Margarethe

The subtractive test on four elements: the ground, the straw, the black and the name. Take away the straw and the golden hair becomes yellow paint; the work loses its one material fact, a thing that is gold and burnable at once. Take away the black and the hair is only gold: the poem’s turn from the golden to the ashen goes, and the canvas becomes a harvest. Take away the name and the straw is a field, not a woman. Each is required, and nothing is added to them. What yields is extent and count: the field could hold more strands or fewer, run wider or narrower, because it is a field repeated rather than a structure articulated, and the ground between the strands is worked rather than compelled.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Two things can be stated, and they hold. The emblem of German beauty, the golden hair of the beloved to whom the man in the poem writes, cannot be shown after the camps without its ash: the gold and the burning are one material, and the canvas makes them one object. And the German land, straw, field and harvest, the matter of a nationalist pastoral, is the same matter as the fire. That the canvas takes only the German half of the poem is itself a statement. What holds the axis is that the meaning is Celan’s, disclosed in the poem in 1945: the canvas transposes it into matter more than it uncovers a new truth, and without its title and source much of what it gives is the mood of a burnt field.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is real and of one kind, dreadful and elegiac. It comes at first sight, in the scale: strands rising across a large field, straw catching the light against a dark ground. It comes again close to, where the gold meets the black and the stalks become singed hair, a material that has been fire or will be. And it comes in the name, written above a field that holds no person, so that the absence of a body is felt as loss. What holds the axis is frequency and range: one motif across the width, an elevation sustained rather than rising to recurring summits, no second register of light or space, and a quiet ground. Grandeur and terror are present; transport less so. The canvas is grave rather than overwhelming.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Myth built in part. The name carries Margarete, the beloved of the poem, and through her the Margarete of Goethe’s Faust, the type of German innocence; the golden hair is the racial ideal the poem sets against the ashen hair of Sulamith. Kiefer adds the archetype the poem only touches: straw, the harvest, the German earth, and kindling. The identification of woman, hair, land and burning is made in the material itself, so the archetype bears load on the canvas, and the particular stays particular, these strands on this ground. Held below the gate because Celan built the structure first, in words; the Faust link is carried by the name alone; and the archetype’s other half, Sulamith and the Song of Songs, lies outside this canvas.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance: painting at the end of the 1970s under American abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptual art; German postwar painting that largely kept away from the National Socialist past or reached it only through abstraction; Beuys, Kiefer’s teacher, whose felt and fat made material a sign; and the straw, earth and fire of Arte Povera. The departure: a large painting made partly of real matter, in which a poem’s line becomes material, and in which a German painter takes up the destruction of the Jews with the signs of German myth itself. The stake was high: Kiefer had already been charged with ambiguity toward fascism, and to take Celan’s poem invited the charge of aestheticising the camps. Held below the top because the material sign came from Beuys and Arte Povera, and the turn to the German past was already made in Kiefer’s work of the 1970s.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The straw is the knowledge: gold and fuel in one, hair and field in one, and it ages, so the material carries the poem’s antithesis as a property of itself rather than as a picture of it. Paint the straw instead and the work becomes an illustration of a line of verse. The absence of figure is the knowledge too: the woman is only her hair, the one attribute the poem gives her, so the German ideal appears as an attribute without a person, which is what the poem says it is. The black laid over the tips makes the gold become ash in one passage of the hand. Held below the top because the wide field is Kiefer’s convention of these years, and the ground does less than the straw and the black.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over promise: forty-five years, and a literature on the cycle that has not let it go. The questions stay open: whether the canvas mourns the myth it shows or rehearses its glamour; whether a German painter may take Celan’s poem at all, and on what terms; what Sulamith’s absence from this canvas means; whether the ageing of the straw is the work’s meaning or its loss. The canvas yields at three distances: a field from across the room, hair nearer, matter at the surface. Held below the top because most of the open questions concern the cycle and Kiefer’s whole project more than this canvas, and the surface itself yields less on return than the argument about it.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German and European painting of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what history painting could be after the Holocaust; painting made of things whose material is the meaning; a German art of mourning made from the signs of German myth; and Celan’s poem, the one most often named as the answer to Adorno’s sentence on poetry after Auschwitz, carried into painting. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cycle on Celan’s poem became the central example in the literature on art and the Holocaust, and straw, lead, ash and earth in large painting were widely followed. Discounted because the reach is shared with the cycle and the practice, because this is one of several Margarethe canvases, and because the Neo-Expressionist wave it was grouped with faded.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: one canvas, whole as far as is known, forty-five years old. Presence: in a major American collection, exhibited and reproduced in nearly every account of the cycle, but not of the widest presence, and the figure is not lifted for it. Fabric: here the charge falls. Straw is brittle and sheds, and its gold dims toward grey and brown, and the gold is the more perishable half of the image’s polarity of gold and ash. The darkening of straw can be read as the poem’s own movement from the golden to the ashen; that reading is noted and not credited, since the image needs the gold to hold against the black. The condition of this canvas is not known; only the risk of the material is charged.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged as command of oil and straw on canvas at a large scale. The making is load-bearing: straw fixed in long strands that rise and curl as hair and as crop; the black worked over and into the upper ends, so that the passage from gold to ash happens in the paint, not beside it; a scumbled ground that sets the gold forward; the name written in a cursive hand and made part of the image. To join a raw material to oil so that neither reads as collage is a real command. The costs: the range of mark is narrow; the ground is worked rather than articulated; the drawing is gesture rather than exactness; and part of the effect belongs to the material’s own properties rather than to the hand.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the bright straw near the base of the field and the name written high on the canvas in the painter’s hand. They obey one law: the name is the hair’s, the hair is the straw, and the straw is the field. Take the gold and the black: one matter in two states, the burning of the one into the other, which is the law of the whole. Nothing brings in a second physics: no figure, no architecture, no perspective space beyond the field, no colour outside straw, earth, grey and black. What holds the axis is the size of the territory, one motif and one turn, for narrowness is not coherence. The range runs from material to word and from gold to ash, wider than it looks, and the law holds across it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The orders held: history, in the destruction of the Jews; the nation, Germany and its idea of itself; the land and the harvest; the body, as hair; poetry, Celan’s poem and through the name Goethe’s; and death. They are integrated in one material: the straw is land, hair and fuel at once, so the nation, the body and the fire are one thing. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of these orders enter through the title and the source rather than the canvas, and that much is absent: no person, no family, no labour, no state made visible, no story. The sacred is present only by absence, in the Sulamith of the poem, who is not on this canvas. The figure describes the form.

Score: 7.2 / 10