At a new exhibition in Amsterdam, celebrated post-war German artist Anselm Kiefer – known for attacking his canvases with a chisel and building works from straw, lead and flower petals – wanted to start repairing his old works.

Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk Museum, admitted in the run-up to a new exhibition opening that Kiefer wanted to set about one of its paintings to fix a hole that shouldn’t have been there.

His 1982 painting Innenraum (Interior), owned by the Stedelijk, has apparently acquired a large and unintended tear. “He saw an unevenness and he thought: maybe we should really repair this,” said Wolfs at the press launch of Where have all the Flowers Gone (Sag mir wo die Blumen sind) in Amsterdam. “It’s a work that’s more than 40 years old, so maybe we should look at it with a restorer and make that work even better. It hasn’t happened yet

“But you often see that with artists: at a certain moment, if they see their old works again, they would have wanted to do a few things differently. We can’t allow [him to use a hammer himself] – we try to keep those kinds of weapons out of our doors!”

The exhibition, which opens on Friday, includes a new, 24m long mural around the top of the Stedelijk’s historic staircase as well as giant works inspired by Van Gogh in the Van Gogh Museum. It revolves around themes of war, death, decay but also renewal.

Kiefer became famous photographing himself doing the verboten Nazi salute after the war and for this show was inspired by the 1950s Pete Seeger anti-war song, Where have all the flowers gone, sung in German by Marlene Dietrich. The huge, new, multi-panelled work named after this song incorporates empty, battered, military uniforms and images of dead bodies spilling rose petals onto the floor.

While Kiefer, 80 tomorrow, said that he was happy for his show to be seen in an anti-war light, it was not a direct polemic. “When I work, I never illustrate some political events but I’m very well informed,” he said. “[It’s] not that I make a programme: now we speak about the Ukraine war. It’s all in me.

“This wonderful song I have always in my ear [and] there is one sentence: when will we ever learn? This sentence, I put on the wall.”

Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, runs at the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum from March 7 to June 9, 2025