Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It’s a bold artist who places himself alongside Van Gogh, but Anselm Kiefer never lacked audacity. The remarkable exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh and Stedelijk museums is a retrospective, showcase of new work, and dialogue with the founder of expressionism. As Kiefer/Van Gogh, it comes in reduced form to London in the summer.Marking Kiefer’s 80th birthday, this is the third in a trio of galvanising European exhibitions — following Venice’s Palazzo Ducale in 2022 and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2024 — in which the German shares a stage with art history’s giants. It relates especially to his “Venice Cycle”, opened soon after Russia invaded Ukraine: tremendous, black war canvases of tattered uniforms, refugees’ shoes, a coffin, dangling from charred panels. Three years later, the painting “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind”, covering every inch of the lofty gallery at the top of the Stedelijk’s ceremonial staircase, is that cycle’s golden, devastated twin. A thickly material surface encrusted in oil, acrylic, shellac and rose petals divides into a gleaming, gold-ground upper register and a dark, earthy lower zone, as in Renaissance altarpieces. Above, women labourers sprinkle showers of gold leaf while ghostly men tumble and collapse. Below, scores of weathered, painted, empty lead uniforms hang disconsolately on rails, like battered skins mourning their own lifelessness, protruding into our space. Along the top run lyrics from Pete Seeger’s peace song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in Marlene Dietrich’s German version: “Tell me where the men have gone . . . tell me where the graves are.”This bravura immersive installation comes midway through the show, which begins in the Van Gogh Museum then continues next door at the Stedelijk. Once more, it confirms Kiefer as the dazzling scenographer of the age, eloquent memorialist to suffering, orchestrating terror as beauty.Any artist working in this expressive vein is indebted to Van Gogh, and the Van Gogh Museum unfolds that lineage, displaying 10 Kiefer paintings with eight by Van Gogh. There are self-portraits by both; “Sol Invictus”, Kiefer basking beneath a sunflower shedding its seeds, asserts the connection, appropriating Van Gogh’s motif symbolising the life cycle. Van Gogh’s tiny close-up of dissolution “Sunflowers Gone to Seed” is here, as is Kiefer’s zany “Rising, Rising, Sinking Down”, a sculpted upside down sunflower looping into a cradle shape. It tilts in rhythm to the crib ropes gently swung by the mother in “Augustine Roulin (La Berceuse)” hanging next to it. Van Gogh intended this portrait to be flanked by sunflower pictures. Van Gogh is above any encounter with a contemporary, but for Kiefer the juxtaposition is revelatorySurrounding the sunflowers, Kiefer’s gold/black/grey apocalyptic landscapes from the past decade, studded with clumps of clay, plaster, billowing straw — “O Stalks of the Night”, “Under the Limes on the Heather”, “Hemlock Cup” — have affinities with Van Gogh’s gestural verve and churning impasto, and sometimes with his compositional structure of undulating ripe fields beneath high horizons — “Wheatfield with a Reaper”, “Wheatfield under Thunderclouds”.For Van Gogh these were rapturous intimations of mortality. Death, he explained, “takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.” In the last one, “Wheatfield with Crows”, roughly painted, overripe wheat rushes like flames, crossed by a path leading nowhere. The tension between despair and hope-giving nature reaches fever pitch.Kiefer pays homage with his pink-hued path through burnt wood in “The Crows”, 40 times larger, as well as an enormous “Starry Night” (4.7 metres by 8.4 metres), reprising Van Gogh’s S-shaped swirling sky and white-haloed stars as luscious spirals in gold leaf and sediment of electrolysis. Displayed for the first time here, these astonish: for their swagger and light-pierced weight; as strange aggrandised simulacra of beloved images. But although they impress, they cannot move us as Van Gogh’s agitated “Wheatfield with Crows” does. Setting Kiefer the master of spectacle against Van Gogh, who staked all on emotional intensity, is a gamble. Van Gogh is above any encounter with a contemporary, and visitors will anyway explore his work in the rich permanent collection. But for Kiefer the juxtaposition is revelatory. By emphasising what Kiefer isn’t, the exhibition shows what he is: a conceptualist for whom expressionism serves political/narrative purpose, rather than Van Gogh’s impassioned declarations.At the Stedelijk, cascading rolls of lead strips imprinted with photographs include the image that in 1969 launched Kiefer’s career — a self-portrait snapshot of him making the Nazi salute, wearing his father’s Nazi uniform. From there Kiefer stalked his prey: Nazi trauma, guilt and denial buried beneath Germany’s postwar recovery. Later came mythological and religious dramas of good versus evil.When German museums initially shunned Kiefer, the Stedelijk was supportive, buying early masterpieces, notably “Innenraum” (1981). Based on a photograph of Albert Speer’s cavernous, skylit Berlin Reich Chancellery, it introduces Kiefer’s characteristic dark/bright contrasts, plunging perspectives, frontal insistence — the huge skylight tips forward. The painting lures you in; it also demonstrates the seductive staging of power, the manipulation of images, on which autocracy depends. That is the point: Kiefer paints the Nazi heartland as alluring extravaganza, making us too part of the crowd succumbing to an aestheticisation of horror. “Innenraum” is a very popular Stedelijk picture.“Who is this fascist who thinks he’s an antifascist?” surrealist artist Marcel Broodthaers asked of Kiefer. That was unfair, though you understand the upset. Kiefer is bombastic, showy, didactic. These days he also overproduces; the show is well-selected, but repetitive heavy mixed media layers eventually appear formulaic.The Stedelijk’s overview of Kiefer’s career is illuminating. It reminds us that he began, with that Nazi salute, as a performance artist, a prankster. Light-fingered subversion survives in “Journey to the End of Night” (1990), a leaden bomber jet with a snake coiled in the cockpit, and the minimalist grisaille relief of lilies in picture frames, commemorating a dozen “Women of the Revolution” (1986), with a red rose for Marie Antoinette.Grandiloquence swells, however, in the final quartet of 8-metre wide gold paintings hung with scythes and axes, inaugurated at Gagosian in 2021. “Axe Age Wolf Age” (a reference from Norse legend), “Seven Bowls of Wrath” (The Book of Revelation’s prophecy of apocalypse), “Sickle Cut” (Germany’s 1940 war plan) and “Field of the Cloth of Gold” (a 16th-century failed peace treaty) are as histrionic as their titles suggest. Has Kiefer the provocateur become a Gagosian golden goose, I wondered.But the way out is down the Stedelijk staircase, and the enveloping Sag mir won me back.Unlike Van Gogh, who painted states of mind, Kiefer is an installation artist, most inventive when creating site-specific projects in big historic spaces. London’s iteration will lack the titular painting, but in Amsterdam Kiefer the showman at once captivates and warns against the politics of spectacle: an artist for our disjointed times.Van Gogh and Stedelijk museums, Amsterdam, March 7-June 9, vangoghmuseum.nl, stedelijk.nlRoyal Academy, London, June 28-October 26, royalacademy.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
