Anselm Kiefer Wonders if We'll Ever Learn

New York Times

07-03-2025

Anselm Kiefer's new installation seems to envelop the grand staircase of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Paintings reach from floor to ceiling in colors of oxidized copper and gold leaf. Army uniforms stiffened with splattered paint hang at eye level. Dried flower petals tumble down the canvases onto the floor. A self-portrait of Kiefer as a young man lies at the base of one panel, with a tree growing out of his chest.
This installation is the title work of Kiefer's monumental solo exhibition, which comprises about 25 paintings, 13 drawings and three films by Kiefer, from 1973 to the present, in addition to eight van Gogh works. 'Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,' or 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,' sprawls across two of Amsterdam's largest modern art museums, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk.
The show, which opens on Friday — the day after Kiefer's 80th birthday — and runs through June 9, is the result of ambitious collaboration between the adjacent institutions in the heart of the city. Mounting the exhibit at two museums made sense on a sheer physical level, too, because of the size of Kiefer's vision: Nearly every work takes up a wall or a room.
What links the two parts of this 'diptych,' as the curator Edwin Becker calls the dual exhibition, is Kiefer's antiwar sentiment, which is expressed in subtle and overt ways.
The title and the new piece at the center of the Stedelijk refer to the 1955 protest anthem 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,' a folk song by Pete Seeger (although Kiefer uses the lyrics from the German version popularized by Marlene Dietrich in the early 1960s).
'The most important sentence in this song is 'When will we ever learn,'' Kiefer said in an interview. 'The rest of the song is a little bit kitschy, but this is a deeper thing. We don't know why things repeat all the time. We have a situation now like in 1933 in Germany, it's horrible.'
Kiefer, born in Donaueschingen, Germany at the tail end of World War II, has long grappled with the legacy of fascism, political violence and cultural memory.
'War has been a running theme throughout his whole body of work,' said Leontine Coelewij, a curator of the exhibition and a curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk. 'Already his first works had to deal with the Second World War, but since then it has taken many different forms.'
In 1969, when Kiefer was a 24-year-old art student, he traveled across Europe to make a performance piece, 'Occupations,' posing at historic sites. He dressed in hippie gowns and business suits and held his arm out in a Nazi salute. 'Heroic Symbols,' his resulting photo series, 'was really a provocation to the people in Germany who did not want to talk about the war,' Coelewij said.
As a young artist, when such subjects were still taboo in Germany, Kiefer felt exiled from his home country, in terms of his artwork. He found an audience at the Stedelijk, which also acquired his work from the 1980s.
The first work in the current show is his 1981 painting 'Innerraum' (Interior), a view of the skylit chamber of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the decaying empty room where Adolf Hitler once met with his members of his military to map out his destruction and seizure of Europe.
Kiefer's works 'are very much about politics, but maybe not specific politics,' Coelewij said. She added, 'We can all think of situations in the world where we can see the absurdity of war, and ask: Why does it still happen?'
The current exhibition didn't originate as an antiwar show; it was conceived by Emilie Gordenker shortly after she became director of the Van Gogh Museum in 2020. The previous year, Kiefer had given a lecture at Tate Britain museum in London about his relationship with van Gogh, and then made a series of huge landscape paintings inspired by van Gogh's work.
Kiefer said that van Gogh has been an influence since he was about 13 years old. In 1963, at age 18, he received a travel fellowship to follow in the footsteps of van Gogh throughout Europe. He began in van Gogh's birthplace, Zundert, in the Netherlands, traveled through Belgium and Paris, and finally hitchhiked to the South of France. He stayed for a few months in Fourques, near Arles, where van Gogh painted his most renowned works, like his 'Sunflowers' series.
'He worked very hard, because he had no talent, you know,' Kiefer said. 'The last two years he did all for what he's now famous. That's because he didn't stop. He kept painting and painting.'
The Van Gogh Museum's part of the Kiefer exhibition juxtaposes Kiefer's huge landscape paintings, some almost 30 feet across, including 'Die Krähen (The Crows),' from 2019, and 'De sterrennacht' (The Starry Night), from 2024 — lashed through with stalks of hay — with van Gogh paintings. Van Gogh's 'Wheat Field With Crows,' (1890) and his 'Sunflowers Gone to Seed' (1890) hang across the room, showing the undeniable influence, though they appear minuscule by comparison.
Kiefer's landscapes, too, 'are burdened by history,' said Becker, the head of exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum. His layers of paint, a mudlike impasto, oil and acrylic paints mixed with raw materials like soil, iron, straw and dead leaves, form deep furrows on the canvas. These landscapes, with van Gogh's high horizon lines, all seem to be ruins, shot through with blood and shrapnel.
Kiefer said that his work isn't meant to depict politics or any specific world event. But he stays abreast of current events, and said that recently he has felt a physical sense of threat by the rise of right-wing authoritarian leadership, both in Germany and in the United States. 'What happens now there is for me a kind of parallel,' he said.
As he turns 80, Kiefer doesn't seem to be slowing down or holding back. 'When I paint, I don't paint with my head, it's with my body,' he said. He added that he knows so much about war 'that it's logical that it comes through. It's me, my body, that brings it onto the canvas. It's not intended to warn people, but I do hope it's a warning.'