The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anselm Kiefer · a single painting, the one canvas scored · oil and acrylic on burlap, large and horizontal · a path white with snow running from the lower edge up the centre into a forest of dark bare trunks, red stains along the snow, and names written in white in the painter’s hand among the branches, joined by thin lines · 1976 · Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven · as it stands, with nothing known to be lost, replaced or restored
Mode
A history painting without a figure; a landscape written over, the founding myth of a nation set on its killing ground
Mythos
The forest as origin and ambush, the path with no return, the trees made a family tree; the sacrifice on the ground below the genealogy
Phase
One winter view; painted in 1976, between Kiefer’s name paintings of 1973 and the Venice Biennale of 1980
Presentation
One large horizontal canvas in oil and acrylic on burlap; dark trunks, a pale path, sparing red, names and lines in white
Register
A cold dread, at one temperature, from the mouth of the path to the dark at its end
Scale
One forest, one path, one network of names and a few stains of blood, on one large horizontal canvas
Governing Proposition
A path white with snow runs from the lower edge of the canvas up its centre into a forest of dark bare trunks, and along it the snow is stained red. High among the branches, names are written in white in the painter’s hand and joined by thin lines into a network. The title is the name of the Roman commander whose three legions were destroyed in this forest in AD 9, in the battle that Germany later took for its founding myth. The wager of the canvas is that the landscape a nation calls its origin is a killing ground, and that the myth is a web of names written over it afterwards, high in the trees, while the blood lies on the ground below; and it sets the viewer at the mouth of the path, where the legions stood.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Varus is one canvas, painted by Anselm Kiefer in 1976 in oil and acrylic on burlap, large and horizontal, and the canvas alone is the work. It hangs in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. A path white with snow runs from the lower edge up the centre of the picture into the depth of a forest of dark bare trunks, which stand either side of it as verticals and close at its end. Along the snow of the path are red stains, read as blood. There is no figure.
In the upper field, among the trunks and branches, names are written in white in the painter’s hand, and thin lines join them into a network. In the usual account of the picture they are names from the story of the battle and from its later German telling; the full roster, its spelling on the canvas and the place of each name are not certified here, and no name is given as inscription. What is certain is the arrangement: names above, joined like a diagram; blood below, on the ground; and the path between.
Each part is required. Without the path the viewer has no place and the picture no line of force. Without the snow the blood has nothing to stain, and without the red nothing in the picture has happened. Without the names the canvas is a winter wood in the manner of Friedrich; with them it is a history. Only the roster yields to the question of what could go: a list is the one form in painting that is assembled by nature, and the lines that join the names read more as diagram than as necessity.
Movement II
The title is the name of Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman commander whose three legions were destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9 by Germanic tribes under Arminius. Varus took his own life. The title names the loser, not the hero: the picture is named for the man whose army walked into this forest and did not come out.
Suetonius reports the emperor’s grief (Augustus 23): Quintili Vare, legiones redde!, “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions.” It is a ruler’s cry for his dead. The nation that later took the battle for its founding would celebrate those deaths. The canvas, titled with the commander’s name, keeps the dead of that day in view, on the snow, beneath the names written over them.
The viewer is set at the mouth of the path, facing into the forest, where the legions stood. The path draws the eye up the centre into a darkness that has no end in the picture. The snow gives a pale light against black trunks, and the red on it is the shock, small and repeated along the path, so that the dread comes in more than one place. It is cold and of one temperature; the canvas does not rise to a second register, and the written names, where they stand, keep the viewer reading rather than carried away.
Movement III
The battle became, in its long afterlife, the founding myth of the German nation. Klopstock wrote dramas of Hermann from 1769; Kleist wrote Die Hermannsschlacht in 1808; the Hermannsdenkmal near Detmold was completed in 1875; and the twentieth century put the story to its own uses. Arminius became Hermann, and the forest where the legions died became the place of the nation’s birth.
Kiefer’s canvas lays that afterlife over the place. The names hang in the branches, and the lines between them turn the trees into a family tree: a genealogy is a tree, and here the genealogy of a national myth is written on trees, grown out of the wood. The blood on the ground below is the sacrifice the genealogy stands on. The myth is shown as made, a diagram hung on a forest, written long after the killing.
The structure is archetypal: the forest as origin and as ambush, the path as the road with no return, the tree as lineage, the blood as sacrifice. The particular stays particular, a real battle, a real commander, a winter wood. But much of the charge arrives through writing. A viewer who cannot read the names, or does not know whose they are, receives the forest and the blood and not the myth’s second half. And the canvas does not say whether it indicts the myth or is drawn to it.
Movement IV
The single deep path is laid with conviction, so that the eye goes in at once and stays. The snow is thin pale paint over a dark weave, and the burlap shows through it as cold ground. The red is placed sparingly, so that it reads as stains and not as pattern. The trunks are set as a rhythm of verticals that frames the path and closes it. The handwriting is the painter’s own and belongs to the field, not stencilled onto it. Against this, the drawing of the trees is summary, the paint in places thin and dry, serving the image and limiting its range, and the lines between the names are diagrammatic.
Burlap is sacking, the cloth of grain sacks, a poor material for a grand subject, and here it reads as earth: the national epic is painted on it. The form is double, a deep perspective space and a flat inscribed surface in one field, the names floating in the picture plane while the path runs back through it, so that the myth sits on top of the place and not in it. As a chart the genealogy would lose its ground and its blood; as a landscape without names the forest would be innocent again. The two registers do not wholly fuse, and the names can read as written on the picture rather than in the wood.
One law joins the farthest parts. The red stain on the snow at the bottom and the name in white among the branches at the top are both marks made on the forest: the blood is what the battle wrote, the names are what the nation wrote afterwards. The range runs from AD 9 to the modern century, from a bodily trace to a literary roster, from depth to flat script. The seam between the deep path and the flat writing is felt by the eye; the law that crosses it is read more than seen.
Movement V
Kiefer was born in 1945, in Donaueschingen. West German art after the war had left figuration and the national subject for abstraction, Zero, Fluxus and the irony of Capitalist Realism, and treated the iconography of German myth as contaminated. Behind it stood German Romantic landscape and history painting, Friedrich’s snowy woods among them. Varus is a large figurative history painting of the founding myth of German nationalism, set in the forest the Nazis also claimed, painted straight and written in. The larger turn had been taken before it, in the photographic Occupations of 1969 and the name paintings of 1973, among them Deutschlands Geisteshelden.
The cost was paid. Kiefer’s work of these years was read as nostalgia for what it examined, and the hostility came to a head at the Venice Biennale of 1980. Shown there and widely in Europe and America in the early 1980s, that work became a centre of the return to painting, of the international reception of German Neo-Expressionism and of the later art of memory, and Varus is one of its clearest emblems, not its origin. The argument whether the canvas criticises the myth, rehearses it, or shows that a German painter after 1945 cannot touch it without doing both has run since the late 1970s and has not closed; most of it concerns Kiefer’s project as a whole, of which this canvas is one instance.
Fifty years on, the canvas is whole as far as is known, in a public collection, reproduced in the literature on Kiefer and on German memory after the war. Its support is coarse and less stable than primed linen; no damage is known. It holds the natural order, history from AD 9 to the last century, the empire and the nation, the writers of the myth, violence and death, and the family tree the names make; the sacred is evoked in the grove and not held. It holds no labour and no person, and no consciousness but the viewer’s at the mouth of the path. The names are still written in the branches, and the blood is still on the snow below them.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test on a single image. The path cannot go: it is the work’s one line of force, and it places the viewer. The trunks cannot go: they are the forest and the frame of the path. The snow cannot go, for without it the blood has nothing to stain. The red cannot go: it is the only thing in the picture that happened, and it lies on the ground, below the names. The names cannot go: without them the canvas is a winter wood in the manner of Friedrich; with them it is a history. What yields is the roster itself. A list is the one form in painting assembled by nature, and a network of names invites the question which could be dropped or added without loss; the joining lines read more as diagram than as necessity.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, and it is a meaning about a people, not a mood. The landscape a nation calls its origin is not innocent: the German forest, the grove of Romantic painting, is a place where men were killed, and the myth of the nation is a web of names written over it afterwards, high in the branches, while the blood lies on the ground below. The genealogy is shown as constructed, a diagram hung on trees. The canvas states nothing in sentences; the placement is the proposition. What holds the axis is that part of the meaning rests on the viewer knowing whose names these are, and that the canvas does not say whether it indicts the myth or is drawn to it. The ambivalence deepens the work and weakens the statement.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The elevation is real and of one register, a cold dread. The path draws the eye up the centre into a darkness that has no end in the picture, and the viewer is set at its mouth, where the legions stood. The snow gives a pale light against the black trunks, and the red on it is the shock, small and repeated, so that the elevation comes in more than one place along the path, and the canvas is large enough to hold the viewer before it. What holds the axis is range: one temperature, one depth, one dread, and no second register. And the names lower it where they stand: a roster in white is a document laid across the sublime, by design, and it keeps the viewer reading rather than transported.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Myth is the subject, and it is built in the structure, not only labelled. The forest is the archetypal place of origin and of ambush; the path into it is the road with no return, and the picture sets the viewer on it facing the dark, in the place of the army that did not come back. The names in the branches make the trees a family tree, the nation’s genealogy grown out of the wood, and the blood on the ground is the sacrifice it stands on. Path, tree and blood carry the composition. The particular stays particular: a real battle, a real commander whose name is the title, a winter wood. Held below the gate because much of the charge arrives through writing: a viewer who cannot read the names receives the forest and the blood, not the myth’s second half.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is double. Behind it, German Romantic landscape and history painting, Friedrich’s snowy woods among them. Around it, West German art after 1945, which had left figuration and the national subject for abstraction, Zero, Fluxus and the irony of Capitalist Realism, and treated the iconography of German myth as contaminated. The departure: a large figurative history painting of the founding myth of German nationalism, in the forest the Nazis also claimed, painted straight, with the names written in. The stake was real and was paid: Kiefer’s work of these years was read as nostalgia for what it examined, and the hostility came to a head at the Venice Biennale of 1980. Held below the gate because the larger turn had been taken already, in the Occupations of 1969 and the name paintings of 1973.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute another form and much goes. As a written list or a chart, the genealogy loses the ground it is written on, and with it the blood: the claim that the myth is hung on a real place and real deaths needs a landscape. As a landscape without names it is Friedrich, and the forest is innocent again. The work knows what it knows only as both at once: a deep perspective and a flat inscribed surface in one field, the names floating in the picture plane while the path runs back through it, so that the myth sits on the place and not in it. The burlap reads as earth and as sacking, a poor cloth for a grand subject. Held below the top because the two registers, which the form needs, do not fully fuse: the names can read as written on the picture rather than in the wood.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, across fifty years. The canvas has stayed open on its central question, which is a question of meaning: does it criticise the myth of Hermann, rehearse it, or show that a German painter after 1945 cannot touch it without doing both? The argument over Kiefer’s work of the 1970s has run since the late 1970s, in attacks on German painting’s return to myth and in the defences and qualified readings that followed, and it has not closed. The roster rewards return: who is on it, who is not, why a Roman’s name titles a picture of the German myth. Held below the higher marks because the argument mostly concerns Kiefer’s project as a whole and comes to this canvas as one instance, and because the formal yield, one path and one network, is quickly taken in.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Published and long shown, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German and European painting of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is a reopening: history painting on the nation’s own myth, figurative, large and written, made possible again for a German painter, and the landscape returned to painting as a carrier of history rather than of nature or mood. The discount is that this belongs to Kiefer’s project of 1969 to 1980 as a whole, of which Varus is one of the clearest emblems and not the origin. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kiefer’s work of these years, shown at Venice in 1980 and widely in Europe and America in the early 1980s, became a centre of the return to painting, of the international reception of German Neo-Expressionism and of the later art of memory. Delayed and shared reach is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole, as far as is known; one canvas, not cut, not altered, no part known to be lost. Presence: continuous in a public collection, reproduced in the literature on Kiefer and on German memory after the war, and shown in his surveys; but it is the presence of a known painting in a regional museum, not the widest, and fame lends it little. Fabric: oil and acrylic on burlap, a coarse support less stable than primed linen; no damage is known, and only the general risk is charged. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the subject is old, and the question of a national myth written over a killing ground has not dated. Fifty years is a short record, and the narrower presence and the coarse support each take a little from it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of oil and acrylic on burlap. Credited: the perspective, a single deep path laid with conviction, so that the eye goes in at once and stays; the economy of the snow, thin pale paint over a dark weave that lets the burlap show as cold ground; the red placed sparingly along the path, so that it reads as stains and not as pattern; the trunks set as a rhythm of verticals that frames and closes; and the handwriting, the painter’s own, integrated into the field rather than stencilled onto it. The making carries the placing of the two registers. The costs: the drawing of the trees is summary, the paint in places thin and dry in a way that serves the image and limits its range, and the lines joining the names are diagrammatic. A sure command of a narrow, deliberate means, not a full one.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a red stain on the snow at the bottom and a name in white among the branches at the top. They obey one law: everything in the picture is a mark made on the forest. The blood is what the battle wrote, the names are what the nation wrote afterwards, and both lie on the same ground. The range runs from AD 9 to the modern century, from a bodily trace to a literary roster, from depth to flat inscription, and it holds; the range is real, across time and across kinds of mark, and narrowness is not taken for coherence. What holds the axis is the seam the eye feels between the two spatial registers, deep path and flat script: the law that joins them is conceptual, and is read more than seen.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, in the forest and the winter; history, from the battle of AD 9 to the uses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the state and the nation, the Roman empire defeated and the German nation founded on the defeat; literature, in the writers through whom the battle became a nation’s story; violence and death, in the blood; the family, in the family tree the names make; the sacred, in the grove, evoked more than held. They are integrated by placement: names above, blood below, the path through. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or thin: labour, any consciousness beyond the viewer at the mouth of the path, and any human figure. History and the nation lift it above a landscape that holds none; the absence of persons keeps it well below a peopled interior.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Living Form at 8.5 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4. A canvas whole after fifty years, in a public collection, on a question that has not dated; a form that knows what it knows only as landscape and inscription at once, the myth laid on the place and not in it; and a myth built in the structure, the forest as origin and ambush, the path with no return, the trees made a family tree over the blood.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: the natural order, history, the nation, literature, violence and death and the family are placed by names above, blood below and the path between, with no labour, no person and no consciousness but the viewer’s. Below the rest, The Sublime at 7.9, and The Inevitable and The Made at 8.0: one cold dread at one temperature, which the written names interrupt by design; a roster that the nature of a list leaves open to subtraction; and a sure command of a narrow means, with summary trees and thin, dry paint.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, and The Unconcealment, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest axis it governs is The Sublime, at 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.2, an average of 8.18 that displays 8.2: the work stands in the band of Tier IV, short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the single canvas Varus, painted by Anselm Kiefer in 1976, of its subject and of its place in his work of 1969 to 1980; 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 now hangs in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven: nothing in it is known to be lost, replaced, restored or repainted, no later hand is known to have added to it, and nothing stands in place of an original. The composition, the subject, the date, the support and the collection are known securely; the inscription, the condition of the fabric and the exhibition history of the canvas only thinly. Kiefer’s Occupations (1969), his name paintings, among them Deutschlands Geisteshelden (1973), his woodcuts on the same subject, the history of the battle and of its later uses, and German Romantic painting are context, and are not scored. The only words quoted are the emperor’s cry as Suetonius reports it (Augustus 23), with an English gloss; no words of Kiefer’s are quoted, and no name on the canvas is given as inscription. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions, the year and manner of acquisition, the number of the names, which names they are, their spelling and their places on the canvas, the present condition of the surface, the date of the woodcut cycle on the same subject, a particular painting by Friedrich of a soldier in a snowy wood, Tacitus’s account of the battlefield as it was found six years later, and the authors and titles of the critical essays in the argument over Kiefer’s work of the 1970s.