Anselm Kiefer and Vincent Van Gogh are not necessarily two artists I would put together in a show. Sure, it's easy to imagine that Kiefer was a fan of Van Gogh (most people, except in the artist's lifetime, have been) but I've been to see Kiefer's art before (a few times) and I didn't come away thinking about Van Gogh.
Kiefer - Hortus Conclusus (2007-14)
Then again, I'd not seen (or even been aware of) Kiefer's sunflowers before. That's an obvious link and one the Royal Academy would have been daft not to make. But the curators of the double header show (more a Kiefer show with supplementary Van Gogh really) do a good job of finding plenty of other connections. Kiefer helps them.
This isn't some cash in on Van Gogh's name. Though the fact his shows are always so popular can't have hurt the RA's box office takings, eh? Van Gogh died in 1890 and Kiefer was born over half a decade later in 1945 but Kiefer claims the Dutch artist as his first inspiration and even followed in his footsteps. From his (Kiefer's) home in Germany to the Netherlands, Belgium, and not just France but Arles in Provence.
Kiefer claimed he wasn't interested in "the emotional aspect" of Van Gogh's work but the "rational structure" behind his paintings and how confidently they were constructed considering Van Gogh's life was increasingly out of control while he was making them. Perhaps the theme that bonds the two artists closer together is nature. Van Gogh painted nature and Kiefer incorporates nature into his work. In the form of straw, seeds, and lead. Sometimes he even scorches the surface of his works with fire. The light in some of Van Gogh's paintings is so incredibly bright it's almost like a small fire.
Van Gogh once opined that books and reality and art are all the same to him (he was a particular admirer of Emile Zola) and Kiefer, too, incorporates mythological, philosophical, and literate ideas into his art. Sometimes confusingly so. There's a lot of interpretation required to understand Kiefer's art but not to enjoy it. With Van Gogh, at over a century's remove, simply looking is enough.
Kiefer - Walther von der Vogelweide:Under the Lime Tree on Heather (2014)
Kiefer - Nevermore (2014)
2014's Nevermore refers to Edgar Allen Poe's 1845 poem The Raven. A poem in which a grieving man is driven mad by a raven repeating the word "nevermore". He's also riffed on James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegan's Wake as well as the composer
Richard Wagner. When it comes to the sunflower, Kiefer sees it, as Van Gogh did, as a symbol of life. First it is connected to the stars because it moves its head against
the sun. Then in the night it is closed. The moment they explode they are yellow and fantastic but also the decline has began.
Just like us poor mortal humans. As soon as reach our peak - intellectual, creative, sexual - we also start our decline and the long journey towards our inevitable death. Worse, we know it. With this in mind, a work named The Crows hung nearby seemed apt. They'll be among the first to pick away at our bones. Especially if we die in a world that looks anything like some of the imaginary hellscapes conjured up by Anselm Kiefer.
Kiefer - The Crows (2019)
Van Gogh - Piles of French Novels (1887)
When in Arles, in 1963, Kiefer (still a teenager at the time) sought out the landscapes that had inspired Van Gogh and the
RA has got a few drawings that Kiefer did at that time which certainly presented to me a side of Kiefer I had been previously been unaware of.
It's not hard to see Van Gogh's influence in these smaller works and it helped me understand the link between Kiefer's enormous canvases as well. Kiefer saw Van Gogh as an artist who didn't so much paint nature but paint from nature. He imbued natural scenes with his own temperament and his own memory and Kiefer has made a career of doing the same. I've not read W.G.Sebald (I think I probably should) but I couldn't help think of him while perusing this section of the exhibition.
Kiefer - Edith Causse, 12 Years Old Arles (1963)
Van Gogh - L'Arlesienne (1890)
Van Gogh - Snow-covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet) (1890)
Mme Ginoux, the owner of the Cafe de la Gare in Arles, was painted from a drawing by
Paul Gauguin (note, again, books on the table - here Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens) and in that Van Gogh's portraiture is not dissimilar to his landscape work. It is an image of something, or someone, that was once there. Refracted through the memory of the artist and, when we look at it - over a century later, our own perception of how the world was and how the world is.
Art isn't static. It changes as we do. It changes to reflect the times. The painting itself remains more or less the same but what we see in it is different as we age, as we change, as we come to see life differently. I don't get bored looking at the same things because they're never really the same. I think that is something best captured in the art of
Paul Cezanne but Van Gogh and Kiefer understand it deeply also.
Van Gogh - Sunflowers Gone to Seed (1887)
Van Gogh - Field with Irises near Ales (1888)
Inspired, variously, by elder French artists like Jean-Francois Millet and
Japanese art, Van Gogh could see nature as beautiful (full of colours like his field of irises) or sad and bleak. His snow covered field looks almost like the aftermath of a battle. Its muted greyish palate conjuring thoughts of desolation and despondency. In the nicest way.
Both La Crau and his Avenue of Poplars seems to stretch out into infinity. As if Van Gogh wished to go beyond the horizon. Both in life, in nature, and in art. There's a yearning to his work, a sense of not being fully satisfied (which would be understandable, all things considered) even when confronted with the best, and worst, nature has to offer. Almost as if the change of seasons was like a parting or even a death. Something gone that can never return. Something that can only be held for a while but never fully grasped. A potentially romantic encounter that was never fulfilled.
Van Gogh - La Crau Seen from Montmajour (1888)
Van Gogh - Avenue of Poplars (1884)
Van Gogh - Country Road (1882)
We could be that solitary figure walking the long straight country road but we could also be the lone bird hovering in the sky. We are, after all, alone in this world. Nobody ever really knows us. Not in our entirety. Not in our deepest, darkest - or even lightest - thoughts. As the alienation inherent with us will live within us forever we should embrace it while at the same time making the most of the moments of communality, be they with family, friends, or strangers, and even intimacy we find ourselves fortunate enough to experience.
Little of this, of course, says much about the paintings but it does say what the paintings made me think about, what they made me feel. I like to learn dates, locations, stats essentially when I visit galleries but I also want to feel stuff. Van Gogh makes me feel stuff. In the past, I'm not sure Kiefer really has. But seeing him alongside Van Gogh made more sense to me. That's good curation. Curation that changes how one feels about an artist.
Van Gogh - Poppy Field (1890)
Kiefer believes that landscapes are silent witnesses of human history and it's hardly a surprise that he finds so much to confirm that in the work of Van Gogh. You don't just see what has been painted but you find yourself imagining how Van Gogh saw, and understood, that view. The landscapes are, in a way, portraits as surely as his 1886 painting of a pair of worn shoes (I'd call them boots) is. The owner may no longer be wearing these shoes (may not even own them anymore) but a memory of the owner lives with them. If you've ever lost somebody close to you and then found something that once belonged to them you'll understand.
It's probably just our human desire for connection, and an equally profound need to negate a painful loss, but we find ourselves imbuing inanimate objects with the spirits of those we have loved and lost. Van Gogh's art speaks profoundly of that.
The Royal Academy show ends with Kiefer's 'cover version' of Van Gogh's classic Starry Night. It's much bigger, rawer even, than the original. It's not better but it's probably just as good. It's the same view but of a different place. Seen by a different person. At a different time. Van Gogh and Kiefer would have have had similarities in their approach to a starry night but they wouldn't see it, or depict it, the same. It's true also of us when we look at the work. We all see it different because we're all different. We change, art changes, life changes. It is for the artist to grab a slice of it while they can. It is for us to grab a slice of it while we can.
Van Gogh - Shoes (1886)
Kiefer - The Starry Night (2019)
No comments:
Post a Comment