Kiefer / Van Gogh,

Royal Academy, The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries.
28^th June – 26^th October 2025.

 

 

Question: Does this image remind one of another iconic image in the Western canon?  If you see here echoes of Van Gogh’s last acknowledged, doom-laden masterpiece Wheatfield with Crows (1890), then you will likely find this exhibition at the Royal Academy highly satisfying.  The two paintings have the same aspect ratio, the same positioning of the horizon, the same depiction of a field track in the centre, the same dark harbingers of death in the sky.  However, in contrast to Van Gogh’s depiction of personal anguish this picture is almost drained of colour – an oppressively battered landscape – and signifies, perhaps, a more general sense of foreboding.  We should remember that Anselm Kiefer, now aged 80, was born in Germany in 1945 and must have seen at very close quarters the rubble-strewn devastation of his country left by the Second World War.  However, the most obvious difference between the two pictures is scale: Kiefer works on a monumental scale with pictures covering up to 40 square metres.

The Royal Academy had a huge show of Anselm Kiefer back in 2014 – mostly of gloomy and threatening interiors.  In this show, which features great paintings and drawings by both artists, he is mostly outside, in the fields and meadows, paying homage to and clearly acknowledging the influence of Van Gogh.  It is no exaggeration to say that Van Gogh is a hero to Kiefer.  At the age of 18 he was awarded an arts bursary and used it to retrace Van Gogh’s journey from the Netherlands through Belgium to Paris, on to Arles in the South, and finally to Auvers where the Dutchman met his end.  So we have two artists from the north of Europe finding meaning and inspiration in the rural, sun-soaked south.

This is not to say that Kiefer attempts to mimic Van Gogh.  In the diary he kept during that early journey he wrote, “I don’t want to copy Van Gogh’s style.  That would be too primitive.  I’d rather try to find my own language.” Finding that language involved, amongst other things, uncomfortable reckonings with Germany’s history, in particular her recent fascist past.  Some of his early performance pieces included challenging audiences with the Nazi salute.  Then he began experimenting with unconventional materials for his work: straw, lead, gold and ash, layering them thickly to create textured surfaces, and even using a blowtorch to achieve the desired effect.

Considering his vast output it is, perhaps, not wise to push the parallels with Van Gogh too far.  But parallels there certainly are.  For example on that first trip Kiefer took the opportunity to render portraits of simple country folk.  Edith Causse, 12 years old, Arles is hung conveniently close to Van Gogh’s portrait L’Arléssienne.

Having settled in the south of France Kiefer, like Van Gogh, was drawn to the land and its fecundity.  But whilst Van Gogh uses rapid alternation of close colours to suggest the vibrancy of life, Kiefer’s palette is altogether darker.

Sunflowers, for example, in Kiefer’s work, are not the glowing orbs which light up a room but ominous black shapes towering over a helpless human figure like interrogation lamps.

The most spectacular connection between the two artists is Kiefer’s The Starry Night of 2019.  To this he brings the full arsenal of his technique: the massive scale and the unusual materials have an overwhelming impact.  Stars and galaxies rendered from swirls of wheat?  That, Kiefer seems to be suggesting, is the profound connection between the mystery of the cosmos and the mystery of life.  And he asserts that Van Gogh grappled with those very ideas: “In Van Gogh there is always something more, not in the sense of something extra or a bonus, the ‘something more’ is everything, the beyond sub-atomic smallest that can no longer be represented and only grasped through mathematical abstraction as well as the biggest – beyond all light years.”

© Graham Buchan 2025