The Stedelijk Museum’s large staircase is grand—it almost immediately lends the museum a sense of majesty. But these days, that staircase leads to something unsettling: at its summit, visitors face a towering set of panels layered with soil, vintage uniforms, and dried flowers.
These dirtied surfaces rise high above viewers’ heads, giving way to expanses covered in gold leaf and copper paint that have also been marked up and tarnished. There are also German words that have been delicately etched by hand: “Tell me where the flowers are/Where have they gone,” they read when translated into English. They allude to similar lyrics from a 1955 antiwar song by Pete Seeger.
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This striking display marks the result of two years of collaboration between the Stedelijk and its neighboring Van Gogh Museum, where works by the German artist Anslem Kiefer— both recent and decades-old—are on view. Over the course of his career, Kiefer, who just turned 80, has drawn on ugly political pasts and dug into cultural taboos in ways that have at some moments polarized viewers.
The Van Gogh Museum show, in particular, is where new sides of Kiefer emerge. Here, Kiefer’s art is placed alongside works by van Gogh, who painted scenes through a far more personal lens. In this show, the painter takes up far less space, receding into the background and letting Kiefer take up most of the audience’s view.
Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum, said she put on the show to enliven the institution’s programming. When she assumed her post in 2020, she realized that locals had grown bored with the museum. “We learned they were starting to see it as a mausoleum,” Gordenker told ARTnews. Ironically, it took Kiefer, an artist obsessed with death and the ghosts of the past, to bring this museum back to life.
The reason for pairing them, Gordenker said, was not for aesthetic reasons. Instead, it was to show how Kiefer’s fixation on van Gogh’s trajectory influenced him during his adolescence—and to make the argument that the dead painter still lives on in the minds of artists today. (Between the ages of 13 and 18, Keifer traveled across Europe as van Gogh did, landing in the French town of Arles, where van Gogh was institutionalized.)
It’s not the first show of contemporary art at the Van Gogh Museum. Last February, the institution staged a show about Matthew Wong, a Canadian artist who painted landscapes with clear references to van Gogh before his death by suicide in 2019. On paper, Kiefer is a less obvious pairing for van Gogh, but the show makes a strong case for why the two belong together.
Take Sol Invictus (1995), a massive canvas on view at the Van Gogh Museum, in which a 15-foot-tall black sunflower rains down seeds on a comatose body. Van Gogh made what may be the most famous images of sunflowers ever produced. The museum appears to position Kiefer as his inheritor.
Kiefer’s shows have a few subtly menacing moments, thanks to the way he depicts the dead. His new commission for the Stedelijk, a monumental painting layered with metal, clothing, and dead flowers, and positioned under direct sunlight, feels a bit like a memorial, or wreckage resulting from political violence.
He recently told the New York Times that while the latest works don’t overtly refer to the political climates of the US and Germany—the countries where he has worked and lived—current threats were inevitably on his mind while making the piece.
Gordenker, meanwhile, noted that the Kiefer shows come amid a rise in nationalism, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere. After some claimed that Dutch universities had become too international, the country’s right-wing government slashed budgets for higher education earlier this month. Meanwhile, the fall marked the first time a far-right party won a German state election in the country since World War II. Later, that party gained the endorsement of some US politicians.
Kiefer has long made work about fascism, but some critics have argued that his work isn’t exactly antifascist. Starting in the late 1960s, just as he was gaining an international following, Kiefer began resurrecting Nazi symbols and gestures. In one particularly controversial set of photographs, he even did the Sieg Heil salute, provoking a scandal. Later paintings made during the 1970s and ’80s also revisit imagery related to the Nazi era. Many of these works are sprawling landscapes that some critics have said are related to the “blood and soil” philosophy of the Third Reich.
His new floor-to-ceiling pieces at the Stedelijk are less direct. They don’t explicitly say what they mean, leaving viewers to question what exactly Kiefer is trying to communicate, or whether he’s left audiences, especially the younger ones that surround the museum’s campus, to pull out warning signs about history’s faults on their own terms. The artist seems to be trying to keep present what we’d rather keep buried, especially during a time when war and the ghosts of the past remain at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Here, the dead go unnamed. Instead, they’re just evoked through stiffened uniforms that take the shape of absent bodies.