Featured in The Telegraph
Anselm Kiefer: Only one living artist can measure up to Van Gogh A review of Anselm Kiefer / Van Gogh at the Royal Academy of Arts
24 June 2025
By Alastair Sooke
Is it hubris for an artist to invite comparison with Vincent van Gogh? That’s what Anselm Kiefer does in this vainglorious but compelling exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, a larger version of which, marking the German’s 80th birthday, split opinion in Amsterdam earlier this year.
If anyone has the cojones to take on Van Gogh, it’s Kiefer. For decades, his desolate yet grand, chest-thumping compositions – each one almost audibly proclaiming its alpha-male status – have lamented martial catastrophes. Born in the Black Forest during the final months of the Second World War, he has often, in his work, interrogated his homeland’s Nazi past.
[...]
Unlike Van Gogh’s vistas of southern France, which usually seem to thrum with life-affirming energy, but here appear as dainty and polite as a plate of crustless cucumber sandwiches, Kiefer’s charred, clogged landscapes depicting ashen, post-apocalyptic wastelands express war’s depravity. Swarming black splodges representing baleful crows in a couple of paintings in the first gallery are as scary as stealth bombers. In the final room, the Grim Reaper makes a cameo in the form of a scythe attached to a picture’s churning surface. With conflicts raging across Europe and the Middle East, could art feel more urgent?
