Cathy's Art Diary

Clever exhibition at the Royal Academy examining the influence of Van Gogh on Anselm Kiefer. I’m glad I’d done a lecture on the topic as the connections weren’t always clear from the blurb. They not only look at similar subjects of rural life but at 18 Kiefer undertook a tour of places Van Gogh travelled and studied his technique. I love the monumentality of Kiefer and the paintings looked great in the space but they dwarfed the Van Gogh’s which were mainly corralled in the central room. It might have worked better to show the Van Gogh’s first then open up into the Kiefer. There was one Van Gogh after Millet which created a nice link to the two shows at the National Gallery at the moment and I guess therefore a link from Millet to Kiefer. Closed 26 October 2025 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph Evening Standard

Surprisingly good exhibition at the Royal Academy of work by Anselm Kiefer. I say surprisingly good because from the bits I had read about the show I didn’t think I was going to like it but I did! I’m not sure I always got all the historical and symbolic meanings but on a very basic level I liked the work and found it attractive and interesting. Knowing a bit more about it added something but I felt I responded to a lot of the work without that and sometimes the slightly over ponderous explanations didn’t add anything to an attractive piece.   Any show which has a picture of Virginia Woolf in the first room must be OK even if she is drowning! I liked the large scale works such as the attic studio works. I didn’t get all the Wagnerian references but I liked the scale and simplicity. I liked the way he painted wood and the sense of putting history in his own space. I also liked the room of paintings of buildings of the Third Reich. Again the scale drew you in. There...