Two artists looking at the stars display very different takes on life

Kiefer/Van Gogh
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, LONDON

Pairing the world’s best-loved artist with a contemporary arriviste was always going to be controversial, and so it has proved at the Royal Academy, where Van Gogh now shares the walls with the German Anselm Kiefer (to 26 October). For some, the vision is totally inappropriate – they don’t believe the nineteenth-century Dutchman, who sold only one painting in his lifetime (despite at one point living with two art dealers), should be compared with anyone. Others, though, see Kiefer as Van Gogh’s natural successor, a painter who took the same themes – the corn fields, the sunflower, the starry sky – and made of them something altogether darker, more sinister. A more ominous interpretation for a more complicated time, is the suggestion. Van Gogh was painting pre the world wars; Kiefer, born into a war-scarred Germany at the end of the second of these, has spent his career unpacking the detritus of unthinkable conflict.

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