Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 80th birthday, this is the third in a trio of galvanising European exhibitions \u2014 following Venice\u2019s Palazzo Ducale in 2022 and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2024 \u2014 in which the German shares a stage with art history\u2019s giants. It relates especially to his \u201cVenice Cycle\u201d, opened soon after Russia invaded Ukraine: tremendous, black war canvases of tattered uniforms, refugees\u2019 shoes, a coffin, dangling from charred panels. Three years later, the painting \u201cSag mir wo die Blumen sind\u201d, covering every inch of the lofty gallery at the top of the Stedelijk\u2019s ceremonial staircase, is that cycle\u2019s golden, devastated twin.\u00a0A 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\u2019s peace song \u201cWhere Have All the Flowers Gone?\u201d in Marlene Dietrich\u2019s German version: \u201cTell me where the men have gone\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009tell me where the graves are.\u201dThis 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; \u201cSol Invictus\u201d, Kiefer basking beneath a sunflower shedding its seeds, asserts the connection, appropriating Van Gogh\u2019s motif symbolising the life cycle. Van Gogh\u2019s tiny close-up of dissolution \u201cSunflowers Gone to Seed\u201d is here, as is Kiefer\u2019s zany \u201cRising, Rising, Sinking Down\u201d, a sculpted upside down sunflower looping into a cradle shape. It tilts in rhythm to the crib ropes gently swung by the mother in \u201cAugustine Roulin (La Berceuse)\u201d hanging next to it. Van Gogh intended this portrait to be flanked by sunflower pictures.\u00a0Van Gogh is above any encounter with a contemporary, but for Kiefer the juxtaposition is revelatorySurrounding the sunflowers, Kiefer\u2019s gold\/black\/grey apocalyptic landscapes from the past decade, studded with clumps of clay, plaster, billowing straw \u2014 \u201cO Stalks of the Night\u201d, \u201cUnder the Limes on the Heather\u201d, \u201cHemlock Cup\u201d \u2014 have affinities with Van Gogh\u2019s gestural verve and churning impasto, and sometimes with his compositional structure of undulating ripe fields beneath high horizons \u2014 \u201cWheatfield with a Reaper\u201d, \u201cWheatfield under Thunderclouds\u201d.For Van Gogh these were rapturous intimations of mortality. Death, he explained, \u201ctakes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.\u201d In the last one, \u201cWheatfield with Crows\u201d, 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 \u201cThe Crows\u201d, 40 times larger, as well as an enormous \u201cStarry Night\u201d (4.7 metres by 8.4 metres), reprising Van Gogh\u2019s 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\u2019s agitated \u201cWheatfield with Crows\u201d does.\u00a0Setting 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\u2019t, the exhibition shows what he is: a conceptualist for whom expressionism serves political\/narrative purpose, rather than Van Gogh\u2019s impassioned declarations.At the Stedelijk, cascading rolls of lead strips imprinted with photographs include the image that in 1969 launched Kiefer\u2019s career \u2014 a self-portrait snapshot of him making the Nazi salute, wearing his father\u2019s Nazi uniform. From there Kiefer stalked his prey: Nazi trauma, guilt and denial buried beneath Germany\u2019s 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 \u201cInnenraum\u201d (1981). Based on a photograph of Albert Speer\u2019s cavernous, skylit Berlin Reich Chancellery, it introduces Kiefer\u2019s characteristic dark\/bright contrasts, plunging perspectives, frontal insistence \u2014 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. \u201cInnenraum\u201d is a very popular Stedelijk picture.\u201cWho is this fascist who thinks he\u2019s an antifascist?\u201d 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\u2019s overview of Kiefer\u2019s career is illuminating. It reminds us that he began, with that Nazi salute, as a performance artist, a prankster. Light-fingered subversion survives in \u201cJourney to the End of Night\u201d (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 \u201cWomen of the Revolution\u201d (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. \u201cAxe Age Wolf Age\u201d (a reference from Norse legend), \u201cSeven Bowls of Wrath\u201d (The Book of Revelation\u2019s prophecy of apocalypse), \u201cSickle Cut\u201d (Germany\u2019s 1940 war plan) and \u201cField of the Cloth of Gold\u201d (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\u2019s 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 \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic It\u2019s 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\u2019s Van Gogh and Stedelijk museums is a retrospective, showcase of new work, and dialogue with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":233338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-233337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233339,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233337\/revisions\/233339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}