The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anselm Kiefer · a single painting, the one canvas scored · mixed media on canvas, large and horizontal, built up in encrusted layers · a long vaulted hall in steep central perspective, blackened and charred, small flames at an arched opening at the far end, the name Sulamith written in the painter’s hand at the upper left, no figure · 1983 · as it stands, with nothing known to be lost or replaced
Mode
A memorial painting without a figure; the perpetrators’ architecture taken for the victims’ memory
Mythos
A hall for heroes converted into tomb and temple; the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, through Celan the Jewish dead, her hair ash where Margarete’s is gold
Phase
One unchanging view; painted in 1983, among Kiefer’s Margarete and Sulamith pictures of 1981 to 1983
Presentation
One large horizontal canvas in mixed media, built up in encrusted layers; black, brown and grey, the far flames the only warm colour; one written word
Register
Dread and grandeur at once, held across the whole field at one temperature
Scale
One hall, one perspective, one fire and one name, at a size the body stands before
Governing Proposition
An empty vaulted hall, seen down its axis, is burnt black from vault to floor, and at its far end small flames burn in an arched opening, the only warm light in the picture. There is no figure. In the upper left the painter has written one word, Sulamith, the name of the ashen-haired woman of Paul Celan’s poem. The wager of the canvas is that a German who would remember the murdered must do it through the forms of those who murdered them, that the victim can be named and not shown, and that a hall made for the perpetrators’ glory, burnt and given her name, becomes her tomb and her temple.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Sulamith is one canvas, painted by Anselm Kiefer in 1983 in mixed media, large and horizontal, and the canvas alone is the work. It shows a long vaulted hall of masonry seen in steep central perspective. The vault and the walls are blackened, charred and encrusted. The floor runs back to a small arched opening at the far end, where small flames burn, the only warm light in the picture. There is no figure. In the upper left Kiefer has written the name Sulamith in his own hand.
The palette is black, brown and grey, the colours of ash and tar, and the far flames are the only warm colour. There is one perspective, with one vanishing point at the far opening; one written word; one fire. The picture is built of four elements, the hall, the perspective, the flames and the name, and none can be taken away. Without the flames the hall is a ruin; with them it is a sanctuary and a furnace at once. Without the name the canvas is a blackened hall; with it the whole image turns.
The hall is identified in the literature on the picture with a design made under the Reich for a funeral hall for its soldiers in Berlin. That identification is the usual one and is given here as such: the canvas shows only the hall, and the reading of it as the Reich’s own memorial, taken over, depends on the viewer knowing whose hall this was. Kiefer’s Innenraum of 1981, his painting of the hall of the Reich Chancellery, is the nearest sibling, and stands outside the work.
Movement II
The name comes from Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge, written about 1944 to 1945. The poem closes on two women set side by side, Margarete with golden hair and Sulamith with ashen hair: the German beloved and the Jewish one, and the second is burnt. Behind Sulamith stands the Shulamite, the bride of the Song of Songs, who is called to return. Through Celan she is the Jewish dead.
From 1981 to 1983 Kiefer made a run of pictures named for the two women. In the Margarete pictures straw stands for the golden hair. In Sulamith the ashen hair is not a passage in the picture but the whole of it: ash, char and burnt surface are her colour, so that the victim is the colour of everything and the figure of nothing. The painting refuses the image of suffering as the poem refuses it. She cannot be shown; she can be named.
The word in the corner, in the painter’s hand, is the only figure on the canvas, and the victim enters as a name, as on a memorial. So much enters by that one word that it is allusion as much as construction: the Song of Songs, the poem, the Jewish dead and the beloved all arrive through it. Love is named in the title and held nowhere in the picture. The poem is present as one word and no more.
Movement III
The perspective of the vault is drawn steep and true across the width of the canvas, and it holds. A central vanishing point puts the viewer in the hall, on the axis meant for ceremony, walking toward the fire. The hall is the height of the viewer’s body and more, and the eye is pulled down it, the blackness pressing on every side. The size makes the hall a place the body stands before, not an image of a place; as a photograph or a drawing, the matter and the scale would be lost, and with them the ash.
The black is built up in layers of matter, so that masonry, vault and floor stay legible through the burning. Matter is chosen for meaning and placed with intent. But the medium is one of crust, drip and accident, and much of the surface is the material’s doing rather than the hand’s: the command is of decisions more than of touch. In passages the encrustation muddies the reading of the architecture, and below the level of the image the incident of crust and stain is not, patch by patch, required. Some of it reads as material for its own sake.
The elevation is dreadful and grand at once, and it is held across the whole field, in vault, walls and floor together, not in one passage. It is also one impression, at one temperature: nothing in the canvas rises a second time in a different way. The grandeur of the hall is felt, and the picture can be charged with being drawn to what it mourns. That charge is part of what it shows: a German memory has no other forms to hand.
Movement IV
At the far end, in the small arched opening, the flames burn. They are the only warm colour and the one source of light. The fire is either a sanctuary lamp or an oven, and the picture will not decide. It burns at the place of the altar or the ark, and it is also the fire that made the ash.
The structure of the picture is a conversion. The hall made for the Reich’s heroic dead becomes the tomb and the temple of the people the Reich murdered: tomb, because it is a crypt, blackened as by burning; temple, because the light burns where the altar would stand. A hall made for glory is shown to be a tomb. The particular stays particular, one building and one line of one poem, and the conversion is built in the image, in the crypt, the burning and the fire at the altar’s place.
One law governs the canvas: everything in it has been burnt, and what was made for the perpetrators’ glory belongs now to the victims’ ash. The architecture of the Reich and the name of the Jewish woman written over it obey that law together: the hall is hers because it is burnt, and the name is legible because the hall is dark. The range of the picture is narrow in kind, one hall, one perspective, one word, one fire; its width is in what the law joins, perpetrator and victim, tomb and temple, poem and building.
Movement V
Kiefer was born in 1945. By 1983 his path of painting German myth and Nazi architecture in charred matter was set, in the attic pictures and in Innenraum, and it had already been punished: the German pavilion at Venice in 1980 drew the charge of reviving fascist forms. Postwar German abstraction had kept away from the image and from the Reich. Sulamith turns Kiefer’s path from the perpetrators’ myth to their victims, and it carried the charges that followed: appropriation, the aestheticizing of the Holocaust, the monumentalizing of what it mourned.
In America the standing of the work was carried by Kiefer’s retrospective of 1987 to 1988, and the picture has been among the most reproduced of his career and of German painting of its decade. Andreas Huyssen’s essay on the terror of history and the temptation of myth (1989) and Lisa Saltzman’s Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (1999) keep it, with Innenraum, at the centre of the question whether Kiefer’s myth works through the German past or is tempted by it. In forty-three years the question has not closed.
The matter is the meaning, and the matter is fragile. Thick encrusted layers of mixed media are not made to last as oil on canvas lasts, and Kiefer’s surfaces of these years are known to crack and shed; the present state of this canvas is not verified here. The hall holds history, the state, death, the sacred and a poem; it holds no person, no body, no family, no labour, no natural order but fire, and no consciousness but the viewer’s. The name is still written over the hall, and the fire at its end is still undecided.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test on a single image. The hall cannot go: it is the work’s body and its accusation, a memorial to the soldiers of the Reich. The perspective cannot go: it carries the viewer into the crypt, toward the one light. The flames cannot go: without them the hall is a ruin; with them it is a sanctuary and a furnace at once. The name cannot go: without it the canvas is the Reich’s hall, blackened; with it the hall belongs to the ashen-haired woman of Celan’s poem, and the whole image turns. Four elements, each required, and nothing added beside them. What yields is the surface below the level of the image: the incident of crust, drip and stain is not, patch by patch, required, and some of it reads as material for its own sake.
Score: 8.7 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated. A German who would remember the murdered must do it through the forms of those who murdered them: there is no other architecture of memory to hand, and the picture takes the Reich’s own hall for its dead and gives it to Sulamith. The victim cannot be shown, only named: she is present as ash, as the burnt colour of everything, never as a figure, and the painting refuses the image of suffering as the poem refuses it. And the monumental is itself a crypt: a hall made for glory is a tomb. These are claims about a nation and about representation, not a mood. What holds the axis is that the disclosure is ambiguous at its root: the grandeur of the hall is felt, and a hostile viewer can say the picture is drawn to what it mourns.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is dreadful and grand at once, and it is the work: a hall the height of the viewer’s body and more, opening to a depth the eye is pulled into, the blackness pressing on every side, and at the end a small fire, which is either a sanctuary lamp or an oven, and the picture will not decide. The height is very high and is held across the whole field, not in one passage: the vault, the walls and the floor all carry the pull. What holds the axis below the top is frequency and range: one image, one impression, at one temperature. Nothing in the canvas rises a second time in a different way.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the picture is a conversion: the hall the Reich made for its own heroic dead becomes the tomb and temple of the people it murdered. Tomb, because it is a crypt, blackened as by burning. Temple, because the light burns at the place of the altar or the ark. Over it stands the Shulamite, the bride of the Song of Songs, through Celan the Jewish dead, her hair ash where Margarete’s is gold. The particular stays particular: one building, one poem’s one line. Held below the top because so much of the archetype enters by one written word, which is allusion rather than construction, and because the conversion depends on the viewer knowing whose hall this was.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: postwar German abstraction, which kept away from the image and from the Reich; and, by 1983, Kiefer’s own path of painting German myth and Nazi architecture in charred matter, already proven in the attic pictures and in Innenraum (1981), and already punished, for the German pavilion at Venice in 1980 drew the charge of reviving fascist forms. The turn proper to this canvas is from the perpetrators’ myth to the victims: a German painter born in 1945 taking up Celan’s Sulamith and setting her in the Reich’s own memorial hall. The stake was real: the charge of appropriation, of aestheticizing the Holocaust, of monumentalizing what it mourned. But the means were his, and a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Substitute another form and the picture stops knowing what it knows. The matter is the meaning: the ash-and-tar blacks and the burnt surface are Sulamith’s ashen hair made into the whole field, so that the victim is the colour of everything and the figure of nothing. The perspective is the argument: a central vanishing point puts the viewer in the hall, on the axis meant for ceremony, walking toward the fire. The scale makes the hall a place the body stands before, not an image of a place. The word written in the corner, in the painter’s hand, is the only figure: the victim enters as a name, as on a memorial. As a photograph or a drawing, the matter and the scale are lost, and with them the ash. Only some of the surface incident is not doing this work.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise: forty-three years, and the argument over it has not closed. Is Kiefer’s myth a working-through of the German past or a temptation by it? Andreas Huyssen’s essay on the terror of history and the temptation of myth (1989) and Lisa Saltzman’s Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (1999), among much else, keep this canvas and its sibling Innenraum at the centre of that question, and the picture is a standing case in the debate over art after Auschwitz. It yields formally on return as well: the reading of the far light, the relation of word to hall, the layers of matter. Held below the top because the span is short, and because the debate is mostly about Kiefer’s project as a whole, with this canvas as one of its strongest exhibits.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American painting of the early 1980s, the years of the return to history. Intrinsic force: it showed that painting could take up the destruction of the Jews not by depicting it but through matter, architecture and a borrowed line of poetry, and that a German painter could do so through the forms of the perpetrators; with Innenraum it is the fullest statement of that possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painting of history in charred matter at the scale of architecture, the memorial thinking of the following decades, and the international standing of German painting, carried in America by Kiefer’s retrospective of 1987 to 1988. Discounted because the reach belongs to his work of 1981 to 1983 as a whole, and for the short span.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: no loss of what makes the image is known. Presence: continuous, as one of the most reproduced pictures of Kiefer’s career and of German painting of its decade. Fabric: this is where the charge falls. The surface is built of mixed media in thick encrusted layers, materials not made to last as oil on canvas lasts, and Kiefer’s surfaces of these years are known to crack and shed. The work’s matter is part of its meaning, so a change in the matter is a change in the work. The present state of this canvas is not verified, and the charge is for the risk its materials carry, not for a loss shown. Forty-three years is a short record, and the figure sits at the line.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged as command of mixed-media painting at the scale of architecture. The making is load-bearing. The perspective of the vault is drawn steep and true across the width of the canvas, and it holds; the black is built up in layers of matter so that masonry, vault and floor stay legible through the burning; the far light is kept small and warm against the whole field, and it carries the picture. Matter is chosen for meaning and placed with intent. The costs: the medium is one of crust, drip and accident, and much of the surface is the material’s doing rather than the hand’s, so the command credited is of decisions more than of touch; and in passages the encrustation muddies the reading of the architecture.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law: everything in the picture has been burnt, and what was made for the perpetrators’ glory belongs now to the victims’ ash. Take the two most distant elements: the architecture of the Reich and the name of the Jewish woman written over it. They obey that one law: the hall is hers because it is burnt, and the name is legible because the hall is dark. The flames at the end are the law’s one source, the fire that made the ash and the light of the sanctuary. Nothing in the canvas breaks it. What holds the axis is that the range is narrow in kind: one hall, one perspective, one word, one fire. The width is in what the law joins (perpetrator and victim, tomb and temple, poem and building), not in what the canvas shows, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held are several, and the hall places them. History: the Reich and the destruction of the Jews, joined in one building. The state: the memorial hall as the state’s own instrument of meaning. Death, as crypt and as ash. The sacred, in the sanctuary light at the end of the axis and in the Song of Songs. Art, in Celan’s poem, present as one word. Love enters only through the title, the Shulamite as the beloved, and it is named, not held. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no body, no family, no labour, no natural order but fire, no consciousness but the viewer’s. One empty hall holds much by allusion and little by integration.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.0, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, and The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Inner Law at 8.7. A form in which the burnt matter is the ashen hair made into the whole field and the perspective puts the viewer on the ceremonial axis; a conversion of the perpetrators’ hall into the tomb and temple of the murdered, built in the crypt, the burning and the fire; four elements, each required; an elevation held across the whole field; and one law of burning that joins the hall and the name.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: history, the state, death, the sacred and a poem are held by one empty hall, much by allusion and little by integration, with no person, no body, no family, no labour and no consciousness but the viewer’s. Below the rest, The Swerve, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.5: the means were Kiefer’s own and proven, the span is short and the debate mostly concerns his project as a whole, the reach belongs to his work of 1981 to 1983, and the encrusted matter carries a risk to the fabric.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable each meet it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 102.5, an average of 8.54 that displays 8.5.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the single canvas Sulamith, painted by Anselm Kiefer in 1983, and of its place in his work of 1981 to 1983; not from standing before it, and no image or written source for the painting was consulted. The work scored is that one canvas, as it stands: nothing in it is known to be lost, replaced or rebuilt, no later hand is known to have added to it, and nothing stands in place of an original. The image, the title, the source in Celan and the place of the picture among the Margarete and Sulamith pictures are known securely; the materials and the dimensions only moderately; the surface in detail, the state of the fabric and the collection thinly. Celan’s Todesfuge, the Song of Songs, Kiefer’s other Margarete and Sulamith pictures, the architecture the hall is identified with and Innenraum (1981) are context, and are not scored. The identification of the hall with a design made under the Reich for a soldiers’ funeral hall in Berlin is given as the usual identification, not as settled. No words of Celan’s, of the Song of Songs or of Kiefer’s are quoted; the one word written on the canvas, its title, is named. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions, the make-up of the media, the collection that holds the canvas, the architect and date of the design the hall is identified with, whether the flames are seven and so a menorah, as is often said, whether straw is in this canvas and whether it is burned or blackened, the year the poem was first published, and the present condition of the surface.