bombing. Soft light depicted in the work accentuates the fury of a person at the center of the scene. In contrast, works in the Okiyodokoro area showed a marvelous expanding scene that looks like a golden wheat field. The installation was titled 'Morgenthau Plan.' The installation related to a plan that the United States devised during World War II to make Germany a country without advanced industries after the war. The work overlayed images of rich natural environments, loss in the war and the postwar occupation. The overlaid images depicted Germany's complicated postwar history. Kiefer was born in a German city that had been devastated and has led a modern art movement with his harsh painting style. His techniques include using sand, lead and straw in layers on a canvas and even burning them. What has always stuck with Kiefer is his willingness to face up to the dark history of his country and confront the hardships of mankind. The subhead of the exhibition was 'Solaris,' which means 'related to the sun.' The works looked at the world 80 years after the war and radiated the strength to illuminate the next generation.
Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Van Gogh/Kiefer review— everything about this exhibition is wrong
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
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Only one living artist can measure up to Van Gogh
Is it hubris for an artist to invite comparison with Vincent van Gogh? That's what Anselm Kiefer does in this vainglorious but compelling exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, a larger version of which, marking the German's 80th birthday, split opinion in Amsterdam earlier this year. If anyone has the cojones to take on Van Gogh, it's Kiefer. For decades, his desolate yet grand, chest-thumping compositions – each one almost audibly proclaiming its alpha-male status – have lamented martial catastrophes. Born in the Black Forest during the final months of the Second World War, he has often, in his work, interrogated his homeland's Nazi past. But, saturated with allusions to philosophy and poetry, his art can seem pretentious and self-regarding – so, it would be satisfying to report that, at the RA, and across the road at White Cube Mason's Yard (where a concurrent exhibition of related works is being staged), he comes a cropper. Yes, there's a batty, arbitrary quality to this enterprise, which acknowledges, from the off, that Kiefer's 'monumental' artworks and the 'smaller canvases' of Van Gogh 'may not appear to have much in common'. It doesn't help that two of the 11 exhibits by the Dutchman (most of which are grouped together in the central gallery, while eight 'monsters' by Kiefer stalk larger rooms on either side) are drawings from the early 1880s – a period of his career that, in the catalogue, Kiefer dismisses as 'of no importance'. And, yes, Kiefer's intense paintings look as if they've been dragged through a hedge. Inspired by Van Gogh's paintings of wheat fields, several incorporate actual stalks of straw, which Kiefer scorches and gilds to surprisingly wondrous effect, as if recording the flash of an explosion. One, a homage to the swirling constellations of Van Gogh's Starry Night (1889), is so insanely tufty and large that it only just fits on the end wall of the exhibition's final room. Glimpsed through a doorway from afar, it seems to bulge and writhe, like something cosmic and universal. Is it a painting – or a cyclone? But if you can get past this honorary academician's mighty ego and accept that this is 'The Kiefer Show', then, I predict, you'll find the exhibition perversely thrilling. Unlike Van Gogh's vistas of southern France, which usually seem to thrum with life-affirming energy, but here appear as dainty and polite as a plate of crustless cucumber sandwiches, Kiefer's charred, clogged landscapes depicting ashen, post-apocalyptic wastelands express war's depravity. Swarming black splodges representing baleful crows in a couple of paintings in the first gallery are as scary as stealth bombers. In the final room, the Grim Reaper makes a cameo in the form of a scythe attached to a picture's churning surface. With conflicts raging across Europe and the Middle East, could art feel more urgent? The German even takes on his Dutch hero's most famous motif, by reimagining sunflowers as bedraggled and drooping, sorrowful presences, black rather than yellow, and denuded of petals. A sculpture of one stem overshadowing a pile of lead books is installed in the last gallery. With the stooped silhouette of a broken shower head, it has a cranky, miserable quality. Yet, shedding golden seeds, it also promises new life. People often want to take Kiefer down, perhaps because he seems so full of himself, and Britons don't care much for ponderous self-importance. Some of his hammier canvases, such as Nevermore (2014), misfire; at White Cube, a room of paintings depicting gaggles of crestfallen sunflowers, like lumbering stick men with shaggy black globs for heads, is inadvertently comical (although the larger basement gallery, devoted to Kiefer's wheat fields, is glorious). But the good paintings, such as The Last Load (Das letzte Fuder) (2019), with their surging energy, and sense of blasted otherworldliness? They're riveting – and formidable. Visit if you dare.
Times
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for June 2025
Below is a round-up of the best art our critics have seen in recent months across the UK. From Renaissance chalk sketches to rotting apples, miniatures and Picasso prints, it's a varied list. Which exhibitions have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments. Resistance — Steve McQueen leads us on a voyage of discovery Turner Contemporary, Margate From the militant suffrage movement in 1903 to the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003, when it matters, we march. This Turner Contemporary exhibition, Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest, curated by the artist and film director Steve McQueen, is a fascinating, deeply researched, if low-key look at a century of protest in Britain through photography. To Jun 1, ND Read our review Edvard Munch Portraits — the Scream painter shows his social side National Portrait Gallery, London Edvard Munch's forensic powers are on full display in the first British exhibition to focus solely on his portraits. Known for his 'subject' paintings, which cast friends and family as the dramatis personae in tableaux that communicate a universal emotion (The Scream being the most famous), he was also a prolific portraitist. To Jun 15, ND Anselm Kiefer: Early Works — an artist under the shadow of the Nazis Ashmolean, Oxford It's one hell of a moment for an exhibition of the early works of Anselm Kiefer. It was probably conceived as celebratory — the German artist's 80th birthday lands on March 8; this show at the Ashmolean opens just before an unprecedented presentation across two Amsterdam museums, the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk. But with the rise of the AfD in Germany, and a shift to the right across Europe, a return to these works, created between 1969 and 1982, has suddenly become urgent. To Jun 15, ND COURTESY NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 — an unmissable National Gallery hit National Gallery The show focuses on four painters — Duccio, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — to reveal them as pioneers, and uses textiles and finely wrought items such as carved ivories and richly decorated reliquaries to show how these four artists were nurtured by this European centre for trade. It is a stunner. London, to Jun 22, ND Andy Warhol: Portrait of America — depicting a dark side to the USA MK Gallery, Milton Keynes This exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, put together from the Artist Rooms collection, goes back to basics in an elegant primer showing how Andy Warhol — uniquely and incisively — held up a mirror to postwar consumerist America. It takes a chronological, rather than thematic, approach. Each room represents a decade, from his days as a commercial artist in the 1950s to the 1980s (he died in 1987). To Jun 29, ND Victor Hugo's The Cheerful Castle, 1847, on show at the Royal Academy PARIS MUSÉES/MAISONS DE VICTOR HUGO PARIS-GUERNESEY Astonishing Things: Drawings of Victor Hugo — strange and marvellous Royal Academy, London Though many of us won't actually have read either of the 19th-century writer Victor Hugo's most famous novels (Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), there's a chance that we've all seen at least one of them, either on film or on stage. Very few will be familiar with the body of work now on display — his strange and marvellous drawings. To Jun 29, ND Read our review Bob Dylan — the musician is a good painter Halcyon Gallery, London There will be people who pooh-pooh yet another exhibition of paintings by Bob Dylan as just another rock star's dabblings. But over the past 20 years (he started exhibiting in 2007 at the Chemnitz art museum in Germany) he has developed into a rather good, interesting painter. To Jul 6, ND Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern is a fascinating homage to an Eighties icon Tate Modern, London Through artworks by his friends and peers (including portraits by Lucian Freud), garments (or 'Looks') from his archive, films, postcards, sketches, letters, magazines and what feels like hundreds of photographs, we follow the journey of a suburban Melbourne lad. It's a story that runs from his arrival in London in 1980, fresh out of fashion college, through his entry to the scene, his impact on clubland, his work with the choreographer Michael Clark and his shift into performance. To Aug 31, ND Hiroshige — an entrancing trip to 19th-century Japan British Museum, London Utagawa Hiroshige is among the very most popular — not to mention prolific — artists in Japan. Yet to many of us he may be familiar only through the work of his most famous fan in the West. Vincent van Gogh was a passionate admirer, which is why some of the images that now go on display at the British Museum may start ringing bells. To Sep 7, Rachel Campbell-Johnston Giuseppe Penone — breathe in the scent of nature Serpentine Gallery, London The idea of breath as sculpture has always interested Penone, and though he's never quite managed to make that work, he symbolises it here with a set of lungs formed from golden branches. Not every work here speaks clearly, but something about the show as a whole evokes an inexplicable wish to linger, basking in the restfulness that permeates the galleries. And then you realise that, just beyond the doors, there's a whole 275 acres of nature. Time to get into it. To Sep 7, ND Read our review Do Ho Suh — an exquisite meditation on the perfect home Tate Modern, London At Tate Modern, the great Korean artist Do Ho Suh has fashioned hundreds from colour-coded fabric according to the places he's inhabited, and installed them on four transparent panels modelled on his present London abode. The effect is at once playful and haunting, a ghostly meeting of places and time zones that poses questions about the meaning of home. To Oct 19, Chloe Ashby Read our review Ancient India: Living Traditions — gods and rituals come to life British Museum, London Considering the sheer size of the country, you might expect an exhibition entitled Ancient India: Living Traditions to be a sprawling mess. However, it's surprisingly compact, perhaps because if they were to go big, we'd have to go home well before we got to the end. May 22 to Oct 19, Nancy Durrant Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur — a mischievous romp Wallace Collection, London Grayson Perry does not love the Wallace Collection. The decadence, the grandeur, the conspicuous expense trigger his snobbery. It was a sticking point when he was invited to create an exhibition of new work responding to the collection. So Perry conjured someone to love the Wallace for him: Shirley Smith, a fictional artist, inspired by Madge Gill, a real 'outsider artist'' who exhibited at the Wallace during the Second World War — a woman who suffered traumatic events but found solace (and acclaim) through art. To Oct 26, ND Read our review Liliane Lijn — first major show for the 85-year-old Tate St Ives Now 85, and having lived in London since 1966, it seems bizarre that Liliane Lijn's Arise Alive exhibition at Tate St Ives is the New York-born artist's first major solo survey show in a UK museum. It's not as if she's an unknown. In the late 1950s she knocked about with ageing surrealists Max Ernst and André Breton in Paris, a rare, prominent and much younger woman in that rather bitchy scene (some of her intricate, dreamy Sky Scrolls drawings from this period indicate a fascination with that surrealist staple, the unconscious). Right now, one of her kinetic pieces has its own room in the Electric Dreams exhibition at Tate Modern. This, though, is all her. To Nov 2, ND Seeing Each Other — Freud, Bacon, Emin and Kahlo all join the party Pallant House, Chichester Looking is what artists do. But at what? At each other, endlessly, on the evidence of this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which looks back over 125 years at the ways that artists working in Britain have portrayed each other. To Nov 2, Nancy Durrant Read our review JMW Turner's Upnor Castle, Kent,1831-2 THE WHITWORTH, THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER Turner: In Light and Shade — a gorgeous display of astonishing scenes Whitworth, Manchester John Ruskin was a funny old stick, but when it came to his hero JMW Turner, whose 250th birthday falls this year, he really knew what he was talking about. 'He paints in colour, but he thinks in light and shade,' he wrote in 1843, and in this exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester, which focuses on Turner's prints — in particular the Liber Studiorum series, which, despite the gallery's significant Turner holdings, hasn't been shown here in full since 1922 — this is borne out gloriously. To Nov 2, ND Read our review Making Egypt — much more than mummies Young V&A, London For its older or younger visitors, the V&A's remit is not simply the history of the past but also its interaction with the design of the present. So in Making Egypt, alongside old fabrics are new dresses; alongside ancient stone carvings are modern ones made with the same techniques. As much space is given for the practice sketches of an ancient scribe — working out how to depict owls and cats and hieroglyphs — as for the finished result. To Nov 2, Tom Whipple Read our review Cartier — dazzled by diamonds in a five-star show V&A, London Curators have kept it simple for this dazzling show, just a lot of exquisite objects of outstanding beauty, quality and ingenuity alongside occasional drawings from the Cartier archives to illustrate their development, all mostly spotlit against black. To Nov 12, ND Pirates — the bloody truth behind Captain Pugwash
New European
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
The flowering of Anselm Kiefer
Now, more than 60 years on, two exhibitions in Amsterdam and one in Oxford are showing the work of Anselm Kiefer, covering his early, mature and most recent output. Arguably the most significant living artist, Kiefer's work is constantly arresting and alarming, while often consoling and unashamedly beautiful. Kiefer calls history an artist's material, 'just as clay is to a sculptor and paint is to a painter'. At 18, a serious-minded young German from Donaueschingen, a town in the Black Forest near the Swiss border, set out across France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He had been born in 1945, the year those lands were beginning to emerge from the nightmare of Nazi occupation. The first recipient of a new travel scholarship for young artists, the young Anselm Kiefer may have travelled light, but he carried with him what he would often refer to in later life as the weight of history. The Amsterdam exhibitions take their title from the 1956 song by Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The written text – 'Where have all the soldiers gone?'; 'Where have all the graves gone?' – sprawls across the works that surround the top of the great staircase in the Stedelijk Museum. The five floor-to-ceiling pieces that tower over the visitor are on a monumental scale, typical of Kiefer's latest and greatest works. Images from Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum Images from Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum Images from Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum Technically these are canvases, thick with verdigris paint and made sculptural with applied objects, stuck to the canvases like giant collages. Ranks of spattered, degraded uniforms hang from rusting hangers, and some of them would only fit a child. Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk, introduced the artist and his work, with its 'weight of the past and uncertainties of the future', two days before Kiefer's 80th birthday. 'When the world order seems to be unstable it's important to think about other unstable world orders,' said Wolfs. 'It's important to use history to explain what's happening today.' What's happening today wasn't happening when the exhibitions were in the making – not all of it, anyway. But Kiefer's practice is rooted in the trauma of a childhood in postwar Germany. The burden of his father, in particular – an officer in the Wehrmacht – was always present in his art. Threat, decay and destruction burn from the vast canvases, but glowing in the embers is always the promise of regeneration. The young Kiefer's European journey followed in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh. There are obvious synergies between the two artists, notably in the paradox of the sunflower: at its most glorious and spectacular the sun-seeking flower head is on the point of corruption and collapse. Kiefer depicts the sunflowers in paint and has also stuck withered flowers to the canvases. Dull, dark seeds will fall to the ground from bowed and blackened heads – but each enfolds a drop of precious oil, and carries the promise of a new crop of breathtaking beauty, mobile, radiant and strong. The flowers of the joint exhibitions' title, however, are interpreted by the artist as roses. Pink and crimson petals are scattered on the floor around the Stedelijk installation, some with just the ghost of a fragrance, but all drained of their former voluptuousness, as they crackle under the feet of heedless gallery-goers. Curators are realistic about human nature. Petals will disappear in pockets and bags, to be replaced by patient gallery staff. Everyone wants a piece of Anselm Kiefer. 'Only these are not Anselm Kiefer,' says Wolfs. After his youthful Van Gogh pilgrimage, Kiefer confronted his country's – and his own family's – past by posing in his father's old uniform, giving the same stiff-armed salute that has become newly and distastefully fashionable among certain ultra right wing Americans. Some of the resulting images can be seen in a third Kiefer exhibition, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. These acts of contrition – atoning for the sins of the fathers – seem to liberate Kiefer, not from his share of Germany's collective memory, but from its negative force. From now on, his images will defer to nature's positive energy. 'My personal history did not start in the Third Reich,' he says, 'it stretches back much further… I don't view history in a linear way: it repeats itself and we find the same structures and patterns in other cultures, too, such as the Incas. History seems to me instead to be something that widens the further back we go.' Like his sunflowers, in Kiefer's early work lie the seeds of what is to come over the ensuing six decades. Certain leitmotifs will recur over and over. Meanwhile the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam juxtaposes Kiefer's works with those of their own man, and this emphasises the fact that Kiefer seldom strays far from landscape in its broadest sense. Drawings of rural scenes that date from the 18-year-old's expedition demonstrate that, notwithstanding the sheer scale and abundance of his later works, in some ways he is a landscape artist at heart. For decades, in works that are loaded with meaning and symbolism, the sky is always up there, the land down there, and the natural order goes undisturbed and unimproved upon. In 1992, having worked for 20 years in Odenwald, latterly in a former brickworks, Kiefer left Germany and set up a colossal new studio in a disused silk factory in Barjac, Provence. Here he creates installations on an industrial scale, but also cultivates sunflowers using seed brought back from Japan during two years of extensive travels across Asia – during which, he says, he did no painting. The experience also led to a rethink: 'I needed a change for my work, and it is easier to change if you go away,' he told Das Kunstmagazin in 2001. 'The horizon has disappeared and the materials are clearer.' Kiefer has no time for abstract art, he writes in the catalogue for the Amsterdam shows. 'I find completely abstract art, for example by Wassily Kandinsky, boring and vacuous. I prefer abstract art that retains a hint of representation, like those paintings by Kandinsky in which the transition to abstraction is still discernible, where the struggle is still visible.' There is no doubt that the later artist appreciates a good struggle, especially if it is natural forces that are at work. In Hemlock Cup (2019), the life has been bleached out of fertile land by the toxic plant that gives German its own version of 'poisoned chalice' – Schierlingsbecher or beaker of hemlock. Farmland under attack is a common motif. The birds that wheel over Die Krähen (The Crows, 2024) resemble a squadron of fighter jets, their outstretched talons like landing gear. You settle into the luxurious gold leaf in the skyline of Under the Lime Tree on the Heath (2019) before noticing a sticky red patch, like a telltale bloodstain at a crime scene. Sometimes the land gets its own back. Also in 2019, the greedy farmer in The Last Load, based, says Kiefer, on a folk tale, collapses under the weight of the grain, having wrested too much from the earth. Kiefer's connection to Van Gogh stretches from the soil to the sky. His O Stalks of the Night, with its reference to a Paul Celan poem and its satellites of gold and indigo, echoes Van Gogh's starry nights. Kiefer's own Starry Night is another undisguised tribute, with constellations of gilded straw and moons of chaff in a sky of aquamarine. But rarely in this natural world is there a recognisable being. A rare exception is the snake that winds through the fuselage of a small jet plane, a creature that can shed one skin and start a new life, while man is represented solely by the memoir of an adventurer. Lead has become a powerfully suggestive material for Kiefer. Having already discovered its potential and alchemic symbolism, he bought lead sheets discarded during the restoration of Cologne Cathedral. Journey to the End of the Night was first shown in 1990 and continues to make a stomach-turning impact, occupying an entire room. Its title is that of a controversial novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who held antisemitic and fascist views. The sense of a crash landing and the absence of humanity make this a chilling object. Unlike the natural world, it has no built-in regeneration. For that, the viewer looks to the fields and skies recreated on the walls. When Kiefer asks the question, 'Where have all the flowers gone?', he answers it himself, in his art. The flowers are destroyed, like so much life, by warfare. And although we have learned that, we have not learned to keep the peace. Anselm Kiefer – Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is at the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, until June 9. Versions of the exhibitions are at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, June 28 to October 26 and at White Cube, Mason's Yard, London, June 25 to August 16. Anselm Kiefer – Early Works is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until June 15
