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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
South China Morning Post
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Unique takes on Van Gogh's Starry Night, Sunflowers by German artist on show in 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. Advertisement Now, more than half a century later, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is joining forces for the first time with the neighbouring Stedelijk modern and contemporary art museum 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 programme; 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.' Anselm Kiefer talks during a press preview of an exhibition of his works at the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands on March 5, 2025. Photo: AP Kiefer's sometimes bleak work, which is rooted in his growing up in post-World War II Germany, might not immediately feel related to Van Gogh's vibrant and richly coloured landscapes and vases of sunflowers.
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.'
Washington Post
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A new exhibition highlights how German artist Anselm Kiefer was inspired by Vincent van Gogh
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.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
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. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. '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.
