Introduction
I didn’t think I liked Anselm Kiefer – some time in the past I went to a show of his which oppressed me with its heavy German guilt and huge, murky pictures – but this show is a revelation, completely changing my opinion of him. The seven enormous Kiefer paintings here are all stunning and two or three of them feel like real masterpieces, transformative dazzling works, thick layers of paint encrusted with twigs and straw and shimmering with gold highlighting – immersive and awesome. Photos cannot convey how entrancing and mesmerising they are.
Installation view of Kiefer / Van Gogh @ the Royal Academy (photo by the author)
Biography
Kiefer is German, born in 1945 in the last months of the Second World War (hence the heavy weight of guilt which hangs over so many of his works). During the 1980s and 90s he went from strength to strength becoming one of the Big Names of contemporary art. In 1996 he was elected an Honorary Royal Academician and his close relationship with the Academy might explain why he seems to have had a big hand in curating this show.
Kiefer’s odyssey
The premise is simple: Way back in 1963, as a promising 18-year-old art student, Kiefer received a travel grant which helped him embark on an artistic and spiritual. He set out to follow in the footsteps of his artistic inspiration Vincent Van Gogh, starting at his home in the Netherlands and travelling through Belgium to Paris and beyond, to Arles in the south of France, where van Gogh spent his last years.
As you go into the exhibition there’s a free A4 handout which contains 20 or so quotes from the diary Kiefer kept of his journey. This very close engagement with the life and locations and works of the earlier artist cemented what was to become a lifelong influence.
Exhibition layout
This exhibition brings together works by van Gogh and Kiefer and sets them side by side to show the influence of the post-impressionist master on the post-modernist master.
The show is in the three big rooms which make up the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries round the back of the Academy.
Room 1 contains four absolutely massive, immersive, recent works by Kiefer, dating from 2019 or so.
Room 2 is more intimate and contains 4 van Gogh drawings set against 6 Kiefer drawings from that 1963 trip, most of them very small – less than A4 size – as they were done in the notebook he took with him. Plus 5 van Gogh paintings, late works which demonstrate the Dutchman’s staggering talent, some of which (the poppy field) gesture very clearly towards the kind of abstraction Kiefer was to pick up 80 years later (van Gogh died in 1890, Kiefer really got going in the 1970s).
Room 3 returns to the monumental scale and contains 3 absolutely huge Kiefer paintings and, almost lost in their overwhelming scale, the famous little painting by van Gogh of a pair of empty boots. But it’s the vast Kiefers which overwhelm you.
Installation view of Kiefer / Van Gogh @ the Royal Academy showing Starry Night (2019) (photo by the author)
Influences
There are wall labels for each of the rooms and for many of the individual works. You can read them for yourself in the large print guide (link below). I’ll pick out some themes which struck me.
1. Surface texture
While van Gogh worked in the traditional media of oil paint and ink, Kiefer uses conventional materials – such as oil and acrylic paints, watercolour and photography – combined with more unusual elements such as straw, seeds, lead and gold leaf.
In some of his paintings, Kiefer scorches their surface with fire, evoking a sense of destruction and desolation. Despite these differences of media, the two artists share an affinity for painterly surface textures.
This is most obvious in the two most impactful works here, Starry Night (a direct homage to van Gogh’s painting of the same name) and the Crows (a reference to an equally famous van Gogh work). Here’s a shot of the Crows in its entirety. A photo can’t begin to do its visceral impact justice.
The Crows by Anselm Kiefer (2019). Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw and clay on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube (photo: Georges Poncet) © Anselm Kiefer
And here’s a close-up I took of the surface, which is covered with bales of straw, thrusting out from the canvas, immensely tactile and visceral – you can feel them, their coarseness, you feel like you’re wading waist-high through a field of hard abrasive straw stalks.
Detail of The Crows by Anselm Kiefer (2019) showing how the swirls and ridges of paint are densely encrusted with clusters of straw (photo by the author)
In this side view of Starry Night (2019) I try to capture the way these encrusted elements really stick out of the painting, to some distance, blurring the division between painting and sculpture.
Side view of Starry Night by Anselm Kiefer (2019) showing the canvas’s dense encrustation with straw (photo by the author)
2. The natural world
Kiefer’s and Van Gogh’s works are related through their use of recurring motifs from nature such as earth, fields of wheat, sunflowers and crows, all alluding to the cycle of life.
I’ve been talking about the two massive works which depict wheat fields. In room 3 there’s a big Kiefer work which speaks directly to ‘the cycle of life’, given the portentous title Eros and Thanatos.
In my reviews of Sigmund Freud I explained how, in his later, post-Great War theory, Freud tried to take account of humanity’s lust for destruction by positing the existence within us – in fact within all life forms – of an impulse to live and reproduce, and an equal and opposite impulse, to make the struggle for existence stop, to find complete rest. He rather pompously named these two theoretical ‘drives’ Eros and Thanatos, Greek gods of love and death.
In this huge painting, a life-sized scythe is stuck to the surface – which is already cluttered with swirls of oil and emulsion and acrylic paint, with shellac, sediment of electrolysis, metal wire and burnt wood, all showered with gilt highlighting – and represents not only the life-bringing activity of harvesting wheat to make bread to sustain human life – but also the traditional medieval symbolism representing the Grim Reaper who cuts short every human existence. And so the cycle, or maybe just the tragedy, of life.
Installation view of Eros and Thanatos by Anselm Kiefer (2013 to 2019) Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, metal wire and burnt wood on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube
3. Yellow and gold
Van Gogh’s love for and repeated use of yellow is also mirrored in the work of Kiefer, who sees the Dutch artist’s recurrent golden skies and fields as resembling the gilding of religious icons.
The yellowest van Gogh here is ‘Field with Irises near Arles’ from 1888. From one point of view, what’s really striking (certainly about this small reproduction) is the way the composition allows colour to be applied in bands across the painting, from the dark green irises in the foreground, to the lighter green band behind them, and then the narrow triangle of yellow plants behind them, before the row of turquoise trees.
Field with Irises near Arles by Vincent van Gogh (1888) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Anyway, gold and gilding is what really distinguishes the two most epic of Kiefer’s works here, ‘The Crows’ and ‘Starry Night’ (as well as the less awesome ‘Eros and Thanatos’). It’s hard for a photo to capture the sense of the gleaming, reflecting, shimmering effect Kiefer’s lavish application of gilding across the surface of his twigs and wheat stalks gives to the works. But in this close-up you can see that the gilding along the top of the work is as lavish and solid as the equivalent gilding in a Renaissance religious painting – hinting at the subliminal religious values of Kiefer’s works.
Detail of ‘Eros and Thanatos’ by Anselm Kiefer in Kiefer/ Van Gogh at the Royal Academy
4. Horizons
The influence of Van Gogh on Kiefer can also be seen in relation to the use of compositional devices characterised by elements depicted at close range combined with deep perspectives, high horizon lines and panoramic formats.
As soon as this is pointed out to you, you realise how true it is. All the van Gogh paintings here have a very strong horizon, a very clear horizontal frontier between land and sky. Regarding van Gogh’s painting of irises, above, the curators note that:
In it, the purple of the irises is set against the yellow of the field, and in the background the green of trees is a foil for orange roofs. Describing this work as just like ‘a Japanese dream’ in a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh made use of compositional devices found in Japanese woodblock prints, such as zooming in on a foreground detail, juxtaposed with a deep perspective onto the distant town
in the background.
Vivid foreground detail (the individual petals of the irises) set against the deep perspective across the field, through the row of trees and to the rooves of the houses on the horizon. Yes. Beautifully composed.
Horizons may not appear as starkly in the Kiefer works with the exception of The Crows, which is a very direct homage to van Gogh, but nonetheless it is hinted at, spectrally present in one of the not-quite-totally-overwhelming but still huge and powerful and spooky painting of big black ravens flying over another of Kiefer’s wheat fields.
Nevermore by Anselm Kiefer (2014) Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and sediment of electrolysis on canvas. Eschaton Kunststiftung (photo by Charles Duprat) © Anselm Kiefer
This also is a wild image of the dark forces of the natural world, his trademark scouring of the canvas indicating the huge, wayward, uncontrolled stalks of wheat, chaotically astrew an unnatural turquoise background, dominated by a thick flock of matt black ravens, looking a bit like Stuka dive bombers. An enormous and hugely powerful, minatory image.
Thoughts
Obviously it’s worth going to see the van Gogh paintings alone, irises, poppies, a snow-covered field… The man was a magician with oil paints.
But I haven’t dwelt on them (and haven’t even mentioned the lovely drawings and the one sculpture) because you should really go to this exhibition to see what Anselm Kiefer is capable of. I was staggered by the scale but also by the power of his compositions; the use of sheaves of sticks and twigs and straw sticking out all over the surfaces; the awesome sense of composition so that each one has its own distinct visual rhythm and feels just right; and the canny juxtaposition of turquoise colouring with the shiny gilt backgrounds; and everywhere the dramatic eruption of the hugely powerful, non-paint elements of sticks and sheaves, indicating forces way beyond man’s control or understanding.
Absolutely stunning.
Related links
- Kiefer / Van Gogh continues at the Royal Academy until 26 October 2025
- Large print guide
Books & Boots 