Where Have All The Flowers Gone—Anselm Kiefer & Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam

Anselm Kiefer, born on March 8, 1945, is a German painter and sculptor. He is one of these artists whose bold actions have kept the whole art world in awe for decades. His art can be called intellectual, metaphysical, or monumental. It touches on the most profound aspects of humanity: the disastrous history of violence and murder, full of ashes and blood of the innocent. And guilt.

Since the late 1960s, he has been trying to process the taboos of German history, in particular the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, both caused by the German Nazis. Born in the final year of the war in Western Germany, destroyed by the ravages of war and among the grayness and monumental ruins of the fallen empire, he is endlessly scratching this wound. And he feels absolutely entitled to do that; he once said: “When they ask me if I am a Nazi, I answer that I don’t know who I am because I have no idea who I would have been in 1930 or 1939.”

Since his beginnings, he has sustained intense criticism in his homeland. It was in the Netherlands where his work first gained recognition among collectors and museums like the Stedelijk—the exhibition in Amsterdam is not a coincidence.

Anselm Kiefer is a wealthy man, thanks not only to his art but also to smart investments in real estate. That allows him to not depend on the art market and sales of his art; in his grand studio in Barjac in southern France (transformed into Eschaton-Anselm Kiefer Foundation, which will be open for visitors from April 2025), he freely creates what he wants: enormous canvases that incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, shellac, but also gold and diamonds. He creates works that are impossible to present or realize anywhere else and maybe by anyone else. His projects require innovative methods: tractors, excavators, cranes, and a team of employees. Everything is enormous and over-scaled.

Inspired by myths, Kabbalah, poetry by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, and eternal themes from Judeo-Christian, ancient Egyptian, and Oriental cultures, Kiefer searches for the meaning of existence and “representation of the incomprehensible and the non-representational.” And his art is a total experience. It is like a scenography of a horror opera telling the story of humankind. But he does not show blood, killings, or death directly. Everything is shown subcutaneously. Not even his Sunflowers are innocent; even they are creeping under your skin with terror.

In the Amsterdam exhibition, Kiefer returns to his evergreen subjects. Sag mir wo die Blumen sind (in English: Where have all the flowers gone) refers to the anti-war song of the same name written in 1955 by American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. The song became widely known in a German rendition by Marlene Dietrich. The title also refers to Kiefer’s new work, which was created especially for the Stedelijk Museum’s staircase.

But let’s start with the part of the exhibition presented at the Van Gogh Museum. Kiefer loves landscapes, and since childhood, he has had a special connection to the work of Vincent van Gogh, which has remained a vital source of inspiration for him. At the age of 17, Kiefer won a travel scholarship and chose to follow the route taken by Van Gogh from the Netherlands to Belgium and France. The Van Gogh Museum shows how important Van Gogh’s works are to Kiefer. We see enormous landscape paintings with the recognizable elements from Van Gogh’s works: the grand Starry Night, The Crows, and Sol Invictus, which is a gigantic depiction of a sunflower with a human lying underneath it. We see previously unseen works, like his early drawings, sometimes so similar to Van Gogh’s that it’s hard to tell which one was drawn by who.

Kiefer was primarily attracted to Van Gogh’s innovative compositions, revolutionary perspectives, and expressive use of paint. He admires his predecessor as an artist pur sang, someone who, like himself, constantly sought to approach the unattainable. “What impressed me was the rational structure, the confident construction of his paintings, in a life that was increasingly slipping out of his control. Perhaps I felt, even then, that an artist’s work and life were separate.”

We know what Kiefer liked about Van Gogh. And what would Van Gogh love about Kiefer’s works? Their three-dimensional aspect? Additions immersed into the canvas taken straight from nature: grasses, cereals, and flowers, which are treated like impasto paint (Van Gogh did that too, you can read about it here)? The fact that while Van Gogh translated his inner world into a landscape, Kiefer translated the history of Europe, and perhaps even humanity, into a landscape?

Presented close to the enormous canvases, we see works of van Gogh himself, but compared to the gigantic compositions, they get lost. But this is not an accusation; it is a sign that Kiefer’s works are the works of his times. And our times.

The presentation at the Stedelijk highlights Anselm Kiefer’s deep connections to the Netherlands, particularly his long-standing relationship with the museum, and shows works concentrated on history and memory. The Stedelijk holds an extensive collection of Kiefer’s works, including my long-time favorite Innenraum, and for the first time, they are being displayed together alongside more recent paintings and two new installations.

The exhibition also explores the role of photography and film in Kiefer’s practice, featuring highlights such as Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder, where the photographs dangle on lead ribbons like film reels. We see images including the giant towers he built, as well as pictures he took in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. The title of the work is taken from Faust, Goethe’s most celebrated drama. In this story, Faust makes a pact with the devil in exchange for higher knowledge. The words “Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder” (rising, rising, falling down) refer literally to the movement of the lead reels of film but also to the connection between the earthly and the divine.

Among these is the exhibition’s title piece, created especially for this place, which dramatically transforms the space around the museum’s historic staircase.

When you enter the staircase, you become immersed in Kiefer’s vision. Like other great friezes we know from art history (The Beethoven Frieze by Klimt), it touches on the profound themes of war’s futility, our destiny, the fragility of humanity’s existence, and the transcendent beauty of art. The paintings, extending from floor to ceiling, shimmer in hues of oxidized copper and gold leaf. Stiffened army uniforms, splattered with paint, are suspended at eye level. Dried flower petals cascade down the canvases onto the floor. A self-portrait of Kiefer as a young man rests at the base of one panel, with a tree sprouting from his chest.

Anselm Kiefer considers himself to be an alchemist and here we can clearly see how masterful he is, not only in the technical aspects of his works but also in the symbolism of the grand themes he chooses.

The song Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is about history repeating itself and about people’s inability to grasp this truth and act on it. So is the art of Anselm Kiefer, who turns 80 this year; now, it is current like never before.

Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is at the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, until June 9, 2025.