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.