Art in America | Reviews by Professor Eugenie Brinkema
Let’s call this “The Work of Art in the Age of All This Bullshit.” You know the list by heart: climate disaster and its unevenly distributed miseries, global pandemics, racialized violence, state brutalities, forced dispossession, institutional collapse, war there and there and also there, neofascism, extinction-threatening technology, drowned migrant children on the shore. Ebullient oligarchs but the world is burning. Everything is moving too fast, the solutions are coming too slow, and are probably already too late. That old curse: May you live in interesting times. You do.
“Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” an ambitious double show in Amsterdam spread across the neighboring Van Gogh and Stedelijk Museums, offers a rejoinder to the state of our world with an appropriately robust artist to play Atlas, holding its risky critique aloft.
With Kiefer, every institution has to decide what big story it’s going to tell. The man just turned 80, so there are many, and they are well-rehearsed. There is the one that begins in March 1945: a child born in Donaueschingen right before the end of World War II, who grows up playing in its literal rubble, builds one long Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) from Nazi horrors. With sculptural paintings such as Dein goldenes Haar Margarethe (Your Golden Hair Margarethe, 1981), scarred with ash, flowers, and straw, the capital-A Artist navigates the conceptual largesse of nouns—History, Guilt, Memory, Responsibility—in dialogue with the likes of Paul Celan. In this version of the story, the capitalizations never end.
Or, one might recount the controversy that greeted “Besetzungen” (Occupations), the 1969 photographic series of Kiefer performing the Sieg Heil salute that invited questions about intention, citation, and irony. This story culminates in Jed Perl’s scathing review of Kiefer’s 1988 New York retrospective in which he excoriates the artist for maximalist canvases that reduce the Holocaust to aestheticized symbol, treating it as “a sensuous texture.”
Perhaps you prefer to get your narrative templates from the cinema. With Kiefer, you have a few options. There is Sophie Fiennes’s Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), which shows the silk factory that the artist transformed into his studio-cum-Gesamtkunstwerk in Barjac, France, where he settled after leaving Germany in 1993. Fiennes cinematically translates Kiefer’s interest in material and form, lingering on abstracted tunnels, corridors, and columns, all set to György Ligeti’s unworldly Atmosphères. A biography lacking a protagonist—no human appears for the first 20 minutes—this is a story of studio labor as terroir, situated in a place. By contrast, in Anselm (2023)—we’re now on a first name basis—Wim Wenders returns to Barjac with a focus on the artist as cosmic philosopher, using fictional reenactments to construct his own legend of the singular genius of alchemy and myth.
Today, in light of installations like Geheimnis der Farne (Secret of the Ferns, 2007), and Die Erdzeitalter (Ages of the World, 2014), a new story regards Kiefer’s debris- and seed-strewn piles as harbingers of the imminent end of the Anthropocene, permadeath of the human experiment. This account supplants the Kiefer of Germanic guilt with something closer to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus via Walter Benjamin: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe.”
How brave, then, of the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk to organize their show around none of these old stories. Instead, they risk an accusation of worldly indifference, even political quiescence, turning inward and looking with fresh eyes at the thing largely forgotten and ignored. I mean, of course, the art itself.
“Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” is a diptych, with the Van Gogh Museum focused on the influence of their house post-impressionist painter throughout Kiefer’s artistic life, while the Stedelijk displays justifiable pride in their early and passionate advocacy for Kiefer’s work, presenting everything in their collection, and featuring a monumental new commission.
This organizing principle—Kiefer via Dutch painter and Dutch institution—is neither arbitrary nor art historical navel-gazing. In a 2019 lecture at Tate Britain (reprinted in the sumptuous exhibition catalog), Kiefer spoke of Van Gogh’s enormous influence on his work, dating back to sketches he made at age 18 while retracing Van Gogh’s footsteps through Benelux and France. These previously unexhibited charcoal drawings, displayed on the uppermost floor, show an unformed Kiefer of heavy line and trying hand. Elsewhere, the likes of Sunflowers Gone to Seed (1887), various 1890 wheatfields, Shoes (1886), and Self-Portrait (1887–88) are displayed alongside 11 of Kiefer’s monumental works, including De sterrennacht (The Starry Night) and Die Krähen (The Crows), both from 2019. The juxtapositions create a formal conversation: One’s 19th-century thick brushstrokes become the other’s 20th-century wood, wire, gold leaf, and straw, while both artists explore the perspectival possibilities of a high horizon line, inducing claustrophobia and expansiveness at once. Even where the motivic connection seems most direct, as in Kiefer’s use of the sunflower—in Sol Invictus (1995), the aggressive verticality of showering seeds meets the vulnerable horizontality of a supine human form—the effect is less straightforward homage than shared lifelong project. One sees two artists attempting to represent an unreachable, fracturing world.
The Stedelijk is also telling a story about art, this time about the sheer range of Kiefer’s oeuvre. There is the early Kiefer of Innenraum (Interior, 1981); the Kiefer of text and delicate dried flowers in Die Frauen der Revolution (The Women of the Revolution, 1986); the full-scale installation warplane of Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night, 1990); and Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder (Rising, Rising, Sinking Down, 2009–12), a towering film-reel tumble of photographic prints on lead with images from the artist’s corpus, including some from “Besetzungen,” a history neither of Deep Time nor modern Europe, but the personal history of artistic reputation.
The centerpiece at the Stedelijk is the titular installation, a series of canvases created for the monumental, light-soaked staircase at the building’s center. Taking its name from Pete Seeger’s 1955 anti-war anthem “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” as popularized by Marlene Dietrich, the work stages figures of mind and body—from pre-Socratic philosophers to Charcot’s hysterical female patients—set against luminous gold backgrounds, thick layers of paint and clay, hung assemblages of cloth, and piles of dried rose petals. The effect is to walk among the paradox of life: that it continually begins, that it continually ends. But while your eye scans the sublimity and poignancy of this generality, a striking detail—say, a clay-crusted uniform—recalls that the ending-ness of life does not come for all in the same way. Seeger took lyrical inspiration from a Cossack folk song. Impossible not to think of Ukraine, but also Sudan, Gaza, Syria, walking through the piles of crumbling petals.
This, then, is the question that will divide the audience. What right does any artist and any institution have to stage, in gold leaf and rose, the question “Where have all the flowers gone?” at this historical moment and to answer it with artistic inspiration, formal conversations, and matters of brushstrokes, light, perspective, and scale?
Other plants might answer. Facing down a world of cruelties and wars, Voltaire’s Candide meets a man absorbed in the task of work, content to tend to his orange trees. I now understand, says Candide: We must cultivate our garden.
Art can still be a provocation against despair. This show’s gamble is that it can be so not despite, but precisely by, remaining curious about the work artists undertake. Candide is proposing the optimism of activity: of seeding, preparing, making. We must cultivate our garden. What else, in the end, can we do?