The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anselm Kiefer · a single canvas with everything attached to it, scored as one work · mixed media on canvas at the scale of a wall, with copper wire, a circuit board and fragments of porcelain or fired clay fixed to it · a stepped pyramid seen almost frontally, rising out of a dark, crusted and burnt ground, a circuit board near its apex and wires running from it to shards scattered over the lower field · 1985 to 1987 · San Francisco Museum of Modern Art · whole as far as is known, with nothing known to be lost or replaced
Mode
A myth painting built as the diagram of its own story; history painting carried out of Germany into ancient Egypt
Mythos
Osiris killed and scattered by Set, gathered by Isis, his wife and sister, and restored as lord of the dead; the pyramid as tomb and house of resurrection
Phase
Painted 1985 to 1987, in the years of Kiefer’s turn, after about 1984, to Egyptian and Mesopotamian matter
Presentation
One large canvas in mixed media with objects attached: copper wire, a circuit board, porcelain or clay fragments; earth, grey and black
Register
The funerary sublime of the ruin, dreadful rather than warm, with one bright thing in it, the wire
Scale
One monument, one myth, one act of gathering, at the size of a wall
Governing Proposition
A stepped pyramid rises frontally out of a burnt, crusted ground. Near its apex a circuit board is fixed to the canvas, and from it copper wires run down across the steps to fragments of porcelain and clay scattered over the lower field. The layout is the myth: Osiris killed and dismembered by his brother Set, his body scattered, gathered by Isis and restored as lord of the dead. The wager of the canvas is that the oldest story of resurrection can be told with the newest technology, and what it tells is hard: the gathered body is linked by wire and never rejoined, and the power that gathers sits where the god or the sun would sit, at the summit of a tomb.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Osiris and Isis is one canvas, made by Anselm Kiefer between 1985 and 1987 in mixed media, with objects fixed to its surface, and the canvas with everything attached to it is the work. It is held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A stepped pyramid, seen almost frontally, rises through most of the height of the canvas out of a dark ground that is crusted and looks burnt. Near its apex is a circuit board. From the board copper wires run down and outward across the steps and the ground to fragments of porcelain or fired clay scattered over the lower field.
The canvas is built of four parts, the pyramid, the board, the wires and the shards, and of little else. Each is required. Without the pyramid the fragments have no centre and the wires no apex to climb to. Without the wires the shards are debris. Without the board the wires converge on nothing. Without the shards there is no body to gather. What yields is the field around them: the burnt crust is worked in a manner Kiefer shared across many canvases of these years, and the number and exact placing of the fragments are not, one by one, required.
The colour is narrow, earth, grey and black, and the one bright thing in the field is the wire. The objects are set into the crust, so that they lie in the ground rather than on a picture of it. The work is a painting at the size of a wall, and the viewer stands at the foot of a monument. In reproduction the wires nearly vanish and what remains is a picture of a pyramid; before the canvas they are the drawing of the work.
Movement II
Osiris is killed by his brother Set, and his body is cut in pieces and scattered. Isis, his wife and sister, searches out the pieces and gathers them, and he is restored, not to the living but as lord of the dead. On the canvas the fragments are the scattered body, the wires drawn to one point are the gathering, and the pyramid is the tomb and the house of the dead god, the place where he is raised.
That reading is the standard one, and the composition carries it plainly: remove the myth and the layout has no logic. Which element is Isis, the board, the wiring or the act of linking, is not documented, and the canvas does not say. What it does say is that the gathered body is not healed. The shards stay shards. They are linked by wire and never rejoined, and reassembly is shown as connection rather than restoration. The god is gathered as a circuit is wired.
The particulars that take on the myth are modern and industrial, porcelain, copper and a circuit board, and there the canvas builds rather than alludes. But the myth is laid out more as a diagram than as an event. The pyramid is generically Egyptian, the place is no place, and there is no person: no god, no goddess, no brother, only the pieces and the lines between them. The kinship at the centre of the story, a wife and sister gathering a husband killed by his brother, is held only through the myth.
Movement III
The wires are real copper, physically joining real fragments to a real board. The gathering is enacted in matter, not depicted. They are the one fine drawing in the work, thin bright lines descending from the apex across the dark steps to the shards in the ground, and they are placed so that their paths lead the eye up to the summit. They catch the light between the two distances at which the canvas is seen, and that is its highest moment.
From across the room the pyramid stands frontally, tier on tier, a monument to death seen from below. Close to, the ground reads as earth, built in layers, burnt, scraped and crusted, and the shards lie in it like finds in a burnt site. The relief makes the painting ground and burial site at once. The tiers of the pyramid are given depth by perspective and value in a coarse, resistant material; the drawing of them is schematic, and the hand is coarse by design.
The elevation is dreadful rather than warm, the funerary sublime of the ruin, a register the painting of the decade shared. It is one register, and the bright moments are few: the wires and their convergence, and little else rises out of the ground. The frontal pyramid and the burnt architectural setting are a form Kiefer used for other buildings in other canvases of these years, so that part of the form is a container brought to this content, while the wires, the relief and the attached shards are this canvas’s own.
Movement IV
At the summit of a monument to royal death, where the god or the sun would sit, Kiefer has fixed a circuit board. The goddess’s work and the circuitry of power occupy one place. The power that gathers the broken body is cast as technology, and the canvas does not say whether that power is the goddess, or the circuitry of the state, or Set’s, or none of them.
The board and the pyramid are the two most distant things on the canvas: an object of the 1980s and a form of the third millennium before Christ. They obey one law. Everything here is a remnant set in burnt ground and joined by one line, and the board takes the place the pyramid’s own logic points to, so that the newest object holds the oldest form’s highest place rather than contradicting it. Five millennia, the sacred and the technical, are held under that law of fragment and connection, and nothing on the canvas breaks it.
The junction is made by placement and by wire. Board and shards are found objects in a painted world, and the two kinds of making meet at a seam that the work shows rather than closes. The board is also what dates the canvas: a technology fixed to its decade, it already reads as period. It is not a gimmick in the structure, since it sits where the wires converge and without it the analogy fails, but it is a surface tied to its moment.
Movement V
Kiefer, born in 1945, had brought history painting back into German art in the 1970s, working German history and German myth in crusted ground, deep perspective and found matter; beside it stood the material painting of Burri and Tàpies, Rauschenberg’s combines, Beuys’s materials as meaning and the return to large figurative canvases. After about 1984 he turned to Egyptian and Mesopotamian matter, and Osiris and Isis belongs to that turn. Its own departure is the circuit board in the sacred field. By then the manner was established and in demand, and the charge the turn invited, that Egypt was a way out of Germany, cost little.
Set beside Sulamith (1983), which gives the Reich’s memorial hall to Celan’s ashen-haired woman, this canvas carries no disclosure about a nation: whatever is said of Germany in Kiefer is said by the oeuvre, not by any sign here. Its reach in America came with his retrospective and the large American collections of the late 1980s, and it is one of his best known works in an American museum and a common teaching example; it redirected no school, and the field’s debts to Kiefer run mainly to the German history paintings and the later installations. The questions it leaves remain open after thirty-nine years: whether linkage is restoration, and whether myth in Kiefer is critique or re-enchantment.
Kiefer’s mixed media are known to flake, shed and alter, and he has accepted change; the wires and fragments are attached parts that can work loose. The present condition of this canvas is not known here, and no loss to its image is known. The canvas holds the sacred, the body, kinship, the state, technology, the earth and history, joined by the one act of gathering; it holds no person, no labour and no city, and consciousness only as the viewer brings it. The wires still run from the summit to the shards, and the shards are still apart.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, part by part. Take away the pyramid and the fragments have no centre and the wires no apex to climb to; the tomb in which the god is restored is gone. Take away the wires and the shards are debris: the scattering remains, but the gathering, the act the myth turns on, disappears. Take away the circuit board and the wires converge on nothing, and the modern term of the analogy is lost. Take away the shards and there is no dismembered body. Four parts, each required, and the work is built of little else. What yields is the field around them: the burnt crust is a manner shared with many canvases of these years, and a few shards more or fewer would change nothing.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Two things can be stated, and they hold. A broken body, and with it a broken past, is not restored by gathering: the shards stay shards, linked by wire and never rejoined, so that reassembly is shown as connection rather than healing. And the power that gathers is cast as technology, a circuit placed where the god or the sun would sit at the summit of a monument to royal death, so that the goddess’s work and the circuitry of power occupy one place. Those are meanings, and they are given in the image as fully as words would give them. What holds the axis is that much of what the canvas gives is a state, aftermath and scorched ground, and that the disclosure about Germany found in Kiefer is carried by the oeuvre, not by any sign on this canvas.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation by scale and by weight, at two distances. From across the room the pyramid stands frontally, tier on tier, at the size of a wall: a monument to death, seen from below. Close to, the crust reads as earth, and the shards lie in it like finds in a burnt site. Between the two distances the wires catch the light, thin bright lines descending from the apex, the one fine thing in a heavy, dark field, and that is the canvas’s summit, and it is high. The elevation is dreadful rather than warm, and the axis does not mind which. What holds it is range and frequency: one register, the funerary sublime of the ruin, which the painting of the decade shared, and few bright moments, the wires and their convergence, with little else rising out of the ground.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, not evoked: the composition is the myth’s structure. Osiris is killed and dismembered by his brother Set and the pieces scattered; Isis, his wife and sister, gathers them, and he is restored as lord of the dead. On the canvas the scattered fragments are the scattered body, the wires drawn to one point are the gathering, and the pyramid is the tomb and house of the dead god, the place of resurrection. Remove the myth and the layout has no logic, which is the test of load-bearing structure. The particulars that acquire the myth are modern and industrial, porcelain, copper and a circuit board, and there the work earns the axis. Held at the gate: the pyramid is generically Egyptian, the place is no place, there is no person, and the myth is laid out more as diagram than as event.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance: history painting, which Kiefer himself had brought back into German art in the 1970s; material painting from Burri and Tàpies; assemblage from Rauschenberg’s combines; Beuys’s materials as meaning; the Neo-Expressionist return to large figurative canvases. The departure is twofold. The subject moves from German history and myth to Egypt, and an electronic component enters the sacred field: an object of the newest technology fixed at the apex of a tomb in a painting about the oldest myth of resurrection. That second move is the real turn. The stake was small. By 1985 the manner, crusted ground, deep perspective and found matter, was established and in demand, and the risk, the charge that Egypt was a way out of Germany, cost little.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Substantially. The wires are real copper, physically joining real fragments to a real board: the gathering is enacted in matter, not depicted. In reproduction the wires nearly vanish and the work becomes a picture of a pyramid; before the canvas they are its drawing. The relief makes the painting ground and burial site at once, with things lying in it rather than painted on it. The scale puts the viewer at the foot of a monument. Held below the top because the pyramid’s frontal perspective and the burnt architectural setting are a form Kiefer used for other buildings in other canvases of the decade: part of the form is a container brought to this content.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise, and thirty-nine years is middling evidence. The questions stay open. Whether the board is Isis, or the power of Set, or neither; whether the work is about energy, about information and transmission, or about the artist gathering a broken tradition; whether myth in Kiefer is a critique of myth or a re-enchantment of it, the argument that has run through his reception since the 1980s. Return to the object yields as well: the crust at close range, the paths of the wires, the shards as finds. Held a step below because the literature on this canvas in particular is modest, and much of the well is Kiefer’s whole oeuvre rather than this work.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Published and shown, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of painting in Europe and America in the 1980s. Intrinsic force: the oldest myth of dismemberment and resurrection joined to contemporary technology, in a material painting at the scale of a wall, and Kiefer’s method carried out of German subject matter into the ancient Near East, a direction his later work pursued at length. That is a real reorganisation within his work and a modest one within the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: one of his best known works in an American museum and a frequent teaching example, carried by his American retrospective and the large American collections of the late 1980s. Discounted because the reach is mostly Kiefer’s, not this canvas’s, and it redirected no school.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric; for a painting, the image. Thirty-nine years from completion. Form: whole as far as is known, one canvas in one public collection. Presence: in a major museum and reproduced, though not among the most reproduced images of its century. Fabric: the charge falls here. Kiefer’s mixed media, emulsion, clay and attached objects, are known in his work generally to flake, shed and alter, and the artist has accepted change; the wires and fragments are attached parts that can loosen. The condition of this canvas is not known, so the risk is charged and no loss. Against it too is the axis’s own test: a circuit board is a technology fixed to its decade, and it already reads as period.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of mixed media at the scale of a wall, read to the same anchors as every medium. Credited: the ground built in layers, burnt, scraped and crusted until it reads as earth; the tiers of the pyramid given depth by perspective and value in a coarse, resistant material; the attached objects set into the field so that they read as found in the ground rather than glued to a picture; and the wire used as line, the one fine drawing in the work, placed so that its paths lead the eye to the apex. The making is load-bearing in the wires and the crust. The costs: the drawing of the pyramid is schematic, the hand is coarse by design, and the range of colour is narrow, earth, grey and black.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the circuit board, an object of the 1980s, and the stepped pyramid, a form of the third millennium before Christ. They obey one law. Everything on the canvas is a remnant set in burnt ground and joined by one line, and the board is put at the apex, where the pyramid’s own logic points, so that the newest object takes the oldest form’s highest place rather than contradicting it. The range is wide, five millennia and the sacred against the technical, and nothing breaks the law of fragment and connection. Held because the junction is made by placement and by wire more than by one physics of making: board and shards are found objects in a painted world, and the two kinds of making meet at a seam the work shows rather than closes.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, in death, resurrection and the god; the body, dismembered and gathered; kinship, a wife and sister gathering a husband killed by his brother, held only through the myth; the state, in the pyramid as royal tomb and monument of power; technology and energy, in board and copper; the earth, in the scorched ground; and history, from ancient Egypt to the present. They are integrated by the one act of gathering, which touches all of them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent from the canvas itself: no person, no labour, no city, no visible particular history, and consciousness only as the viewer brings it. More than an abstract field holds, and far less than a crowded history painting.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Sublime, The Living Form, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.4. A myth built into the layout, the scattered shards as the scattered body and the wires as the gathering; an image whole in a public collection, its fabric at risk but no loss known; an elevation that peaks where bright copper descends through a dark field; a gathering enacted in real wire rather than depicted; a ground commanded until it reads as earth; and one law of fragment and connection that puts the newest object at the oldest form’s summit.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: the sacred, the body, kinship, the state, technology, the earth and history are joined by one act of gathering, with no person, no labour, no city and consciousness only as the viewer brings it. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: much of what the canvas gives is a state of aftermath, and its disclosure about Germany belongs to the oeuvre; the manner was proven and the stake small; and the reach is mostly Kiefer’s, not this canvas’s.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable each meet it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 falls short of the bar of 8.5 by six tenths, The Swerve at 7.8 by seven tenths and The Unconcealment at 7.7 by eight tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 97.4, an average of 8.12 that displays 8.1, in the band of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 the summit also requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the single canvas Osiris and Isis, made by Anselm Kiefer between 1985 and 1987 and held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and of its place in his work of those years; not from standing before it, and no image or written source for the painting was consulted. The work scored is that one canvas with everything attached to it, 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 composition, the attached copper wire, circuit board and porcelain or clay fragments, the date and the collection are known securely; the size only approximately; the number and placing of the fragments, the surface at close range, the condition and the exhibition record thinly. Kiefer’s other paintings of these years, among them the architectural interiors and courtyards and the works in lead and straw, his turn after about 1984 to Egyptian and Mesopotamian matter, and his American retrospective of the late 1980s are context, and are not scored. The reading of the shards as the body of Osiris and the wires as the gathering by Isis is given as the standard reading; which element is Isis is not documented and is not asserted. No words of Kiefer’s are quoted, and no inscription; the title alone is named. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions, the full list and order of the painted media and whether lead is among them, whether the title is written on the canvas, the form in which the title is catalogued, the year the museum acquired the work, the number of fragments and wires and the depth of the relief, the present condition of the surface, how often the work is shown, the reading of it as a picture of nuclear fission, and the critical literature on this canvas in particular.