Kiefer / Van Gogh: a 'remarkable double act'
"Plenty of artists have dreamed they could somehow be van Gogh," said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Few, however, would have "the bottle" – or the resources – to mount an exhibition pitting their works against van Gogh's, essentially putting themselves on the same pedestal. Yet Anselm Kiefer (b.1945) has never been one for "false modesty", and that is precisely what the immensely successful German artist has done.
Now 80, Kiefer is best known for his "vast" sculptural installations and deadly serious meditations on the darker chapters of German history. He has idolised van Gogh since his teenage years, when he retraced his forebear's steps across southern France and sketched what he saw. Those sketches are on show in this exhibition, which pairs 11 of van Gogh's paintings and drawings with a selection by Kiefer.
The first painting you see is "The Crows (2019)", his huge reinterpretation of "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890), which is long believed to be van Gogh's last piece. Not content with painting the ripe corn stalks, Kiefer "grafts bundles of actual corn stalks onto the canvas", embedding them in splodges of black and gold paint. The show, overall, is by turns fascinating, "heroic" and "absurd".
The Royal Academy could hardly have come up with a weirder pairing, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Kiefer's "dark and doomy slabs of Teutonic angst" look preposterous alongside van Gogh's delicate, closely observed canvases, which themselves take up only a fraction of the wall space. The most glaring example of Kiefer's folly comes with his homage to "The Starry Night", itself absent from the show. Taking up an entire wall, his version of that "tiny", deathless painting is "a colossal sprawl" of wood, wire and straw, in which van Gogh's stars have been replaced by something resembling "the shattered remains of an African village hit by a tornado". Everything about it is wrong: an image that in van Gogh's "gentle hands" captured the magic of "a fabulous night sky" has somehow been transformed into "a grim, effortful slab of doom". If Kiefer thinks he shares "a special affinity" with van Gogh, he is much mistaken.
Kiefer and van Gogh are obviously very different artists, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. But the juxtaposition sheds new light on both, each inviting you to pay closer attention to the practice of the other. There are some fabulous pictures by both, too. Van Gogh's drawing of a country road by night gives us a picture of "wintry melancholy", his pen catching "skeletal leaves and bare ruined trees with fragile acuity".
Nearby, Kiefer gives us a landscape of a road stretching through "burned-out fields of charred stalks, blackened stems and scorched earth". Devastating as it is, it still echoes van Gogh's "amazing radiance". Spectacular and beautifully put together, this is "a remarkable double act".
Royal Academy, London W1 (020 7300 8090, royalacademy.org.uk). Until 26 October