The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gerhard Richter · a cycle of four abstract paintings scored as one work · oil on canvas, each 260 by 200 cm, four equal upright panels hung in a row · each begun from one of the four photographs taken in secret at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944, painted onto its canvas and then covered entirely · 2014 · all four kept together since they were painted, nothing lost, replaced or restored
Mode
Abstraction laid over a painted photograph; a cycle of four in which an image is made and then buried
Mythos
Burial, the rite of Antigone made the structure of the making, with the birch grove of the name; built in the act, its particular abolished by design
Phase
From four photographs of August 1944 to four paintings of 2014, seventy years after; the painter at eighty-two
Presentation
Four canvases in oil, each 260 by 200 cm, hung as a row of equal upright panels; one photograph to each, painted and then covered by scraped layers
Register
Dread and mourning held at one pitch; black, white and grey, with red that reads as blood and green that reads as the birch wood
Scale
Four canvases each taller than a person, 20.8 square metres of painted surface; four photographs, one to a canvas
Governing Proposition
Four paintings of 2014, each begun from one of the four photographs a prisoner of the Sonderkommando made in secret at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944: each photograph painted onto its canvas, then buried under layer on layer of scraped black, white and grey, with red and green breaking through. Nothing of the photographs can be seen. The wager of the cycle is that the image of the camp can be neither made nor refused, that a painter can look at it and cover it in one act, and that the covering, done with the whole of his craft, is a burial that marks where the dead are.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title is the German name of the camp, taken from the birch grove. In August 1944 a prisoner of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau took four photographs in secret, at the risk of a life. Among them they show bodies burning in the open, smoke, and women among the birches. They are the cycle’s source and stand outside it: the four photographs are context, and are not scored.
Richter painted the cycle in 2014, at eighty-two. There are four canvases in oil, each 260 by 200 cm, upright, hung as a row of equal panels: 20.8 square metres of painted surface in all. Each began from one of the four photographs. Richter transferred the photograph to its canvas and worked it up as a figurative painting, then covered it entirely, layer over layer, with the scraped and dragged paint of his abstract method, in black, white and grey, with red and green breaking through. One photograph to one canvas: the number of the paintings is the number of the exposures.
Nothing of the photographs is legible on the finished surfaces. The underpainting is part of the work, since it is the thing covered and the covering is the work’s act, but it cannot be seen and is not judged as a separate object. The work is the four together, as Richter left them, kept together since they were painted, with nothing lost, replaced or restored. Whatever has been shown beside them is context. The whole of what the cycle knows lies in the passage from the first layer to the last.
Movement II
The count is the strongest fact in the work. Four photographs, four canvases: take one away and one witness’s image is left uncovered or lost from the count, and the cycle no longer answers what was made at mortal risk. Three would not do, and neither would one. The covering is compelled in the same way, each layer laid to close over what is below it. The necessity of the cycle sits there, in its frame, and holds against every attempt to subtract.
Two arguments meet in it. One holds that these photographs must be looked at; Georges Didi-Huberman made it at length in Images malgré tout (2003). The other holds that the event cannot be rendered, and that to make its image is already to betray it. The cycle takes the first side and paints the photographs; then takes the second and covers them; and the finished object is both at once, a picture of the impossibility of the picture. Neither side is refuted. Both are kept, in one surface, and the surface is the record of keeping them.
From that follow two further claims, and they hold. Abstraction after Auschwitz is not neutral ground but a covering, and what it covers is still there. And remembrance takes here the form of burial: a surface laid over the dead that marks where they are. These are meanings, not a mood, and they are carried by an image as fully as words could carry them. Their limit is that they were argued before the paint was laid, in the debate the cycle enacts, and that the surface alone does not show what it covers. The disclosure needs the title and the known process.
Movement III
The method is the one Richter had refined over three decades of abstraction: a long blade drawn across wet paint, lifting some layers and laying others down, so that the lower break through the upper in seams and flecks. Here it carries history rather than standing free of it. The craft is the control of how much of each lower layer survives, and covering is the work’s act, so the making bears the whole load. Across four canvases at the height of a wall the surfaces are held in a dark, closed key without going dead.
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. Show the photographs and the prohibition is broken. Paint them as pictures and the painter takes the witness’s images for his own. Paint an abstraction and give it the title alone, and the covering is a gesture with nothing under it. Only an image made and then buried keeps the duty to look and the refusal to show together, and only in the physical laying of one surface over another. The form is the instrument of the knowledge.
The method also sets the limits. It admits chance by design, and the painter accepts it: the particular passage, a drag of grey here, a seam of red there, is not required by what the work says, and another pull of the blade would say the same. Necessity thins in the fabric, and command of the single passage is bounded. The craft is at full stretch, and it is the craft of many of his abstractions: mastery applied, not extended. And the form’s knowledge lies in what cannot be seen, so the visible form does not carry it unaided.
Movement IV
The range is black, white and grey, and through it, rationed, come red that reads as blood and green that reads as the birch wood. They read as what is under, not what is on. The scale does the rest: each canvas is 2.6 metres high, taller than anyone before it. The register is dread and mourning, not transport, and the knowledge of what lies under the paint gives these surfaces a weight none of Richter’s other abstractions carries. It is one pitch, held four times. Without the title the surfaces would read as strong late abstractions, and some find in them a beauty that sits uneasily with the subject: a cost the work courts and does not wholly master.
One archetype is built here, not alluded to: burial. The images of the dead lie beneath the paint as the dead lie beneath earth, and the painter’s act is the act of covering a body, the rite of Antigone made the structure of the work. Veil, palimpsest and grave are one structure seen three ways. The name adds the grove where one photograph shows women among the trees. But the particular is abolished by design. The bodies, the smoke and the women survive only in the title and the record of the making, and the archetype stands over an absence. The work chooses that, and pays for it.
One law governs the four: an image made and then covered, the surface the record of the covering. The two most distant elements, a document of 1944 at the bottom of each canvas and a painted field of 2014 at its top, obey it exactly, since the second exists only as the covering of the first. Across the four it holds with no exception: one height, one method, one key, one photograph each. The distance it spans in time and kind is great. The visible range it governs, four equal panels in one idiom and one range of colour, is narrow.
Movement V
The cycle is twelve years old. The four canvases are whole and together, unaltered, with no damage, restoration or replacement known, and the covered surface stands as Richter left it. It has been shown continuously since 2014, and widely for so young a work. Its survival as this work, and not as four late abstractions, depends on one thing kept outside the paint: the title, which travels with it and is part of it.
In twelve years it has drawn a substantial response, mostly on the questions it stages: whether covering is mourning or evasion; whether the abstraction redeems the photographs or makes them beautiful; whether a German painter’s burial of these images is atonement or a second erasure. None is settled. Within Richter’s work it closes the split between photograph and abstraction that had defined it. Twenty-six years after October 18, 1977 (8.5), which painted from the photographs of the Stammheim deaths in grey and blurred them, he painted these and covered them. Its reach so far runs into German memory culture more than into painting.
Beside it stands Kiefer’s Sulamith (8.5), a memorial to the murdered that refuses to show the victim and gives a burnt hall and a name; Birkenau holds the documentary image itself, and buries it. The orders it holds are many, history, death, the witness, the nation, the question of what may be shown, the birch wood of the name, and one act binds them, but all of them by reference: the surface shows paint. The cycle stands where its twelve figures place it, at the top of Tier III. What it shows is a covering, and what it knows is underneath.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged at two levels, and they part. In the conception the work resists subtraction completely: four photographs, four canvases, one to each. Take a canvas away and one of the four images made at mortal risk is left uncovered or lost from the count, and the cycle no longer answers the four exposures. The covering is compelled as well, since each layer exists to close over what lies below it. At the surface the test meets less resistance. The scraped field admits chance by design, and the particular passage, a drag of grey here, a seam of red there, is not required by what the work says: another pull of the blade would say the same. Necessity sits in the frame of the work and thins in its fabric.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, and holds: the image of the camp can be neither made nor refused. The work takes the side of the argument that the four photographs must be looked at, and paints them; then the side of the argument that the event cannot be rendered, and covers them; and the finished object is both at once, a picture of the impossibility of the picture. Second: abstraction after Auschwitz is not neutral ground but a covering, and what it covers is still there. Third: remembrance here takes the form of burial. These are meanings, not a mood, and an image carries them as fully as words would. Held below the gate because the argument was made before the paint, and the surface alone does not show what it covers.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The register is dread and mourning, not transport. The means are scale, four canvases each 2.6 metres high, taller than anyone who stands before them, and a dark range of black and grey, with red that reads as blood and green that reads as the birch wood. The knowledge of what lies under the paint gives these surfaces a weight none of Richter’s other abstractions carries, and the height recurs across four canvases rather than resting on one. But it is one pitch held four times, and it is in large part induced by the title: without it the surfaces would read as strong late abstractions, and some find in them a beauty that sits uneasily with the subject, a cost the work courts and does not wholly master.
Score: 7.6 / 10
One archetype is built, not alluded to: burial. The images of the dead lie beneath the paint as the dead lie beneath earth, and the painter’s act is the act of covering a body, the rite of Antigone made the structure of the work. Veil, palimpsest and grave are one structure seen three ways, and it bears the load: it is the whole making. The name adds the grove, the birch wood where one photograph shows women among the trees. What holds the axis is that the particular does not remain particular. It is abolished by design: the bodies, the smoke and the women survive only in the title and the record of the making, so that the archetype stands over an absence. The work chooses that cost.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is double: the painting of atrocity and its collapse after the war, in the long argument over whether the camps may be shown, in which Kiefer and Boltanski worked; and Richter’s own two idioms, the painting made from a photograph and the scraped abstraction, kept apart for fifty years. The departure joins them in one canvas, the abstraction laid over the photograph so that it carries history rather than standing free of it, and makes four documentary photographs from the camp, the most guarded images in the record, the ground of a painting. The stake was real: at eighty-two, on the one subject where failure is a moral charge, in his own abstract method. Held below the gate because covering an image is a proven path in his own work, and the covered picture as memorial has precedents.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Substitute another form and the work can no longer say what it knows. Show the photographs and the prohibition is broken; paint them as pictures and the painter takes the witness’s images for his own; paint an abstraction under the title alone and the covering is a gesture with nothing under it. Only an image made and then buried keeps both the duty to look and the refusal to show, and only in the physical layering of one surface over another. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. Held below the top for one fact: the knowledge lies in what cannot be seen, so the visible form does not carry it unaided. It needs its title and the record of its making to be read as what it is.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are twelve years of evidence. In that time the work has drawn a substantial critical response, mostly on the questions it stages: whether covering is mourning or evasion; whether the abstraction redeems the photographs or makes them beautiful; whether a German painter’s burial of these images is atonement or a second erasure. Those questions are open and not exhausted, which is real yield. But twelve years is forecast more than demonstration, and much of the return turns on the frame, the source, the title and the process, rather than on what the surfaces give on a second and a tenth look, which is not attested here. Held at the forecast, its upper reach limited by elapsed time.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European painting of the 2010s and the art of Holocaust remembrance in Germany. Intrinsic force: within one painter’s work, the resolution of the split between photograph and abstraction that had defined it; and a painted position in the argument over representing the camps that holds both sides at once. That weighs within his work. It is not a reorganisation of what painting can do, since the covered image and the abstraction as memorial were available. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in twelve years the cycle has been a centre of exhibitions and writing, its reach running into German memory culture more than into painting, and no body of later painting is known to have turned on it. Delayed influence cannot yet be credited.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The four canvases are kept together and unaltered, and the finished covered surface, which is what the work consists of, stands as the painter left it. Presence: continuous since 2014 and wide for so young a work, though fame is not proof of permanence. Fabric: oil on canvas, twelve years old, with no damage, restoration or replacement known. Twelve years is a short record, and the span sets the figure: with nothing charged, it stands at the top of what so short a record allows. One fact is noted and not charged: the work survives as this work, and not as four late abstractions, only while its title stays attached to it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Command of oil paint at the scale of a wall, in the method Richter had refined over three decades: the long blade drawn across wet layers, lifting some and laying others down, so that the lower layers break through the upper in seams and flecks. The making bears the load, since covering is the work’s act and the craft is the control of how much of each lower layer survives. The surfaces are held in a dark, closed key across four canvases without going dead, and the red and the green are rationed so that they read as what is under, not what is on. Held below the top because the method’s chance, which the painter accepts, limits his command of the particular passage, and because this is mastery applied rather than extended.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs: an image made and then covered, the surface the record of the covering. The two most distant elements are the photograph at the bottom of each canvas and the abstract skin at its top, a document of 1944 and a painted field of 2014, and they obey the law exactly, since the second exists only as the covering of the first. Across the four the law holds without exception: one height, one method, one key, one photograph each. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory the law governs is narrow: four equal panels in one idiom and one range of colour. The distance held, in time and in kind, raises the figure; the small visible range holds it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders are several: history, in the camp and the year 1944; death, in the bodies burning in the open that the photographs record; the witness, in four images made at mortal risk; the nation, in German memory and its forms; representation itself, in the question of what may be shown; and nature, in the birch wood of the name. One act, the covering, binds them in a single structure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that they are held almost wholly by reference: none is visible on a surface that shows paint. The person, the family and labour are present only as what the photographs record and the paint conceals, and the sacred only as the rite of burial.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.6, then The Living Form at 8.5 and The Inner Law at 8.3. A blade drawn across wet layers with the control of how much of each lower layer survives, holding four canvases at the height of a wall in a dark key without going dead; a form in which only an image made and then buried keeps both the duty to look and the refusal to show; and one law, an image made and then covered, that binds a document of 1944 to a painted field of 2014.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: history, death, the witness, the nation, representation and nature are bound by one act, and every one of them is held by reference, beneath a surface that shows paint. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7: a dread held at one pitch four times and largely induced by the title; and in twelve years a reach into German memory culture, not yet into painting.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.1, The Swerve at 8.0, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Imperishable at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest axis it governs is The Sublime, at 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 95.2, an average of 7.93 that displays 7.9: the work stands in the band of Tier III, a tenth short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the four paintings of Birkenau, painted by Gerhard Richter in 2014, of their source and of how they were made and received; not from standing before them, and no image or written source for the paintings was consulted. The work scored is the cycle of four canvases as one work, as it stands now: all four survive together as Richter left them, nothing in them is known to be lost, replaced, restored or reworked, and nothing stands in place of an original. The figurative painting from each photograph, beneath the covering, belongs to the work as the thing covered and is not judged as a separate object. The four photographs of August 1944, anything shown beside the paintings, and Richter’s earlier work and history are context, and are not scored. The object, its source, its date, its dimensions and its method in outline are known securely; its reception moderately; its surfaces only thinly, so that no passage is described canvas by canvas. No words of Richter’s are quoted; the title is given, and the title of Didi-Huberman’s book. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the name of the photographer, the order and spacing of the hang, which canvas was begun from which photograph, the dates of the work within 2014, the number of layers and how much of each image was painted before it was covered, the collection that holds the paintings and the places they have been shown, whether photographic versions of the paintings were made and where they hang, whether the book occasioned the cycle, and Richter’s earlier use of photographs from the camps.