The Van Gogh Museum and The Stedelijk, by showing Van Gogh and Kiefer side by side have inadvertently allowed us to judge between them. Only the critic from The Guardian, Jonathan Jones, has had the balls to say what so many must be thinking:
“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.” *
Our visit to see the Van Goghs was a pilgrimage. Su and I spent a few hours looking at his work and then, when we walked into the combined show, we both had the same reaction—visceral repulsion. I want to make that clear—this was not an intellectual response. Now I am trying to figure out why.
My first actual thought was, “If we had looked at the Kiefers first, it wouldn’t have been this bad.”
Van Gogh was an uncannily acute observer; he had an ability to be—and to paint—in the moment. In a letter to Theo, he said, “I believe that an artist is a person who touches people’s hearts.”
His paintings are intimate; they encourage close looking.
But you shouldn’t look closely at a Kiefer.
Because then, The Crows is a clumsy, gluey pile of straw and clay.
For Kiefer, as he ponderously explains—they are made of Straw…and Clay… (he only speaks in Capital Letters.) He wants to make quite sure that his viewers understand the atavistic significance of that. He thinks of himself as an Alchemist.
You might guess that I’m mad at Kiefer. Yes, I am furious at him for his arrogance in imagining his work could be in the same room as a Van Gogh.
Anyway, to appreciate a Kiefer, you must stand in the presence and feel the significance of his jumbled collages of history, symbols, books and words and go inward to see if they resonate.
For me, sometimes they have. Bohemia by the Sea (1996) for example, a poppy field fertilized by dead soldiers and Interior (1982), a re-imagining of the Reich Chancellery, among others.
The curators talk about Kiefer’s long connection to Van Gogh, the shared subject matter in this exhibition: the wheatfields; the sunflowers; they both use thick paint. The argument becomes thin and then they pile on—describing Kiefer’s main theme as cycles of birth, death and regeneration.
(I see only Death. That dead guy in Sol Invictus is not a corpse, by the way, they say. It is a man in a yoga pose.)
The curator Edwin Becker explains:
“Kiefer says about Van Gogh that it was not so much the myth of Van Gogh, not about the depression, the disease, not about the emotional approach. It was for him more the almost irrational structure of the paintings.”
He also mentions that “Van Gogh’s paintings are on a much tinier scale but with a huge impact because of the color. And with Kiefer, it’s the same sort of strength and power but on a monumental scale…”
No, it is not the same “sort” of strength and power. If art is to have any meaning, that is.
Van Gogh’s painting Wheatfield with Crows is not on a “tiny scale” at 20 by 40 inches and the impact is not just because of the color; he does not take an emotional “approach.” He found a way, despite the grief and depression, to have hope, to love nature—and even people. That in itself is an achievement and everybody knows that. To embody it in paint is his genius.
I’m unclear as to what Kiefer means by the “almost irrational structure” and how he has been influenced by it. Van Gogh’s fields curve, fall and rise: he is sensitive to the topography. Kiefer’s landscapes have been concocted in the studio and are very awkwardly composed. The ground is flat and the use of real dried wheat sheaves and sunflowers flattens them out further. I didn’t look closely enough to tell but I wonder now if those are real birds taxidermied and pasted onto the sky in Crows. They seem to be organized in a drone-like pattern. But this landscape is already bombed or burned so the “crows” are meaningless.
And without the vision, the hope and the emotion, where is the connection to Van Gogh?
Clouds and stars made of twisted straw…Did I mention that he bathes his paintings in electrolytes? Which is funny because the color is very like the Gatorade Frost Glacier Freeze Thirst Quencher:
I wonder how I would view the combination if they had been presented as stark opposites? If they had presented Kiefer as a man who has lost hope and cannot bear to look closely at nature because it was ruined for him by the tragedies of war and maybe by the environmental genocide we are experiencing the results of now—though I have not heard him mention it.
Have you heard of KIRAC? Keeping It Real Art Critics.
Here is their statement:
In fact KIRAC is in search of love, in the form of truth. To achieve that, it uses that
sincerest and most impossible enlightenment fetish of all: dialectics: the belief that the
truth can and will emerge only from reasonable discussion. This implies that
discussion and criticism is always permitted, and that in the end, each opponent really
is an ally in this overriding search for truth.
“After a comparison between Van Gogh and Mondrian in which the argument was that Van Gogh is better, an audience member asked the question: ‘The comparison between Mondrian and Van Gogh’s art ends with a merit judgment: Van Gogh is better than Mondrian. Why is this necessary? They are different artists.'”
KIRAC’S answer:
“To say that the comparison between Mondrian and van Gogh warrants no judgment of merit because they are different, reveals a religious conception of the word “different.” It implies that because things are different they are as good as each other. It is this deeply religious principle of equality and humility that drives the prevalent default mechanism of wanting to look at art as a noncommittal, indiscriminate plain of isolated historical facts, separate from all other realms of human experience where we constantly pass judgments of merit to enable meaningful consequence in thought and action. Like any other field, art needs judgment to thrive, and to deny art its selective nature is to tie it down to the level of generalized mediocrity.” **
Kate Sinha
I have no doubt that Kiefer hates the Nazis. And yet the scale of his work and its relentless symbolism are in sync with the Fascist’s preference for overwhelming spectacle and Teutonic mythos. And coincident with the rise of the billionaire class building massive structures to house his works.
—CNQ
* Anselm Kiefer review—Creative Genius Crushed Under Van Gogh’s Starry Might, March 5, 2025
** Read the whole text about the comparison between Van Gogh and Mondrian at KIRAK
P.S. The strangest thing happened while I was looking at Wheatfield with a Reaper. It started to shimmer with the heat of a summer day.
