Anselm Kiefer’s Takeover of the Stedelijk Lets Viewers See the Warning Signs

By Angelica Villa

The Stedelijk Museum’s large staircase is grand—it immediately lends the museum a sense of majesty. But these days, that staircase leads to something unsettling: At its summit, visitors face a towering set of panels layered with soil, vintage uniforms, and dried flowers. 

These dirtied surfaces rise high above viewers’ heads, giving way to expanses covered in gold leaf and copper paint that have also been marked up and tarnished. There are also German words that have been delicately etched by hand: “Tell me where the flowers are/Where have they gone,” they read when translated into English. They allude to similar lyrics from a 1955 antiwar song by Pete Seeger.

This striking display marks the result of two years of collaboration between the Stedelijk and its neighboring Van Gogh Museum, where works by German artist Anselm Kiefer—both recent and decades-old—are on view. Over the course of his career, Kiefer, who just turned 80, has drawn on ugly political pasts and dug into cultural taboos in ways that have at some moments polarized viewers.

The Van Gogh Museum show, in particular, is where new sides of Kiefer emerge. Here, Kiefer’s art is placed alongside works by van Gogh, who painted scenes through a far more personal lens. In this show, the painter takes up far less space, receding into the background and letting Kiefer take up most of the audience’s view.

Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum, said she put on the show to enliven the institution’s programming. When she assumed her post in 2020, she realized that locals had grown bored with the museum. “We learned they were starting to see it as a mausoleum,” Gordenker told ARTnews. Ironically, it took Kiefer, an artist obsessed with death and the ghosts of the past, to bring this museum back to life.