Odd thoughts, but they are stoked by the Royal Academy’s strange and startling exhibition. This is an intimate encounter between the great living German history painter, to mark his 80th year, and his hero Van Gogh. It juxtaposes his responses to the latter, from teenage drawings to recent gold-spattered wheatfield scenes, with the Dutch artist’s works. The peculiar result is to make you see how the dreamer of sunflowers and starry nights might have painted the horrors of modern history, if he’d lived to see them.
Kiefer was born in 1945, as the facts of the Holocaust started to emerge in Germany’s ruins. His art has been a long war against forgetting, fought with paintings, actions and installations. This exhibition includes his 7.5m wide 2019 canvas The Last Load, a European landscape under a black sky, emptied out by history, a gnarled waste land of stumps and stubble, including straw stuck into the masses of earthy paint. You just know what it’s about. Every ploughed furrow receding across the dead space looks like the rail tracks to Auschwitz.
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It is Van Gogh’s disturbing ability to step outside of himself and paint his shoes and books as if they were relics of a dead man that makes him appear, through Kiefer’s dark lens, a prophet of the Holocaust. It’s a convincing, if harrowing, image of him. At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam earlier this year, a different version of this show refused to see anything macabre or morbid in Van Gogh’s art, and consequently made little sense. Here, Kiefer and Van Gogh blend together in a weird Romantic death dance – or, to use the title of a poem about the Holocaust by Paul Celan that has long obsessed Kiefer, a Death Fugue.
