Walking in the steps of a master has long been a rite of passage for young artists. Bach undertook a journey on foot of almost 400 kilometres from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude play, and Puccini’s obituarists tried to mythologise a (far shorter) walk he made from Lucca to Pisa to hear Verdi’s Aida. In 1963, the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer received a student travel bursary and decided to use it for a similar sort of pilgrimage, though his idol was long dead. He hitchhiked across the Netherlands, Belgium and France to locations associated with Vincent Van Gogh.

Over the course of his travels, Kiefer wrote in his diary of how moving it was to ‘find exactly the same landscape that Van Gogh painted’ and see ‘Van Gogh motifs… everywhere’, but expressed disappointment at the uniformity of modern life and the abandonment of distinctive local traditions and costumes. Arriving finally in the Provençal countryside, he immersed himself in the sights and sounds that had inspired Van Gogh, mucking in with agricultural life and sketching local scenes and people. Over the decades that followed, Kiefer’s desire to pay tribute to his hero grew more ambitious, and he began to create canvases on a monumental scale, particularly in the late 2010s.

It is these that dominate the Kiefer / Van Gogh show at the Royal Academy of Arts, which explores connections between the two artists, in terms of technique, shared artistic themes, and deeper philosophical affinities, as well as their respective representations of nature. It is a small, three-room exhibition. The first and third mirror one another: each contains four recent works by Kiefer (all vast canvases, with the exception of one sculpture in the final room) and a single painting by Van Gogh. The second room, where the earlier artist is showcased, displays images on a much smaller, more intimate scale.

In this central space – the most appealing part of the exhibition – we find nine Van Gogh paintings and sketches, of predominantly Provençal landscapes and people, and six small Kiefer sketches undertaken during his student sojourn. Though the latter wrote in 1963 that ‘I don’t want to try to copy Van Gogh’s style. That would be too primitive,’ the similarities in technique are striking between the almost pointillist Van Gogh sketch of La Crau seen from Montmajour (1888), with signature curvilinear trees, and Kiefer’s sketches of a nearby area in graphite and the very modern medium of ballpoint pen. Here is a young artist virtually copying the works of an older one, rather as composers used to copy out their predecessors’ scores as part of their artistic apprenticeship. Kiefer’s uncompromising sketches of the faces of locals – a sombre young girl clutching a bunch of flowers and a tough-faced bullfighter – sit evocatively alongside Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne (1880), a portrait of the local station café proprietress.

In the outer rooms, we are unable to compare related works side by side. The famous paintings that have inspired Kiefer reside elsewhere: in galleries across Europe, the United States, and the Far East. But anyone who has ever seen a Van Gogh on a postcard or tea-towel will grasp the references, not only in composition (the typical high positioning of the horizon within the frame, for instance) but in thematic motifs.

Sunflowers abound: in Hortus Conclusus, a monochrome collage of woodcuts with a man lying dead under immense drooping sunflowers, and in Danaë, a lanky sculpture of a single sunflower, from which gold leaf-coated seeds fall onto a pile of what appear to be leaden piles of paper or loosely bound books. (Van Gogh’s Piles of French Novels, incidentally, which seems curiously out of place in the first room, would have been far better-placed in proximity to Danaë.)

And then there is Kiefer’s own The Starry Night (De Sterrennacht) (2019), an epic tribute to Van Gogh’s painting, in which the swirl of light that unfolds from left to centre is instantly recognisable. As with his other large-scale works, Kiefer emphasises texture, using copious quantities of wood, straw, sticks, and pieces of wire that burst out of a canvas so large it fills an entire wall. The background is not midnight blue, but aqua, picked out with contrasting gold leaf – a signature colour scheme that Kiefer uses repeatedly in the works exhibited here.

Van Gogh’s landscapes depict the French countryside in lush, vibrant health. His quasi-Impressionistic Poppy Field (1890), covered in energetic daubs of scarlet, is suggestive of nature in full bloom. Field with Irises near Arles (1888) depicts flourishing crops, flowers in bloom, and trees laden with foliage or olives. Kiefer’s landscapes inescapably evoke Van Gogh, but nature, as represented here, is in a state of distress. The vast The Crows (Die Krähen) (2019), is influenced by Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ (not on display here), which Kiefer called ‘an amazing abstraction’ in 1963. His own representation seems post-apocalyptic, replacing Van Gogh’s primary-toned blue and yellow with a dull-toned field of parched crops underneath a sinister sky bleached gold by a sun that has become insufferably strong.

Kiefer’s three-dimensional technique creates an inescapable feeling of aridness, and he takes this to extremes in The Last Load (Das letzte Fuder, 2019), a virtually monochrome representation of charred earth, its monotony broken only by a wheatsheaf, or perhaps a funeral pyre, more evocative of death than of abundance. Kiefer regularly scorches his canvases to create this feeling of devastation. Perhaps in this image he sought to evoke what he described in his diary as the ‘bare, rugged, wild fields’ around the Monastère Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, where Van Gogh was incarcerated in an asylum.

If both of these artists are fascinated, as the exhibition captions tell us, by the cycle of life, then Kiefer seems to suggest, in his repetitive, gargantuan canvases cluttered with detritus, that this cycle is now under considerable strain, perhaps even at breaking point. We get the message. Such doom-laden narratives are very much in keeping with the pessimistic Zeitgeist of our time, but Kiefer over-eggs the pudding. Even at his most broken, Van Gogh managed to produce paintings filled with colour, joie de vivre and hope.