'Kiefer / Van Gogh' (Royal Academy until October 26 2025): Sometimes you don't have to shout

Vincent van Gogh, Snow Covered Field with Harrow, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

There is no doubting the sincerity of Anselm Kiefer's enthusiasm for Vincent van Gogh: the small exhibition hand-out traces his 'pilgrimage' to Arles as a young man through diary entries. Somehow, though, this genuine respect, affection, perhaps even hero-worship doesn't really resonate through the Royal Academy's Kiefer / Van Gogh. Partly, this is a problem with curation. Three rooms, especially when you are exhibiting works as big as Kiefer's, is not a great deal of space, and this is a truncated iteration of a much larger presentation shown across two venues in Amsterdam earlier this year. Equally, the curators seem surprisingly reluctant to offer the works in dialogue, so van Gogh's Piles of French Novels is not shown in the same space as Kiefer's Danaë in which an elongated sunflower sheds golden seeds on a pile of crumpled books. Similarly, a line of Kiefer's drawings which so clearly speak to van Gogh's Arles quill and ink sketches are shown next to much earlier examples of the Dutchman's draughtsmanship. Was there a failure of nerve, as if the two artists might appear too close, as if Kiefer might be reduced to a mere copyist?

The problem is not just curatorial. The canvases Kiefer shows hover between brilliance and  kitsch. Nevermore slathers reference on reference, with the same abandon that the artist applies his mixed media: Edgar Allen Poe, Gauguin, Hitchcock, van Gogh, even, as my companion wickedly suggested, Brian Blessed's birdmen in Flash Gordon. The tarry flock of vampiric black shadows feels like overkill, not just unnecessary but self-destructive. In the same room Hortus Conclusus carries echoes of the woodcuts which were recently on show in the Ashmolean, messily complex, layered and inconclusive but nevertheless retaining subtlety. Under the Lime Tree on the Heather presents a rococo respite, floral and delicate, lyrical and evocative. Poetry is never far from Kiefer's art, sometimes even physically present as text, but he is often at his best when it is spoken softly.

The dilemma of the exhibition is summed up by the two most heavily influenced van Gogh pieces, The Crows and The Starry Night. The former takes the viewer into the wheatfield, through projecting stalks and perspectivally exaggerated path. The scale is such that you feel you could literally walk in, like an illusionistic painted backcloth in the Wizard of Oz, and, like that, simultaneously hyper-real and otherworldly. The sky glitters with flaking gold like a distressed altarpiece as the canon crumbles. Crows hover through the gilded mist like dark clouds. This is full-on Kiefer overload, but it works. In contrast, The Starry Night tips over the brink, the over-familiar swirls have none of the anxious brushstrokes which animate the original, and instead rely, rather like an immersive extravaganza, on shock and awe scale. Sometimes more is just too much.

Anselm Kiefer, The Crows (Die Krähen), 2019. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw and clay on canvas, 280 x 760 cm. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube. Photo: Georges Poncet. © Anselm Kiefer

Pummelled by the weight of these huge creations, van Gogh seems to barely be given a chance to speak. In comparison with the National Gallery's wonderful Poets and Lovers exhibition, the paintings here seem ill-chosen (or hardly chosen at all). The exception is Snow Covered Field with Harrow, one of the many Millet-inspired landscapes which van Gogh produced in St Remy. Here the thread of inspiration leads back another generation, the same furrows and high horizon and bleakness which are visible in Kiefer's Last Load, yet with each iteration life, hope and a future spring seems to recede further until the sky is reduced to a slice of black and agricultural land becomes an apocalyptic morass. At his best, Kiefer can leave you devastated, hollowed out in the face of such physical, literal rawness and this is Kiefer at his best.

In the end, though, this uneven, unsatisfying exhibition fails to do either artist real justice. The draw of van Gogh for Kiefer is hinted at rather than fully explained and you are left wondering if the young enthusiast is really still present in these big showstoppers, or if the older artist is grasping at long lost straws. Because the image that lingers is not grandiose and declamatory but comes with the quiet creak of old leather: van Gogh's Shoes on their eighteen-inch, near monochrome canvas. Sometimes you don't have to go big to hit home.