Two museums put on a blockbuster on the artist’s 80th birthday.

A nselm Kiefer: Where Have All the Flowers Gone? — a blockbuster indeed — is the new exhibition on view at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and, a hundred or so feet away, the Stedelijk, the country’s premiere museum of modern and contemporary art and design. The single exhibition flows coherently from museum to museum, itself a feat. Kiefer isn’t for the faint of heart. His work is wild, erudite, and bizarre, more to be revered than loved. If you can get to Amsterdam, see it, but it takes work.

With 200 paintings by Van Gogh, 300 drawings, and work by artists connected to him, the Van Gogh Museum is a trove for Van Gogh research and for scholarship on his place among living artists. It’s also the Netherlands’ most visited museum. The Stedelijk is hip and cool, in a good way, having an edgy collection with stars from Mondrian to young European artists. This is the first time the two heavy-hitter museums have collaborated on an exhibition, and Kiefer is best described as a cosmic force.

There’s no such thing as a little Kiefer, so I can’t say a little Kiefer goes a long way. His art is uncharted territory — immense, intense, and Wagnerian. I didn’t much like Where Have All the Flowers Gone? at first. Too Teutonic. It takes close looking, deep breathing, as well as deep thinking. The art is weighty and hypnotic. Much of it is hypnotic.

Kiefer, born in 1945 as Nazi Germany lurched to the abyss, turned 80 a couple of weeks ago. As a young artist, still a student in the 1960s, he observed the willed forgetfulness of the Nazi years by Germans of nearly all stripes. In 1969, he dressed in his father’s Wehrmacht uniform, stood on the banks of a placid German lake, a snow-capped mountain, or the Colosseum in Rome, and snapped black-and-white self-portraits with his arm raised à la “Sieg Heil.” He titled the group Occupations. It’s performance art, a parody of travelogues, and a repackaging of the wartime ghosts that Germany still exhaled. Other than Kiefer, the spaces are empty. He’s saluting to no one who’s living.

So reckless, so inflammatory was Kiefer’s series that it made news not only in Germany and throughout America and Europe; it also hit my local newspaper, the New Haven Register, which tended to limit its arts coverage to craft fairs. He’d stuck a rusty poker into a deep German wound. He was launched. By the 1990s, he was famous and one of Germany’s richest men. Was he a neo-Nazi? Did he make a pact with Satan? Kiefer’s not a Brutalist but he’s inspired by brutality, horrified and inspired by Nazi brutality but also by the apocalyptic wrecks made of German cities. These wrecks, to him sites that appall, still have a unique beauty. Kiefer isn’t a Holocaust artist by any means, though the catastrophe for European Jews informs and moves him. He’s immersed in the poetry of Paul Celan, the Romanian Holocaust survivor whose German-language poetry conveys the Nazi years as a universal evil but as distinctly German, too.

“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is a Pete Seeger song that Americans link to the ’60s folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary, but Marlene Dietrich sang it in German. From Weimar cabaret and movie fame to ardent anti-Nazi, sultry and naughty, Dietrich sharpened the song’s vaguely pacifist feel. In her voice, and in German, she evoked the themes of human destiny, the past, war’s madness, and the strange beauty of both art and devastation. Kiefer thinks her version suits the work.

As Kiefer focused on the horror of recent German history, even on the props the Nazis made of German heroes from the past, paint didn’t seem nearly enough. He has collected rubble for years, since, by 1945, it was Germany’s ubiquitous matter. He makes sculpture from it. Straw, ash, and soil became a material, mixed with paint. Sometimes he uses a flamethrower to burn straw already fixed to a painting to get the color, density, and design of the ash that’s left. He burns, a studio assistant then hoses the thing, and the picture exits on casters, smoking. He uses lead, which he calls alchemic, but it’s poisonous, too, and heavy, like the weight and gravity of the past. Sometimes he hacks at a painting, using a palette knife to remove chunks of layers after they’ve hardened like bark. He’s performative and theatrical, and I don’t mean of the Noël Coward school.

By 2000, he was attaching not only straw to his canvases but also petrified plants, lead sculpture, epoxied clothes, old clay pots, and farm implements such as pitchforks and scythes that look as if they came from the Devil’s bag of tricks. He wants chaos and order in his work but puts his thumb on the chaos side. All of which is to say that he’s not Mary Cassatt. Kiefer’s an artist like no other.

What does this have to do with Van Gogh, dead since 1890? The exhibition is described as a diptych, a two-parter, one part about Kiefer’s love of Van Gogh’s work and the idea of Van Gogh as a rebel, explored mostly at the Van Gogh Museum, and the other part showing Kiefer’s work over the last few years. As a teenager, Kiefer won an artist’s stipend allowing him to retrace Van Gogh’s steps from the Netherlands to Belgium to the south of France. He wasn’t much concerned with the emotional content of Van Gogh’s work or the artist’s unhappy life. To the young Kiefer, as he later wrote, “every single one of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes is an eruption, a manifestation of defiance.” Van Gogh’s composition is minimalist. There’s no shimmering light. He builds his pictures the way a bricklayer lays brick, one emphatic brushstroke at a time.

The exhibition does the best it can to compare and contrast the two artists. An enormous introductory gallery explores the sunflower and wheat fields as motifs in their work. Van Gogh’s paintings, such as Wheatfield with Crows, from 1890, and Shoes, from 1886, both less than 40 inches wide, hold their walls. Kiefer’s massive, vertical Sol Invictus, from 1995, and The Crows, from 2019 — which is 25 feet wide — don’t overwhelm them. Kiefer’s inspired by the sunflower as an umbilical cord to God and Heaven. Yellow is the color of the sun, the source of light and energy, and wheat’s yellow, too. It’s the timeless source of nourishment. Labor is the timeless lot of humanity, whether in the fields with a scythe or, in our times, with a laptop. Rows of wheat fields, or the furrows of freshly plowed fields — Van Gogh specialties — suggested to Kiefer the theme of journeys, roads to somewhere.

I was happy to see Winslow Homer’s Veteran in a New Field, from 1865, get a spotlight in the catalogue. Harvesting wheat is a tried-and-true subject in art. For Homer, a Civil War veteran in the field is a return to normality. For Homer and Kiefer, fields are also where battles happen, men cut down like wheat with a scythe. Van Gogh’s Shoes depict mundane objects that take a beating, but his scene is at that hard-to-find intersection of ugly and prosaic with poetic and powerful. Wheatfield with Crows is beautiful, too, but it’s menacing. A flock of swooping crows against a cobalt sky is more medieval than Monet. As a teen and as an old man, Kiefer is drawn to all of this. He starts to think about straw from wheat not only as a subject but as a material. In 2019’s Starry Night, he uses bunches of straw arranged in concentric circles in the sky.

The Van Gogh Museum’s half of the show displays a group of drawings by Van Gogh in the 1880s and by Kiefer in the 1960s. Kiefer’s drawings aren’t polished. They’re anti-academic. They’re not about form, idealism, dogma, or emulation of past masters. On his trip to discover Van Gogh, he hitchhiked. He drew primitive types he met on his travels. They’re not lissome. Kiefer’s lines are bunched and insistent. Supple he ain’t, ever.

Van Gogh’s father was a Protestant minister, and he thought seriously about following in his footsteps. He didn’t, though he was always religious, more as a nature mystic, and saw his life as a pilgrimage. The Van Gogh Museum’s part of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? introduces and develops Kiefer’s own pilgrimage. The Stedelijk gives it Wagnerian dimensions. Simon Schama, the British art historian, writes in the catalogue about Kiefer’s work in the exhibition, explaining why he’s in a world apart from most artists living today. Kiefer’s “not about irony, theory-clotted navel gazing, cheaply bought moralizing.” If anyone can ever say “that’s a relief” about Kiefer, it’s on these grounds.

The anchor work at the Stedelijk, called Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and made last year, covers the walls of the hall around the museum’s central staircase. On either side of the hall is a 49-foot-long picture composed of emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, clay, dried flowers, straw, fabric, steel, charcoal, photographs, and layers of canvas. Two narrow, tall pictures are at the top of the stairs. Petals drop to the floor from the dried flowers, as if they’re tears from Heaven. A nearly square scene is on the wall at the top of the stairs.

The lower halves of the two 49-footers are packed with stiff, battered, disembodied clothing — trousers, blouses, shirts, skirts — hanging from rusty steel tubes that protrude from the surface. It’s as if the people who once filled the garments have disintegrated to nothing, which is the biblical way of all flesh. Flat paintings of human figures fill the upper half, their abstracted bodies against gold grounds. Kiefer views gold as the look of divine light. Gold grounds suggest late medieval and early Renaissance religious scenes from Italy as well as Byzantine icons. The pictures are tall, about 20 feet, so we viewers are busy, bewildered bees buzzing at the bottom, walking and talking and looking from the floor. Heaven and Earth, death and life, unfold.

Looking at this opus, I thought about Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze in Vienna, painted around 1901 and inspired by Wagner’s tribute to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Klimt’s frieze is only 100 or so feet wide, so it’s a piker compared with Kiefer’s work, which, technically isn’t a frieze. Still, it’s got an impressive mix of Byzantine, mythological, musical, and medieval references, monsters here and there, and lots about lust. Klimt ends on a happy note, though, with a choir of angels from Paradise. It’s a tidy package.

Kiefer delivers a fine kettle of fish. In the last two galleries, the sun becomes an engorged monster. Wheat fields, pantheistic places of abundance, turn claustrophobic and punishing. I didn’t spot any strutting skeletons, but we didn’t need them to know we’re seeing apocalypse in action, German-style. Austrians like Klimt spoke German and, in 1914 and 1939, went down the tubes with Germans, but Vienna is closer to Russia and Italy than it is to Berlin. Call me crazy, and I’d call the Austrians crazy, but ultimately, they’re romantic, or at least aphrodisiac. It’s not called the Viennese waltz for nothing. Kiefer is erudite and infuses his work with allusions to Icarus, Saturn, the Norse gods, Lilith, Jason and the Argonauts, the Sphinx, and much else from mythology. He looks at art as being about human awareness and acknowledgment, like mythology, a means to suggest who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. Unlike Klimt, he does not propose a choir from Paradise. For him, the answer is no more definite than construction, destruction, and punishment.

The last work in the exhibition, called Rising, Rising, Falling Down, is from 2024 so it’s where Kiefer is now. The title is from Goethe’s Faust, in which Faust, looking for life’s meaning, makes a bargain with Mephistopheles, a nogoodnik if there ever was one. Give me transcendent bliss in my life, even for a passage, Faust promises, and I will serve Satan forever in Hell. The thing is black-and-white photographs dangling among lead ribbons, so it looks like unwound, descending reels of film. Faust has a happy ending, so Kiefer, at 80, might be hoping for the best. I look at it, putting aside Faust, as Kiefer’s rumination on the Stasi’s mass surveillance and enlistment of hundreds of thousands of Germans to spy on friends and family. Putting aside the Holocaust, revelations about the Stasi have to be the central drama and taboo among Germans from the East. After seeing so much Kiefer, it was hard to be upbeat.

The Dutch aren’t German, taste-wise. They like Hals, Rembrandt, and paintings of clouds, or “vetter,” as they call it, cows, and the serenity of Vermeer. They think Van Gogh is very French. That said, the Kiefer galleries were packed. There’s a chronology at the Van Gogh Museum charting the speedy, full Dutch embrace of Kiefer’s work starting in the 1970s and continuing today. Anne Frank is rightly famous, but the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands during the war were brutal for nearly everyone. As a subject, the war involved fewer taboos among the Dutch as Kiefer was becoming famous. These days, the Dutch are naturally pacifist, as is Kiefer, and less queasy about reckoning with apocalypse. The pot habit and, now, LSD’s revival take the edge off.

At fewer than 200 pages and sumptuously illustrated, the catalogue’s great. Kiefer writes an essay that’s conversational. Schama, a British Jew born a few weeks before Kiefer, has been deeply engaged with Kiefer’s art for years. He’s insightful and a superb communicator. There is a good essay on Kiefer in the Netherlands and a thorough chronology.

I have no quibbles about the exhibition, except that a measured condensation would have been a good idea. I don’t mind being shattered or harrowed or amazed. Most exhibitions I visit are earnest, smug, and dull, especially in America. Kiefer in abundance is, by nature, overbearing, but he’s German. To absorb Kiefer is to let the work absorb the viewer. This takes time. Fewer objects give visitors more time. He’s the most immersive of artists.