The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gerhard Richter · Kölner Dom, the window of the south transept · one window scored as one work with its site: the glazing that fills every lancet and tracery head of the Gothic opening, and the coloured light it casts into the transept; the stone tracery and the cathedral are its setting, not its making · about 11,263 squares of mouth-blown antique glass in 72 colours, each about 9.6 cm a side, over about 106 square metres · 2007 · Cologne Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996 · whole as made, nothing in it replaced; it fills the opening where nineteenth-century figurative glazing stood until the Second World War and plain glass stood after it
Mode
Site-specific abstraction in stained glass; a field of colour placed by chance, scored with the building it lights
Mythos
The church window as the threshold where light enters a sacred house, and the many made one by chance; evoked through the site and the medium, built in part
Phase
Glazed in 2007 into an opening whose figurative glass was lost in the Second World War and which stood in plain glass until then; nineteen years in place
Presentation
About 11,263 squares of mouth-blown antique glass in 72 colours, each about 9.6 cm a side, filling every lancet and tracery head of one Gothic window
Register
Calm brilliance: a flicker of units near to, an even radiance at a distance, and coloured light moving across stone
Scale
One window of about 106 square metres in the south transept of a Gothic cathedral, lit through it on every clear day of the year
Governing Proposition
Some eleven thousand squares of mouth-blown glass in 72 colours, placed by chance and edited by the artist, fill the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, where figurative glazing stood until the war and plain glass stood after it. No figure, sign or story appears. The wager of the window is that a Gothic opening’s work was always light before it was narrative, that an order no hand composed can stand in a sacred house without irony, and that the oldest unit of leaded glass can be the pixel of its own year without either reading cancelling the other.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Cologne Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, holds in its south transept façade one great window in stone tracery: lancets below, tracery heads above. Its nineteenth-century figurative glazing was lost in the Second World War, and the opening stood in plain post-war glass until 2007. In that year it was glazed to the design of Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932. The work scored here is that glazing as it fills every lancet and tracery head of the one window, and as it acts in the building: in the coloured light it throws on the transept’s stone and floor across the day.
The cathedral, its other glass and the tracery are not Richter’s and are not scored as made. They are the site the work answers. The stone draws the window’s outline, and the window is read inside it: every square is set in a frame drawn by other hands, and every judgment on this page is made of the glass with its frame and its building. Scored with its site, the window is credited with what it does to the transept, and not with the transept.
The means are few. About 11,263 squares of mouth-blown antique glass, in 72 colours, each about 9.6 cm on a side, cover a glazed area of about 106 square metres. The figures hold together: that many squares at that size make about 103.8 square metres of glass, and the difference is of the order of the lead and the edge pieces cut where the tracery curves. The colours were assigned to the squares by a random procedure and then edited by the artist, so that no figure, sign or narrative appears. Spread evenly, each colour would fill about 156 squares, and in the window none dominates.
Movement II
The window replaced nothing that still stood. The figurative glass of the nineteenth century had been gone since the war, and what filled the opening was plain glass: light without colour and without image. Richter’s window keeps one half of that condition and reverses the other. It gives the opening its colour back, and it withholds the picture.
The refusal answers a history. A window of figures had been lost, and its replacement could have restored a programme of figures or chosen a new one. This window answers the loss by declining any figure at all. Of the orders the work holds, history is one: the lost glazing and the plain glass are present in it as what it will not repeat. The others are light and perception, the sacred as the house the light enters, and chance as an order without a designer. The person, the body, the family, labour, the state and any story are absent, and a form that withholds every figure cannot hold them.
The archetype the window takes up is the oldest in its medium: the church window as the threshold where light enters a sacred house, light as the presence of what cannot be pictured. The window does that and nothing else, and so it carries the archetype by function rather than by allusion. But it builds by withdrawal. There is no particular here to become archetypal, only colour, and the myth of light belongs to the building before it belongs to the glass. A second pattern stands beside the first, the cosmos made by chance, the many held as one; it too is evoked more than built.
Movement III
The square is the work’s unit and its argument. It is the oldest unit of leaded glass, the pane, and it is the pixel of 2007, the unit of the screen in the year the window was made. The window lets both readings stand in the same squares, and neither cancels the other. Made figurative, the window would be one more window with a story to read; made a single colour, or a designed composition, it would lose the claim of an order no one composed, and the even radiance in which no area outranks another.
The decisions that matter are few and load-bearing. The palette is held to 72 colours. The square is about 9.6 cm, a size at which the colours mix when seen from the floor of the transept and separate as one comes near. Chance is edited, so that the field stays even and no colour gathers into a shape. At the curves of the tracery the grid is cut, not bent: it yields to the stone, and the form is visibly an answer to its frame. The execution in mouth-blown antique glass, by the glassworks and the studio that made and set it, is part of the work and is credited to it.
The costs are as plain as the gains. There is no drawing in the window and no modelling of light within a pane. The range of mark is one unit, by design. Much of the craft is the fabricator’s, a command of glass rather than a command shown in the work’s own surface. And the form, though it is the instrument of what the window knows, is a known instrument applied, not one found in the making of this work.
Movement IV
Any one square could take another of the 72 colours and nothing would be lost. That is the design: no part is singly required, because chance placed it. What is required is the rule, the module, the limited palette and the refusal of any figure, and each is compelled by what the window does, which is to give the opening back its light without giving it an image. Nothing could be added, a figure least of all. The scale is set by the tracery rather than argued by the work, and the editing admits that the procedure was not left wholly to itself: the necessity is the system’s, and the contingency is every part’s.
One law governs every lancet and every tracery head: the square, the palette, chance. The foot of a lancet and the cut pieces at the top of the tracery obey it alike. The law is narrow, one unit and one rule, and its wider test is its meeting with the building’s law, the gridded square against the Gothic curve. The window does not pretend to the tracery’s geometry and does not fight it. The stone draws the outline and the glass fills it by its own rule, and the meeting holds.
What the procedure brings into the open is a proposition about authorship. Chance takes the place of the designing hand, and the result, set in a sacred place, is received as fitting and not as irony: an order no one composed, standing in a house where the sacred has been pictured for centuries. With every figure withdrawn, the window shows what stained glass was doing beneath its pictures, which was making light. Both claims hold. But most of what the window gives is a condition of perception, colour and radiance, and its proposition is carried more by its circumstances than legible in the glass.
Movement V
The window rises in a transept of great height, and when the sun stands in the south its colour is cast in moving patches across the piers and the floor. The building is lit through it, on every clear day of the year; its height is daily, not a single moment. Much of that height is lent by the cathedral, and the same squares in a low modern room would be a fine field of colour and not grandeur. The register is calm brilliance, and from near to the surface is a flicker of units that does not itself rise.
Against the tradition it enters, figurative stained glass in a Gothic cathedral and the post-war practice of artists’ windows in historic churches, the turn is large: no image and no sign, by chance, in one of the most prominent windows of a World Heritage Site, where an iconographic programme would be expected. The stake was public. But the method was Richter’s own and proven, the grid of colours placed by chance of his colour-chart paintings of the 1970s, here brought to glass at a new scale; the swerve lies in the placing more than in the invention. It changed what a commission for a historic cathedral could accept, and artists’ windows in historic churches followed, though how much of that run it caused cannot be shown. In painting it redirected little.
Nineteen years is a short record. The window is whole as made, nothing in it lost or replaced, and it is a fixed part of every visit to the south transept of a working cathedral that is among the most visited buildings in Germany, a building with a permanent works yard that has kept its glass for centuries. Its pixel idiom may come to read as the 2000s. Its commentary runs on a short list of terms, chance and providence, the digital module, what a church may picture after the twentieth century; its light does not repeat, changing with the hour, the season and the weather. The opening that stood in plain glass is coloured again, and nothing in it is a picture.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites hard here, and the work invites it. Any one square could take another of the 72 colours and nothing would be lost: by design no part is singly required, because chance placed it. What is required is the rule. The square module, small enough that the window reads from the transept floor as glass and not as a picture of glass; the limited palette; the refusal of any figure. Each is compelled by what the work does, which is to give the opening back its light without giving it an image, and nothing could be added, a figure least of all. Against it, the scale is set by the tracery rather than argued by the work, and the edited chance admits that the procedure was not left wholly to itself. Necessity of the system, contingency of every part.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Two things are brought into the open, and both can be stated. First, that a Gothic window’s work was always light before it was story: with every figure withdrawn, colour alone makes the transept glow and throws itself across the stone, and the window shows what stained glass was doing beneath its pictures. Second, that an order no one composed can stand in a sacred place without irony: chance takes the place of the designing hand, and the result is received as fitting, a quiet proposition about authorship and providence. Both hold. What keeps the axis well below the gate is that most of what the window gives is a condition of perception, colour and radiance, and its second meaning is carried more by its circumstances than legible in the glass.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Scored with its site. The elevation is real and it recurs: the window rises in a transept of great height, and when the sun stands in the south its colour is cast in moving patches across the piers and the floor, so that the building itself is lit through it on every clear day of the year. That frequency is the window’s strength here; its height is daily, not a single moment. The cost is that much of the height is lent by the cathedral: the same squares in a low modern room would be a fine field of colour, not grandeur. The register is calm brilliance rather than terror or transport, and from near to the surface is a flicker of units that does not itself rise. It stands above the delight of Broadway Boogie Woogie, at 8.0 on this axis, and well below the enveloping rooms of the Water Lilies, at 9.0.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The archetype is the oldest the medium has: the church window as the threshold at which light enters a sacred house, light as the presence of what cannot be pictured. Here it bears load, since the window does exactly that and nothing else; and a second pattern stands beside it, a cosmos made by chance, the many held as one. But the window builds by withdrawal. It evokes the archetype through the site and the medium more than it constructs it in a particular, and there is no particular here to become archetypal, only colour. The myth of light belongs to the building before it belongs to the glass. Evoked strongly and built in part, but not made from a particular, and well short of the gate.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Measured against the tradition the window enters, figurative stained glass in a Gothic cathedral and the post-war practice of artists’ windows in historic churches, the turn is large: no image, no sign, a distribution by chance in one of the most prominent windows of a cathedral that is a World Heritage Site, where an iconographic programme would be expected. The stake was public, and the wager could have been lost. Against that, the method was Richter’s own and proven: the grid of colours placed by chance belongs to his colour-chart paintings of the 1970s, here brought to glass at a new scale. The swerve lies in the placing more than in the invention, a wager on a method already won, set where it could be lost.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Substitute another form and the window stops knowing what it knows. Made figurative, it becomes one more window with a story to read; made a single colour, or a designed abstract composition, it loses the claim of an order no one composed, and the even radiance in which no area outranks another. The square module is the knowledge in a second sense: it is at once the oldest unit of leaded glass and the pixel of 2007, and the window lets both readings stand in the same squares. The grid also yields to the stone, cut at the curves of the heads, so the form is visibly an answer to its frame. Held below the top because the form, though it is the instrument, is a known instrument applied rather than one found in the making of this work.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and the evidence is nineteen years. On return the window yields formally: its light changes with the hour, the season and the weather, so that no two visits see the same cast of colour, and it is revisited by the nature of the place, a working cathedral. Semantically it has drawn sustained commentary, on chance and providence, on the digital module, on what a church may picture after the twentieth century. But that commentary runs on a short list of terms, and the window’s depth is shown more in the changing light than in new kinds of question asked of it. A forecast of depth more than a demonstration.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is stained glass and art for churches in Germany and Europe, and German painting, in the 2000s. Intrinsic force: the window reorganised what a commission for a historic cathedral could accept, chance and a pure field of colour in place of an iconographic programme, and it did so in one of the most visited buildings in Germany, before a very wide public. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in attention, and real in the run of artists’ windows in historic churches that followed, though how much of that run this window caused cannot be shown and is discounted. In painting it redirected little, since its means were Richter’s of the 1970s, and nineteen years is short for reach to prove itself.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, as made, nothing lost or replaced. Presence: continuous and very wide, in a working cathedral that is among the most visited buildings in Germany, where the window is a fixed part of every visit to the south transept; fame is presence and not proof, and lifts the figure only so far. Fabric: mouth-blown glass in a building with a permanent works yard that has kept its glass for centuries, the smallest charge. Against it, a surface that could read as fixed to its moment, the pixel idiom of the 2000s, and only nineteen years of demonstrated survival. The figure is the one nineteen years allows, and not a forecast lifted by fame.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged as command of glass and light at architectural scale, and load-bearing at the decisions that matter: a palette held to 72 colours; a square of about 9.6 cm, at which the colours mix at the distance of the floor and separate as one comes near; the editing of chance so that the field stays even and no colour dominates; the handling of the grid where it meets the curves of the tracery. The execution in mouth-blown antique glass, by the glassworks and the studio, is part of the work and credited to it. The costs: there is no drawing and no modelling of light within a pane, the range of mark is one unit by design, and much of the craft is the fabricator’s rather than a command shown in the work’s own surface.
Score: 8.2 / 10
One physics governs every lancet and every tracery head: the square, the palette, chance. Take the two most distant elements, the foot of a lancet and the cut pieces at the top of the tracery, and they obey the same law. But narrowness is not coherence, and the law is narrow: one unit, one rule. The wider test is the meeting of the window’s law with the building’s, the gridded square against the Gothic curve, and here the window holds. It does not pretend to the tracery’s geometry and does not fight it; the stone draws the outline and the glass fills it by its own rule. That meeting is the widest range the work covers, and it is coherent.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Achieved, not attempted. The orders held in the one structure are four: light and perception; the sacred, as the house the light enters; chance, as an order without a designer; and history, the figurative glazing lost in the war and the plain glass that stood in its place, which the window answers by refusing a picture. These are integrated in the light itself, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the person, the body, the family, labour, the state, any story. A form that withholds every figure cannot hold what lives through figures, and the figure says so.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.3, then The Sublime and The Made at 8.2. A form in which the square is at once the oldest unit of leaded glass and the pixel of its year, and chance yields an even radiance no composed field could give; a window whole as made, a fixed part of every visit to a working cathedral among the most visited buildings in Germany; coloured light cast across the transept’s stone on every clear day; and a palette, a module and an editing of chance that bear load at every decision that matters.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: light, the sacred, chance and history held in the light itself, and no person, body, family, labour, state or story. Above it, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5: a disclosure that is mostly a condition of perception, its proposition about authorship carried more by circumstance than legible in the glass; and the archetype of the window as the threshold of light, evoked through site and medium and built only in part, with no particular to carry it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.3, The Swerve at 7.8, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6, The Unconcealment at 7.5 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met, on the line: The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep stand at 7.5, against 7.5, and no axis but The Encompassed falls lower; The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: the twelve sum to 93.3, an average of 7.78 that displays 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral, glazed to Gerhard Richter’s design in 2007, as it stands in the cathedral, and of its documented making and reception; from photographs and the record, not from a day in the transept, so that the axes resting on the effect in place, The Sublime, The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well, are judged from image and record. The work scored is one window with its site: the glazing that fills every lancet and tracery head of the one opening, and the light it casts in the building. The cathedral, its other glass and the Gothic tracery are the setting the work answers and are not scored as made, except that the tracery sets the outline within which the window is read. The window stands whole as made in 2007, nothing in it lost or replaced; it fills the opening where the nineteenth-century figurative glazing stood until its loss in the Second World War, and where plain post-war glass stood after it until 2007, and neither is part of the work. The maker, year, place, means, count of squares and colours, size of square, glazed area and the random procedure edited by the artist are known securely; the agreement of count, module and area is a calculation (11,263 squares of 9.6 cm make about 103.8 square metres, against about 106 stated). No words of Richter’s or of anyone else are quoted, and no inscription or document is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the date and form of the dedication, the source from which the 72 colours were chosen, the glassworks and the studio that made and set the glass, the course of the commission and the subjects first proposed for it, the cost of the window and how it was met, its reception within the Church, the number of lancets, the height and width of the opening, the method of setting, whether any lancet repeats or mirrors another’s sequence, and which later windows follow from this one.