Amsterdam honors Anselm Kiefer on his 80th birthday

With their slimy crusts, these hermits between paintings and sculpture immerse themselves deeply into the mythical cosmos, from which the figurative history painting of the Anselm Kiefer, who lives in France, multiplies its dramas for decades. Only that this time the tragedy in Ukraine and its current tightening by Donald Trump cannot be maintained the usual distance to this panoramic window of dying.

Based on an anti -war song

The 24 -meter -long, multi -part wall installation, which was specially made for the museum, effortlessly conquers the room and overwhelms with its dark reflection on the condition humaine. She is named after the anti-war song “Tell me where the flowers are” by the US folk singer Pete Seeger, which was sung in German by Marlene Dietrich.

The title also refers to a double show with which the creation of Anselm Kiefer in Amsterdam is recognized on two stages. She celebrates the artist, born in the ruins of Germany in 1945, on the one hand as a notorious disturbance of disturbance, who, with his memory work, which has always insisted on material opulence, has always insisted that not only the German right -wing extremists should keep an eye on, starting with the provocative self -portraits with Hitler greeting up to later installations that let me think of megalomanic leader bunkers. On the other hand, one would like to stage pine as soul mates of the impetuous van Gogh, a risky undertaking that only rises to a limited extent.

From this weekend, the Stedelijk Museum bowed with an exhibition that shows all the early work of Kiefers from his own collection for the first time. In addition, newer paintings and two installations are joined. The topic of war runs through the bleak earthy landscapes with surfaces made of real scythe, thick layers of tree branches, straw, sand and dried flowers, for example on “The field of the golden cloth”, the reference to an area in northern France, where a peace negotiation took place between France and England in 1520. Just a year later, the fights broke out again.

The new installation “rising, rising, sinking down” in its reduction on black and white looks almost like a foreign body, albeit one who could come from a hail of bomb directly. Myriads of dusty photographs and film coils dangle from the ceiling on lead ligaments, motifs dominate landscapes and architecture. You can see the shaky towers that Kiefer built in La Ribau, his former studio complex in southern France, flanked by showcases in which only fragments of decaying objects can be seen.

Lots of gold and excessive material consumption

The second rapprochement in the van Gogh Museum next door is also great theater, not only because it focuses on the direct comparison with Van Gogh, which may be due to the fact that Kiefer wants to show itself here for a change as a sensitive natural painter beyond the usual apocalyptic bombast. In the early 1960s, he won a scholarship for a trip through the Netherlands and France to the landscapes of the painting vote.

On the top floor you will encounter touching drawings with which he at the time he made up for his role model. You could not be further away from the epic landscapes on the two floors below. The confrontation of this gigantic proportions with the more vulnerable small formats van Goghs is more disturbing than illuminating.

While the Dutch, who was entertained by his brother Theo for life, uses a withdrawn color palette for his sun -drenched wheat fields, Kiefer wlessly weated on with thick applied gold and excessive material consumption as a successful market artist. Even the self -portraits could not be more contrary. While van Gogh is modesting his easel, Kiefer stages itself in yoga position under an oversized sunflower. Did he surrender before the burden of human history?

On this Saturday, Anselm Kiefer, who represented Germany in 1980 with its unmistakable style at the Biennale in Venice and was invited three times to documenta, will be eighty years old. One can still expect huge friction from him, to Germany, in the world.