Vincent van Gogh and Anselm Kiefer are soul mates. Both seek the impossible in their work

Anselm Kiefer's work is a monumental, unwieldy, and not least, somber battle of materials. The crushing weight of his art stems from a past that, for Kiefer, never fades. The German artist piled tons of German war guilt onto his works. For some, this was and still is a bit much. No wonder two museums are needed in Amsterdam for the retrospective marking the 80th birthday of this berserker of post-war art: His enormous paintings threaten to overwhelm even the brightest exhibition spaces.

The exhibition extends from the Van Gogh Museum to the rooms next door in the Stedelijk Museum. The museum's collection includes important works by Kiefer, who first gained recognition not in his homeland, but in the Netherlands. Hence a retrospective in Amsterdam. But why the Van Gogh Museum?

Presenting this dark giant of contemporary art through a star artist like Vincent van Gogh is certainly a good idea. But showing Anselm Kiefer alongside the famous and tragic artist, thus opening his work to a wider audience, is also logical for another reason. In Vincent van Gogh, Anselm Kiefer found a soul mate. The Dutch artistic genius was a great source of inspiration for the German. The double exhibition in Amsterdam makes this abundantly clear.

Anselm Kiefer often imitated van Gogh, but always in a blow-up format. In a floor-to-ceiling painting, he now lets a giant black sunflower hang its head over the viewer. Next to it, in a monumental landscape format, opens a vast, desolate field furrowed by a dusty country road. One imagines oneself under the scorching sun of southern France, where van Gogh captured his hallucinatory landscapes on canvas. With striking, black traces of oil paint in the gold-leaf sky background, Kiefer evokes the crows that, in van Gogh's work, perform a delirious dance of death over a luminous golden cornfield.

"The Crows" is the title of the enormous 2019 painting at Kiefer. "Crows over a Wheatfield" is the title of the painting by van Gogh shown in the same room. It is said to have been his last work before he shot himself in the chest on July 27, 1890.

Next to it are a pair of worn shoes – a small picture with a magically animated presence, almost reminiscent of a portrait. It is likely the footwear of a peasant woman, painted by van Gogh in 1886, still entirely in the style of his Dutch period, which was dominated by shades of brown, gray, and black. Now in the Kiefer exhibition, one inevitably recognizes in these battered shoes the result of long and strenuous explorations into the craggy expanses of Anselm Kiefer's rugged landscape painting.

Van Gogh worked himself to the bones for his art. He himself faded like a sunflower—or burned out, as the star to which this plant's name pays homage would one day. Another small painting—"Sunflowers Gone to Seed" from 1887, almost a symbolic self-portrait—anticipates the tragic end. It shows the wilting, severed heads of sunflowers: the transience of life. For Vincent van Gogh, as well as Anselm Kiefer, the sunflower symbolizes the eternal cycle of nature.

Kiefer commented: "The sunflower is connected to the stars because it turns its head toward the sun. And at night, it is closed. It explodes in a fantastic yellow: And that is already the point of its decline. That is why sunflowers are a symbol of our condition d'être." Under his giant sunflower from 1995, the German artist depicted himself in the corpse pose, in which the yogi's soul becomes one with nature.

Like the sunflower, Kiefer once turned toward the sun—his imaginary artist-sun, Van Gogh—when, as a young man, he followed in the footsteps of his idol. Van Gogh was already his hero when Kiefer was still a teenager—in 1960, at the age of fifteen, he made a copy of Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait as a Painter" from 1887/88, as if to reinforce his resolve to become an artist himself.

In 1963, at the age of 18, he set off on a travel scholarship to Zundert, van Gogh's birthplace. From there, Kiefer hitchhiked, sometimes via Amsterdam and Paris, to Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh spent his final months. The van Gogh trip—Kiefer's first experience abroad—was a kind of initiation, he later recalled. The result was a travel journal with countless drawings inspired by van Gogh and numerous notes.

Kiefer wasn't concerned with the Van Gogh cult of the misunderstood and suffering artist. He wasn't particularly interested in the emotional inner life of the unhappy genius. That might have been conceivable when he set out as a budding artist to follow in his footsteps, so to speak. "What impressed me was the rational structure, the confident construction of van Gogh's paintings in a life that was increasingly slipping beyond his control," he noted in his travel diary. Even then, Kiefer must have realized that the life and work of an artist are two different things.

What fascinates Kiefer about van Gogh to this day is "this defiant determination not only to attempt the impossible, but to force it." He himself pursued such a path with utmost determination and tenacity, considering his immense oeuvre and his working methods.

For his Sisyphean task, Kiefer requires entire factory halls as studios. He maintained such buildings in the Odenwald region, then near Paris, and now works in the South of France. There, he toils like a maniac, throwing paint at canvases, burning them with acid, or even torturing them with flamethrowers and other heavy equipment. He wants to demonstrate one thing above all: that art today can only be injury, debris, and destruction.

Kiefer has a nearly impossible burden on his shoulders: Born in 1945, as the Second World War was in its final months, he, like his teacher Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter, belongs to the generation of post-war German artists who are asking themselves the question posed by Theodor W. Adorno: how to continue making art after the Shoah. This is where the sheer impossibility of Kiefer's artistic work comes from.

Anselm Kiefer is arguably the German artist who has most persistently grappled with the Holocaust. Within him lies a war-torn artist's soul. And that's what his landscapes look like: furrowed wastelands, burnt stubble fields. "In my works, you can see the endless struggle—the constant rejection of results that don't live up to my standards."

Kiefer once said that only an iconoclast is a true artist. In van Gogh, whom he denies the lightness of talent, unlike Picasso or Matisse, he sees a desperate painter struggling for form and expression, searching for the impossible. "Throughout his life," Kiefer says, "van Gogh wanted to create something great. And he constantly failed."

In Kiefer's eyes, van Gogh was also an iconoclast. He achieved much with paintings such as the famous "Potato Eaters." However, van Gogh later erased these dark and gloomy beginnings, as it were, with the deadly, glaring sunlight of his brilliant late work. In such fury, both Kiefer and van Gogh display the same relentless seriousness when it comes to the matter of art.

"Anselm Kiefer – Tell Me Where the Flowers Are," Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, until June 9. Catalog: 32 euros.