Anselm Kiefer - Exhibitions in Amsterdam @ Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind"

Anselm Kiefer - Sag mir wo die Blumen sind

Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

7 March – 9 June 2025

Anselm Kiefer, Sag mir wo die Blumen sind (2024), 

installation view at studio, Croissy, France.

Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, 

clay, dried flowers, straw, fabric, steel, charcoal and 

collage of canvas on canvas.

Copyright: Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Nina Slavcheva

Anselm Kiefer, De sterrennacht (2019)

470 x 840 cm, emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, straw, gold leaf,

wood, wire, sediment of an electrolysis on canvas

Copyright: Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet

A major new immersive painting installation by Anselm Kiefer will form the centerpiece of a landmark exhibition of the artist’s work in Amsterdam. For the first time in their history, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam are joining forces to stage the exhibition Anselm Kiefer - Sag mir wo die Blumen sind.

The exhibition brings together twenty-five works by Anselm Kiefer, including paintings, installations, film and works on paper, across the two museums. The presentation at the Van Gogh Museum will demonstrate the enduring influence of Vincent van Gogh on Kiefer’s work. In 1963, Kiefer won a travel scholarship and chose to follow the route taken by Van Gogh, from the Netherlands to Belgium and France. Van Gogh and his work have remained a vital source of inspiration for him.  

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, (1890)

50.5 cm x 103 cm, oil on canvas

Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The exhibition presents seven key works by Vincent Van Gogh, alongside previously unseen paintings and thirteen early drawings by Kiefer. Paintings, such as Van Gogh’s Wheatfeld With Crows (1890) will be juxtaposed in the same space as Kiefer’s monumental works of the same theme. 

Emilie Gordenker, Director, Van Gogh Museum, said: “Anselm Kiefer has been engaged with Van Gogh’s work from his early years. Sometimes the inspiration is almost literal, as in the use of sunflowers and the composition of his landscapes. Kiefer’s recent work – displayed here for the first time – shows how Van Gogh continues to make his mark on his work today.” 

Anselm Kiefer, Innenraum (1981)

287.5 x 311 cm, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Anselm Kiefer, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1990)

239 x 750 x 750 cm, lead, glass, mixed media

and Untitled (1989)

340 x 501 x 100 cm, lead, lime, chalk and salt on wood.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The presentation at the Stedelijk Museum focuses on Anselm Kiefer’s close ties to the Netherlands, particularly the artist’s connection with the museum, which has been pivotal to his career. The Stedelijk acquired Innenraum (1981) and Märkischer Sand (1982) early in the artist’s practice and staged an acclaimed solo exhibition of his work in 1986. This exhibition is not only an unprecedented opportunity to see all the works in the Stedelijk’s collection together, but also a chance to see Anselm Kiefer’s more recent paintings and especially two new spatial installations. The titular work Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is an immersive painting installation of more than 24 meters long, which the artist is currently completing to fill the space around the historic staircase of the museum. The second installation Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder is made from photographs and lead, an important material that recurs throughout Anselm Kiefer’s work, alluding to the heavy weight of human history. The exhibition will also feature films by and about Anselm Kiefer, including the unknown film Noch ist Polen nicht verloren (1989), which he made in Warsaw shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Rein Wolfs, Director, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, said: “The Stedelijk has a long relationship with Anselm Kiefer and has played an important role in the acceptance of the artist’s work. That connection will be expressed in the two special spatial installations he will show in our building, and which will be an immersive experience. It will be truly remarkable to see these installations amid several of his iconic works from the 1980s. In this way, Kiefer looks back at the past and towards the future.” 

SAG MIR WO DIE BLUMEN SIND

The title of the exhibition Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is taken from the 1955 protest song Where have all the flowers gone by American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, which became famous when Marlene Dietrich performed the song in 1962. Anselm Kiefer’s expansive new installation for the Stedelijk Museum Sag mir wo die Blumen sind combines paint and clay with uniforms, dried rose petals and gold, symbolising the cycle of life and death with the human condition and fate of mankind playing a central motif. The flowers of the title are also a reference to the Sunflowers (1889) by Vincent van Gogh and to recent landscapes by Anselm Kiefer, which will be seen for the first time in the exhibition.

Portrait of Anselm Kiefer

Photo by Summer Taylor

From left to right: Edwin Becker and Emilie Gordenker

(respectively Curator and Director, Van Gogh Museum),

Anselm Kiefer, Rein Wolfs and Leontine Coelewij

(respectively Director and Curator, Stedelijk Museum

Amsterdam), April 2024. Photo: Tomek Dersu Aaron

ANSELM KIEFER (b. 1945, Donaueschingen, Germany) was born in the closing months of World War II, and as a boy he played in the debris of post-war Germany. In the late 1960s, Anselm Kiefer was one of the first German artists to address the country’s fraught history in monumental, acerbic works for which he sustained intense criticism in his homeland. In the Netherlands, his work first gained recognition among collectors and museums like the Stedelijk. Later, Kiefer would be hailed for breaking the silence surrounding Germany’s past. His work reflects on themes such as history, mythology, philosophy, literature, alchemy, and landscape. 

Van Gogh Museum 

Museumplein 6, 1071 DJ Amsterdam

www.vangoghmuseum.nl

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 

Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam

www.stedelijk.nl

Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape

Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape

Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio

February 20 - May 29, 2016

Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Pushing the boundaries of traditional landscape painting, Charles François Daubigny (1817-1878) was a vital touchstone and mentor for the subsequent generation of avantgarde artists now widely celebrated as the Impressionists. In the 1850s and 1860s, Daubigny routinely painted outdoors to directly capture qualities of light and atmosphere, launched a floating studio boat on French waterways that fundamentally changed the way artists could frame their compositions, employed radical painterly techniques and exhibited sketch-like works that critics assailed as “mere impressions.” Though an inspiration to artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent Van Gogh, Daubigny is now relatively unknown. Until this year he has never been the subject of a major international exhibition, and no exhibition has previously examined Daubigny’s profound influence upon the Impressionists and in turn their influence on his late style.

Co-organized by the Taft Museum of Art, the Scottish National Gallery and the Van Gogh Museum, Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape revises our understanding of the origins of Impressionism by reconsidering Charles François Daubigny as a central figure in the development of 19th-century French landscape painting, including Impressionism. The groundbreaking exhibition will be on view at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the sole U.S. venue, from Feb. 20 through May 29, 2016. It will travel to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam later in 2016 and in early 2017.

In addition to one of the Taft’s Daubigny paintings, which prompted the exhibition, Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape will also feature spectacular loans from numerous North American and European museums—including the Art Institute of Chicago; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam—and private collections.

“Conceived at the Taft, this very special exhibition reflects the museum’s strength in European art and its strong relationships with a host of distinguished international institutions,” said Taft Director and CEO Deborah Emont Scott. “We are thrilled to bring this stellar group of European works of art to our greater Cincinnati, regional and national audiences.”

Of the 55 paintings in the exhibition, approximately 40 masterpieces by Daubigny will showcase the full range of the artist’s achievements over four decades, including both small easel paintings created outdoors and grand-scale paintings completed in the studio for exhibition. The remainder of the works on view will offer fascinating and often surprising comparisons with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent Van Gogh, revealing Daubigny’s impact on and importance for two subsequent generations of artists, the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionist Van Gogh.

“This exhibition stakes a claim for Daubigny’s inadequately recognized achievements as a powerful innovator and precursor to one of the most original art historical movements of all time,” said Lynne Ambrosini, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of European Art at the Taft Museum of Art. Ambrosini is the initiating curator (and one of five curators) of the exhibition.

In the vanguard of artists who privileged and embraced the immediacy of open-air painting, Charles François Daubigny invented the studio boat and was the first to paint views surrounded by water instead of from the riverbanks. This pioneering compositional technique of stripping away conventional foregrounds to more directly observe nature and capture the effects of light, as well as his radically unfinished painting style and brighter palette, had a powerful influence on the young Impressionists.

Highlights of the exhibition include Daubigny’s images of silvery light and reflections along the Seine and Oise rivers, stormy atmospheric effects at the Normandy coast, dramatic moonlit landscapes, views of lush fields and scenes of blossoming orchards in the countryside outside Paris—the last another subject he invented. These subjects were soon taken up by Monet and Pissarro, whose similarly themed works will also be featured, for example Pissarro’s The Banks of the Oise near Pontoise (1873, Indianapolis Museum of Art), which echoes Charles François Daubigny’s compositions, and Monet’s Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil, (1873, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia), which was painted from Monet’s emulative studio boat. Daubigny’s panoramic views of the sunny grain-fields near Auvers were admired by Van Gogh, who adopted Daubigny’s then famous double-wide canvas formats for his own pictures of the plains near Auvers. The final section of the exhibition presents five masterpieces by Van Gogh that reveal his debt to Daubigny, including Daubigny’s Garden (1890, R. Staechelin Collection, Basel, Switzerland), which exhibits Van Gogh’s signature swirling intensity.

Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio

www.taftmuseum.org