A Diptych of Memory and Meaning - Anselm Kiefer at the Van Gogh Museum & Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

In an era of fragmentation and fleeting attention, the union of two great cultural institutions - the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam - is an act of artistic defiance. For the first time, they merge their curatorial voices to present a sweeping, soul-rattling exhibition of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most consequential artists of our time. Running from 7 March to 9 June 2025, this joint endeavor is more than a retrospective - it is an epic in two acts, a dialogue between two visionaries: Kiefer and Van Gogh.

Two Temples, One Pilgrimage

Imagine walking into a cathedral split in two - the nave housed in one museum, the apse in another. That’s what this diptych exhibition accomplishes. Visitors move physically and emotionally between the Stedelijk, long a patron of Kiefer’s monumental inquiries into memory, and the Van Gogh Museum, a sanctum of emotional intensity and raw, posthumous brilliance. It’s a traversal not just of geography, but of time, trauma, and transcendence.

Kiefer & Van Gogh: Kindred in Fire

Van Gogh painted stars as though they bled light. Kiefer, by contrast, often paints with fire itself. Yet in spirit, they share a furious tenderness - a refusal to look away.

Born in 1945, as the smoldering wreckage of Nazi Germany cooled, Kiefer would spend his artistic life confronting a past many preferred to forget. Van Gogh, for his part, wrestled with internal ruin, his canvases often radiant with desperation and defiance.

Kiefer once said:

“Van Gogh defies every setback; he does the impossible; he does not give up.”This statement is not admiration - it is kinship.

Kiefer’s method, like Van Gogh’s, is physical, even violent. He sculpts with lead, ash, straw, earth, clay, and gold leaf - materials heavy with metaphor. Lead recalls Saturn, the alchemical metal of melancholy; straw invokes the fragility of rural life; gold leaf, that ancient symbol of divinity, is often cracked and tarnished in his hands. His canvases become palimpsests, bearing the bruises of time.

The Title Work: Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind

The exhibition’s centerpiece - Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind - borrows its name from a 1955 anti-war song by Pete Seeger, popularized by Marlene Dietrich in the shadow of global catastrophe. The lyrics are a lamentation in cycles: “Where have all the flowers gone? / Gone to soldiers, every one.” This refrain - simple, elegiac - becomes an incantation of historical amnesia.

Kiefer’s installation answers with scale. The work will encircle the entire historic staircase of the Stedelijk Museum - a spiral of remembrance. Constructed from paint, clay, dried rose petals, military uniforms, and gold, it is as much mausoleum as it is mural. It evokes a sepulchral garden, where remembrance clings to the air like dust.

The flowers in the title operate on multiple registers:

As protest, they evoke the loss of youth to war.
As homage, they allude to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1889), symbols of both vitality and decay.
As symbol, they embody the cyclical dance between bloom and ruin - between Eros and Thanatos, love and death.

Echoes in the Collection

Other works deepen the resonance:

Innenraum (1981), a grim architectural interior, stripped and silent, resembles a ruined chapel or an ossuary, its starkness echoing Germany’s haunted memoryscapes.
De sterrennacht (2019), Kiefer’s celestial response to Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, is less a reinterpretation than a cosmic requiem - a sky not of wonder, but of warning.
Sol Invictus (1995), referencing the Unconquered Sun, calls forth Rome’s solar deities and alchemical metaphors. It signals resurrection, but under layers of corrosion.

These are not static images; they are allegorical chambers, each one a threshold between history and myth, psyche and society.

Allegory as Architecture

Kiefer's work is architectural in metaphor and form. His pieces resemble ruined temples, burnt fields, or the underworld’s archive. They are acts of excavation - each layer of paint a sediment of time. The viewer becomes an archaeologist of meaning, brushing back soot to find scraps of the sacred.

If Van Gogh is Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods to ignite color on canvas, then Kiefer is Orpheus, descending into the underworld with poems of ash and iron. Where Van Gogh’s brush dances, Kiefer’s gouges. Both seek redemption - but from opposite ends of the spectrum.

A City That Hosts Memory

Amsterdam plays the third voice in this triadic conversation. It is no accident that this city - known for its liberalism and layered past - was among the first to embrace Kiefer’s work. The Stedelijk Museum, particularly, helped catalyze his international career by collecting and exhibiting his early works, at a time when Germany was still grappling with collective denial.

In returning to Amsterdam now, Kiefer completes a mythic circle: a homecoming not to comfort, but to confrontation.

Epilogue: The Eternal Garden

So, where have all the flowers gone?

In Kiefer’s vision, they return - not in bloom, but as petals pressed between the pages of history, as dust scattered across memory’s threshold. His flowers do not bloom anew; they endure. They haunt.

In this unprecedented exhibition, we do not merely witness the intersection of two great artists - we are invited to stand within their shared landscape. One paints to save the soul, the other to mourn it. But both insist on one radical idea:

To remember is an act of creation.

---

Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Atelier Anselm Kiefer.