At the last moment I visited the blockbuster Anselm Kiefer exhibition “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” at the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a vast, haunting meditation on memory, war, and the dialogue between art and history. It is not as bad as I feared. The sublime and the bombastic were in perfect balance.

The show spans over 40 works by Kiefer alongside eight paintings by Van Gogh, exploring an intergenerational dialogue between two artists obsessed with mortality and meaning. Kiefer’s engagement with Van Gogh goes back to his teenage years, including a pilgrimage across Europe tracing the Dutch artist’s life. That influence manifests in sweeping, scarred landscapes and dense surfaces made of straw, soil, and lead, echoing Van Gogh’s compositions but loaded, and at times overloaded, with history and meaning.

The Van Gogh Museum’s side of the exhibition creates rich juxtapositions: Van Gogh’s expressive but intimate works sit beside Kiefer’s grand, apocalyptic canvases. Where Van Gogh explored the spiritual resonance of nature and light, Kiefer overlays similar landscapes with scars of war, death, and ideology. “Die Krähen” (2019) and especially “Nevermore” (2014) are clearly inspired by Van Gogh’s haunting “Wheat Field with Crows” (1890), which has a special meaning for Kiefer. The wheat field is reminiscent of a verse by Paul Celan, whom Kiefer frequently refers to in his work: “From hearts and brains / sprout the stalks of night, / and a word, spoken by scythes, / bends them into life, (..) / o stalks, you stalks, / You stalks of night”.

These and other canvases, such as “Das letzte Fuder” (2019) and “Schierlingsbecher” (2019) are pretty awesome, but in several other works Kiefer can’t help himself and the symbolism is overdone, such as when he attaches scythes to a canvas. The exhibition’s title piece also falls into that category.

Dominating the Stedelijk Museum’s grand staircase is a monumental new installation by Kiefer: paintings of oxidized copper and gold leaf, stiffened army uniforms, dried petals, and a self-portrait with a tree sprouting from the chest. Visually and thematically it references the cycle of destruction and rebirth. The title, “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind”, is taken from a German version of Pete Seeger’s protest anthem. It signals Kiefer’s central themes of loss, mourning, and the persistence of trauma, especially rooted in Germany’s Nazi past and the artist’s own lifelong reckoning with it. But it is all too much.

Over at the Van Gogh Museum the exhibition includes Van Gogh’s “Shoes” (1886), arguably the most famous shoes in the history of art and philosophy. Martin Heidegger saw the painting at an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1930. He went on to write about the painting in a key passage in The Origin of the Work of Art (1935). In The Still Life as a Personal Object (1968), the art historian Meyer Schapiro criticized Heidegger for wrongly referring to the shoes as those of a peasant woman. In Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [‘Pointure’] (1978) Jacques Derrida playfully questions both Heidegger’s and Schapiro’s interpretation, while giving a masterclass in close reading in the process.

The work of Anselm Kiefer doesn’t lend itself to multiple interpretations, let alone playful ones. At its best it inspires awe through its sheer physical presence. At its worst it lapses into mere grandiloquence. But as with all my writings, don’t take my word for it, go look for yourself if you have a chance and make up your own mind.

Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is at the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam until 9 June 2025. In a modified version the exhibition will be on show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 28 June until 26 October 2025.

Anselm Kiefer at Museum Voorlinden.

My review of Anselm, the film by Wim Wenders.