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New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Anselm Kiefer Wonders if We'll Ever Learn
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.'
The Independent
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
A new exhibition highlights how German artist Anselm Kiefer was inspired by Vincent van Gogh
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 Bakker 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.
Associated Press
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
A new exhibition highlights how German artist Anselm Kiefer was inspired by Vincent van Gogh
AMSTERDAM (AP) — 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 Bakker of the Van Gogh Museum told The Associated Press.
