Anselm Kiefer, "Heaven and Earth"

Anselm Kiefer, The Hierarchy of Angels, 1985–87.

Maybe it's inappropriate to drag Milton into a discussion of an Anselm Kiefer survey, even one called "Heaven and Earth." Despite Kiefer's Christian upbringing and the encyclopedia of religious sources from which he draws—from Teutonic lore to the Sefer Hechaloth—the artist has said in interviews that he finds the Christian canon to be mostly rigid. But a passage from Paradise Lost powerfully rhymes the liminal realms that have been a subject in Kiefer's works for nearly 30 years.

The passage comes before the Fall: Seeking transit from hell to earth so that he may stage his insurgency against God, Satan passes through a space called Chaos, an indeterminate realm characterized by coexisting antipodes and dimensionlessness, an "illimitable ocean without bound" that serves as the "womb of nature and perhaps her grave." It is the place from which God obtains "His dark materials" for creating the universe (2.891–916).

"Heaven and Earth"—currently showing at the Hirshhorn Museum and originally curated by Michael Auping for The Modern in Fort Worth—casts Kiefer as an artist of dark materials. The first survey of his works to reach the United States in almost 20 years, the exhibition reveals Kiefer as an artist who ultimately sought to depict mankind's liminal situation: his station on the terrestrial sphere and its celestial better.

Anselm Kiefer, Book With Wings, 1992–94.

If there's a temptation to read Kiefer's work as a search for salvation, the artist has always checked it with his caustic irony. The Secret Life of Plants (2001), a 6-foot-high lead book whose pages are fanned open wide to support the book's posture. (The lead pages threaten to collapse in on themselves unless the weight is properly distributed, and if you've been listening, you've heard all sorts of stories and mishaps related to the show's installation—I understand one visitor tried to turn the pages). On these pages the artist has drawn constellations, with stars titled by NASA coordinates—numbers in place of names, alluding to the victims of the Holocaust. The book's instability casts doubt on redemption, as if the book of heaven were not large or sturdy enough to support mankind.

The indeterminacy of Kiefer's depicted space also plays a role in defining the movement between and meaning of heaven and earth. The Hierarchy of Angels (1985–1987), like many of his monumental paintings, reveals a landscape from a perspective far above the earth; affixed to the canvas are a lead propeller and a group of "meteorites" representing the order of the angels, suggesting a phenomenal heaven above our world. The sculptural fixtures also resemble an aerial bombing, which changes the directionality of the painting from heavenward and sacred to earthbound and profane, the hierarchy perhaps stemming from the dominance over Europe enjoyed by Goering's Luftwaffe.

This is not, to be certain, a show of the Kiefer whose work has bridged the memory gap between Germany's present and its past. A survey that highlights one aspect of representation in Kiefer's work does not consider that it was the mere act of representation after World War II—after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno—that was transgressive: for the searing historical content of the works, for breaking with American AbEx, and for forging new ties to modernism after modernity devastated Germany.

Anselm Kiefer, To the Unknown Painter, 1982.

"Heaven and Earth" does highlight Kiefer's career-spanning effort to reinsert German painting into an historical context. In a watercolor titled To the Unknown Painter (1982), Kiefer references the architecture and crucifix form in Masaccio's Trinity (1425–1428). In the early Renaissance painting, the arched ceiling housing the crucifix scene is queerly distorted; accurate perspective falls away above the head of God, prefiguring the notion of a noemenal realm beyond the phenomenal. Kiefer draws orthogonals along the ceiling that lead to a false vanishing point—not in the figure of God, but rather in the head of the lone figure. Other, more recent works follow suit: Leviathan (2005) recalls Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, and for Melancholia (2004) Kiefer borrows from the alchemist's occult polyhedron in Albrecht Dürer's notorious engraving.

Not a proper retrospective—voids in the survey, like the absence of pieces from Kiefer's "Occupations" series, disqualify it—"Heaven and Earth" does not address the lingering questions over the degree to which Kiefer, as Mark Rosenthal problematically phrased it, drew from the unqualifiable horrors of World War II to "make Germany whole again" (p. 96). Of course, many pieces investigate whether the horror prompted by German nationalism could be explained—or depicted, or even described—in such a way to make any sense of the nation's worst generation. Quaternity (1973)—one of few very Kiefer paintings that really looks like a painting—portrays three flames (the figures of the Holy Trinity) burning on the floor of the artist's studio; a snake completes the circuit. Scholars debate over the snake on the paintings (the same sort of argument over Chaos among Milton scholars, to float that line again), but conventional wisdom, which I think is right, is that the snake is Hitler.

Auping's show begs off the question—at best, it's presented as significant that the artist drew from religious imagery, but not important in a telling way. What about Germany? That unaddressed historical question—the problem of evil, the persistence of national memory—is tantalizingly hidden in the survey, since memory is, finally, the fixture that holds Kiefer's chaotic constellations.