Van Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is so popular it has taken steps, it was recently reported, to reduce visitor numbers. I can only assume Anselm Kiefer’s alienating exhibition is part of this plan to scare off the punters.
A curator lent weight to the suspicion by telling me “the sort of people who come here” may be perplexed to see this giant of contemporary art next to their idol Vincent. To herd these people into the museum’s exhibition wing, they’ve moved some of Van Gogh’s most beloved works there from the permanent collection. It’s a fatal decision – for Kiefer.
No artist is likely to come off well from a direct comparison with Van Gogh. But the catastrophe Kiefer suffers is a Götterdämmerung. Here is one of the gods of today’s art, whom I have always seen as a creative giant, crashing into Van Gogh’s wheatfields in a smoking heap.
If that sounds like a bad taste image from German history – and in my head I see Paul Nash’s painting Totes Meer of a field full of destroyed Nazi planes – that’s inspired by Kiefer at his best. This artist born in the ruins of Germany in 1945 has bravely used his work to insist that Germans, and the rest of us, keep the evil of nazism in sight. He’s done that in provocative ways, from being photographed making Hitler salutes to creating installations resembling the Führerbunker. You can understand why, in his 80th year, Kiefer might want to be seen differently, as a sensitive painter of nature, a fellow spirit of Van Gogh, who, just as the Dutchman fled to Arles, has a home and studio in the south of France. Macho history painter?, this show screams. No, I’m a sensitive landscapist!
But Kiefer can’t do small or subtle. In his first gigantic painting, it looks as if Stukas are dive-bombing Auvers-sur-Oise. Another colossal “painting” recreates Van Gogh’s Starry Night in vast swirls of real straw.
Kiefer’s best painting, however, is a grey expanse of ruined nature with a fire-fringed horizon. It belongs in a different show. One that mentions the war. Then he’s back to piling up dried vegetation in an outsized recreation of an early Van Gogh painting of a Dutch woodland, or sticking a single dead sunflower in a vitrine spilling its seeds on to an open book. There is darkness in Van Gogh, and madness and isolation, yet it’s tempered by his humble vocation of looking at the world. Kiefer uses massive scale instead of the small pictures Vincent painted, heaps of dead stuff instead of trusting in paint, sensation instead of substance. It’s all sound and fury. On the next floor you find it signifies nothing.
Van Gogh’s paintings have been hung opposite a wall of golden, encrusted, gargantuan Kiefers. Do the big 21st-century works overwhelm the poor little 19th-century ones? No. You are drawn magnetically to Vincent’s. The Van Gogh Museum doesn’t like it if you say Wheatfield with Crows is his “last” work (it’s just one of his last!) or read too much into the deathly birds streaking out of a billowing sky. But Van Gogh stood here, saw this, in this mood, and expressed his response in colours wrenched from within.
Going from this to the vast Kiefer paintings is like tearing yourself from, well, a sincere folk song to a kitsch cabaret version of it. The title of this exhibition, Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, is the first line of Marlene Dietrich’s 1962 cover version of Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? This pop oddity, on an album that also includes Dietrich’s Blowin’ in the Wind, is an unexpectedly flip quotation from Kiefer. Facing Van Gogh, the most authentic of all artists, he looks inauthentic, endlessly upping the materials, replacing numinous golden mists, especially in Vincent’s little wonder, Wheatfield with a Reaper, with coarsely applied gold paint.
Next door in the Stedelijk Museum, where the show continues, you find Kiefer’s response to Wheatfield with a Reaper: he has, you guessed right, fixed actual scythes on it. To accompany the Stedelijk’s stroll through its Kiefer collection is a suck-up film of the artist at his Barjac estate. He has sculpted this bit of sunny France, building new roads, a tunnel between the main house and “the children’s house”, and a warscape of tottering concrete bunker-towers. Van Gogh was a poor man surviving through his brother Theo’s handouts. Kiefer belongs to a commercial art world where artists who make it live on huge estates they survey by helicopter and produce art on an industrial scale.
Yet on the top floor of the Van Gogh Museum another film tells another story. News footage from early 1960s television features the bespectacled, intense, teenaged Kiefer as the winner of a grant to go on a journey through the Netherlands and France visiting Van Gogh’s landscapes. The drawings he made on his youthful quest are on show – loving imitations of his hero, full of promise.
Dietrich’s version of Seeger’s song must have been on the airwaves at the time. Unfortunately, Kiefer’s latterday responses to Vincent look all the more false compared with these relics of youthful sincerity. Where have all the flowers gone? Indeed.
• Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is at the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, from 7 March to 9 June, then the Royal Academy, London, from 28 June to 26 October
