Anselm Kiefer Wonders if We’ll Ever Learn

Anselm Kiefer’s new installation seems to envelop the grand staircase of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Paintings reach from floor to ceiling in colors of oxidized copper and gold leaf. Army uniforms stiffened with splattered paint hang at eye level. Dried flower petals tumble down the canvases onto the floor. A self-portrait of Kiefer as a young man lies at the base of one panel, with a tree growing out of his chest.

This installation is the title work of Kiefer’s monumental solo exhibition, which comprises about 25 paintings, 13 drawings and three films by Kiefer, from 1973 to the present, in addition to eight van Gogh works. “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” sprawls across two of Amsterdam’s largest modern art museums, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk.

The show, which opens on Friday — the day after Kiefer’s 80th birthday — and runs through June 9, is the result of ambitious collaboration between the adjacent institutions in the heart of the city. Mounting the exhibit at two museums made sense on a sheer physical level, too, because of the size of Kiefer’s vision: Nearly every work takes up a wall or a room.

What links the two parts of this “diptych,” as the curator Edwin Becker calls the dual exhibition, is Kiefer’s antiwar sentiment, which is expressed in subtle and overt ways.

The title and the new piece at the center of the Stedelijk refer to the 1955 protest anthem “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” a folk song by Pete Seeger (although Kiefer uses the lyrics from the German version popularized by Marlene Dietrich in the early 1960s).