Anselm Kiefer
Hortus Conclusus
2007-14
Collage of woodcuts on canvas with acrylic and shellac
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube
For Kiefer, just as for Van Gogh, the sunflower symbolises the cycle of life: 'First the sunflower is connected to the stars, because it moves its head against the sun. And in the night, it's closed.
The moment they explode they are yellow and fantastic: that's already the declining point.
So sunflowers are a symbol of our condition d'être (condition of being]' The man lying at their base might be the artist himself, adopting the
'savasana', the yoga position also known as the 'corpse pose', in which practitioners imagine themselves dead, their souls at one with nature.
Anselm Kiefer
Nevermore
2014
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Eschaton Kunststiftung
The title of this painting refers to 'The Raven'
(1845), a poem by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), in which a grieving man is driven mad by a raven repeating the word 'Nevermore'.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted-nevermore!
Anselm Kiefer
Walther von der Vogelweide:
Under the Lime Tree on the Heather
(Walther von der Vogelweide: under der Linden an der Heide)
2014
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis and charcoal on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube
At first glance, Kiefer's monumental works of art may not appear to have much in common with the smaller canvases of Van Gogh.
While the latter artist worked in the traditional media of oil paint and ink, the former uses conventional materials - such as oil and acrylic paints, watercolour and photography - combined with more unusual elements such as straw, seeds, lead and gold leaf. In some of his paintings, Kiefer scorches their surface with fire, evoking a sense of destruction and desolation. Despite these differences of media, the two artists share an affinity for painterly surface textures.
Kiefer's and Van Gogh's works are related through their use of recurring motifs from nature such as earth, fields of wheat, sunflowers and crows, all alluding to the cycle of life. Van Gogh's love for and repeated use of yellow is also mirrored in the work of Kiefer, who sees the Dutch artist's recurrent golden skies and fields as resembling the gilding of religious icons. The influence of Van Gogh on Kiefer can also be seen in relation to the use of compositional devices characterised by elements depicted at close range combined with deep perspectives, high horizon lines and panoramic formats.
Kiefer, like Van Gogh, is deeply influenced by literature and poetry.
Van Gogh read widely, once remarking in a letter to his brother Theo: 'books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me'.
Novels he read and sometimes even included in his works often add a further layer of meaning to his paintings and drawings. Kiefer's works frequently relate to mythology or philosophical concepts. He also uses the written word to enhance the meanings of his paintings, sometimes acting as a foil to interrogate their meaning.
1887
Oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Van Gogh was an avid reader. Almost all of the 820 surviving letters that he wrote to family and friends contain at least one reference to literature.
While on the surface his works depict the world around him, they also often contain echoes of authors he admired. The Naturalism of the work of Emile Zola, and its unvarnished perspective on modern life, particularly touched him. Van Gogh owned many of the writer's novels, published in cheap yellow paperbacks much like those heaped up in this still life, which constitutes a veritable homage to modern French literature.
Anselm Kiefer
Untitled
1963
Graphite on paper
Private collection
1963
Graphite and ballpoint pen on paper
Private collection
1963
Graphite and ballpoint pen on paper
Private collection
1963
Graphite on paper
Private collection
Vincent van Gogh
Country Road
1882
Pencil, pen and brush and ink, watercolour, on paper
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
The exact location depicted in this early drawing, made on a country road near The Hague, has never been established. Van Gogh used the reed screens shielding the market gardens from the wind and drifting sand to reinforce its strong linear perspective. The landscape's otherworldly light, the naked trees, two lone figures - one working in the garden, the other walking down the road - and a single bird in the sky imbue this work with a sense of melancholy.
Vincent van Gogh
Avenue of Poplars
1884
Pencil, pen and ink, on paper
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
1888
Pencil, pen and reed pen and ink on paper
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Van Gogh was much taken with the panoramic view from a hill known as Montmajour, located about five kilometres north of Arles. There, he produced an autonomous series of six drawings, of which this is one. It is at once the result of meticulous observation and the produce of his imagination, recalling a fictional garden from a novel by Émile Zola. The view encapsulates a whole world: fields, vineyards, distant hills, a couple walking along the road. Van Gogh likened it to the sea, but more beautiful because it's just as infinite and yet you feel it's inhabited.
Vincent van Gogh
Landscape with Figures Pushing Wheelbarrows
1890
Pencil on paper
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
1888
Oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Painted outside the town of Arles a few months after he moved to the south of France, this canvas shows Van Gogh's love of colour contrasts.
In it, the purple of the irises is set against the yellow of the field, and in the background the green of trees is a foil for orange roofs. Describing this work as just like 'a Japanese dream' in a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh made use of compositional devices found in Japanese woodblock prints, such as zooming in on a foreground detail, juxtaposed with a deep perspective onto the distant town in the background.
In Arles in the summer of 1963, at the end of his journey in the footsteps of Van Gogh, Kiefer set out to find the landscapes and inhabitants of this southern French town which Van Gogh depicted in his characteristically expressive style. This room contains a selection of the drawings that Kiefer made there, joined by a group of Van Gogh's own works on paper.
More than 60 years later, Kiefer still finds Van Gogh's works arresting.
Dating from the last three years of the Dutch artist's life and executed in his mature style, the paintings in this room have been selected to speak to Kiefer's sensibility. He sees the works, which depict Arles and Saint-Rémy in the south of France and Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, as rich with meaning as well as fading memories. The theme of memory is central to Kiefer's practice as a German artist born a month after the end of the Second World War and growing up in a country he felt attempted to avoid confronting its past.
While we know that Van Gogh painted in front of the landscape, what is shown is no more than a starting point. He re-invests landscape with its secret. He builds a world, his world, but it is a struggle between this world and the self-secluding earth. Every energetic brushstroke is an attempt to capture it; he tries to support himself on it - he is holding onto a straw. He tries to rebuild it with these forcefully applied brushstrokes. And yet: what a failure; earth defies him. So, what does he depict? Not the wheatfield, not the romantic memory of a specific summer's day. The painting is almost abstract. What remains is the memory of something specific that has almost completely disappeared.
Anselm Kiefer
Edith Causse, 12 Years Old, Arles (Edith Causse, 12 Jahre, Arles)
1963
Charcoal on paper
Private collection
Vincent van Gogh
L'Arlésienne
1890
Oil on canvas
Private collection
Van Gogh painted six portraits of Mme Ginoux, the owner of the Café de la Gare, where he lived during his first months in Arles. None were painted from life but instead taken from a drawing Paul Gauguin had left at Van Gogh's lodgings following his unsuccessful stay in Arles in autumn of 1888. With its vivid colours, simplified forms and flattened space, this work stands as one of Van Gogh's most pared-down paintings.
On the table are two books: Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens's
Christmas Stories.
Vincent van Gogh
Snow-covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet)
1890
Oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
While in the hospital at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted 21 copies, or rather translations, after works by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), an artist known for his depictions of the toil of peasant farmers. Although working from a black-and-white print of Winter, The Plain of Chailly (1868, Belvedere, Vienna), Van Gogh reimagined it in this version as a study in icy blues and greens, conveying a powerful sense of mood.
Vincent van Gogh
Sunflowers Gone to Seed
1887
Oil on cotton
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Vincent van Gogh
Poppy Field
1890
Oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum Den Haag - long-term loan
Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands.
This canvas was painted in a field near the town of Auvers-sur-Oise where Van Gogh spent the last three months of his life. Quick dabs of thick paint animate the sky and the field in a whirlwind of energy, giving the impression of an impending storm. Composed of horizontal bands of colour enlivened by the verticals of distant trees, this late work of Van Gogh's mature style seems to teeter on the edge of abstraction.
This artwork is part of a collection that has been placed in custody of the Dutch government after it was recovered from Germany after World War II, and might have been looted, confiscated or sold under duress between 1933 and 1945. More information can be found by scanning the QR-code below. At this website you also can contact us if you have new information regarding this artwork. It might be helpful in the search for its rightful owner
Vincent van Gogh
Shoes
1886
Oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
This painting of well-worn shoes is, for Kiefer, a portrait of sorts in their owner's absence, a relic of journeys past and at the same time a symbol of what is to come. It reminds him of the essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1950), by Martin Heidegger, who, Kiefer recalls, 'writes about the struggle between the world created by the artist and the earth, which closes itself off'.
Anselm Kiefer
The Last Load
(Das letzte Fuder)
2019
Emulsion, oil, acrylic and straw on canvas
Eschaton Kunststiftung
Anselm Kiefer
The Starry Night (De Sterrennacht)
2019
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, straw, gold leaf, wood, wire and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube
Anselm Kiefer
Eros and Thanatos (Eros und Thanatos)
2013-19
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, metal wire and burnt wood on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and White Cube
In the writings of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the concept of 'Eros and Thanatos' (the gods of love and death in Greek mythology) relates to his belief that human behaviour is driven by two primary forces: the life instinct and the death instinct. These two competing forces are in a constant dynamic state of tension. The scythe in the painting is both used to cut the ripened wheat, but is also carried by the personification of death.
Set against the golden landscape, it serves as a reminder of the precarious equilibrium of life.
Kiefer and Van Gogh's artistic kinship goes beyond technique, subject matter and a love of the written word. For both artists, a painting of a field is not merely a view, wheat or earth, but is imbued with a deeper meaning. Kiefer believes a landscape also stands as a silent witness of human history, while for Van Gogh it was a conduit to express intense feelings and emotions.
Kiefer's The Starry Night was painted as a direct allusion to Van Gogh's painting of the same title (1889, MoMA, New York). Kiefer sees Van Gogh's original as almost transcendental, linking life with death, the earth with the cosmos, the spirals of its sky taking on the guise of a sea monster:
Like the tentacles of a kraken, the serpent-dragon's arms coil around empty spaces that are wrapped and twisted around themselves. The moon and the stars orbit around themselves, each forming their own cosmos, separate from the dominant spiral nebula and the cosmic river on the horizon, and connected to the whole by means of forceful brushstrokes alone.
Fascinated by the night sky, a window into a mysterious universe, Kiefer focuses on the highly schematised firmament of Van Gogh's work, replacing its sinuous strokes of dark blue paint with bundles of golden wheat. By making the sky out of crops that grow from the soil, Kiefer suggests the profound connection between heaven and earth.
According to Kiefer, Van Gogh shows us what we cannot understand and projects us into 'a restlessness that cannot be stilled:
In Van Gogh, there is always something more, not in the sense of something extra or a bonus, the something more' is everything, the beyond-subatomic smallest that can no longer be represented and only grasped through mathematical abstraction as well as the biggest - beyond all light years.