"Contrary to what one might expect of a teenager, I was not overly interested in the emotional aspect of Van Gogh's work or in his unhappy life. What impressed me was the rational structure, the confident construction of his paintings, in a life that was increasingly slipping out of his control." - Anselm Kiefer.
This exhibition ran concurrently with the exhibition titled Anselm Kiefer at the nearby White Cube Mason's Yard featured in a recent post (here). Both take/took as their subject the inspiration provided by artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), and the artistic journey that van Gogh undertook on his career path from the Netherlands, to Belgium and Paris, ending up in Arles where he would paint many of his iconic late period images. This exhibition at the RA examines recent artwork created by Kiefer and the original entries in his diaries from 1963, when at the age of 18 years of age he decided to follow in van Gogh's footsteps recreating the earlier master's journey through Europe. Through the exhibition we see a shared visual inspiration and iconography between the two. Both had a love of and appreciation for nature and the land, creating painted landscapes which share in their compositions panoramic views and high horizon lines. Van Gogh famously loved and used the colour yellow profusely in his work, and Kiefer enlivens his landscapes and flower studies with the copious use of gold leaf. Van Gogh painted his canvases on a modest scale using traditional oil paints and watercolours because that was what was most convenient when working 'en plein air', and also because of financial constraints. He relied on the financial support of his brother Theo to fund his lifestyle and pay for art materials. Kiefer, being a successful contemporary artist has no such financial constraints, and doesn't hold back choosing to work on a monumental scale creating statement art pieces which employ unusual materials such as seeds, lead, straw and fire to burn the surfaces of certain paintings. We know of van Gogh's love of literature from the numerous letters written to family and friends referencing passages from books. He was particularly fond of the works of Emile Zola, owning many of the authors paperbacks. Similarly in the paintings here Kiefer also references literary sources found in Greek mythology and Edgar Allen Poe's 1845 poem The Raven with his painting Nevermore, and Walther von der Vogelweide's poem Under the Lime Tree on the Heather with a painting of the same title. Kiefer also goes as far as incising the paintings surfaces with quotations from the literary works he references with his signature scrawled script. The most obvious references here to van Gogh are the large golden painting The Crows (Die Krähen), in which the sinister presence of crows and ravens fill the sky, playing their role as harbingers, which appears to be based on one of van Gogh's last and most expressive paintings Wheatfield with Crows, 1890. Dominating the last room of the exhibition is Kiefer's The Starry Night (De Sterrennacht), a massive painting enlivened by a turbulent swirl of straw representing the clouds of the famous original Starry Night, 1889 painting by van Gogh. Impressive as its size is, it is no match for van Gogh's smaller original. This is a fascinating exhibition creating a dynamic dialogue between the two artists, and as mentioned earlier, was enhanced by the complementary Kiefer exhibition at the nearby White Cube Gallery in St James's. It was great to see more of van Gogh's work again in London so soon after the huge Poets and Lovers exhibition at the National Gallery last year which examined the last two years of his life (here).
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