One of fifty-five works on paper by Kiefer in the Museum's collection, this watercolor takes as its mise-en-scène the Soldiers' Hall, a planned but never-built monument of the Third Reich. Designed by Wilhelm Kreis but first sketched by Hitler himself in 1936 as part of his scheme to reconstruct central Berlin on a huge scale, the Soldiers' Hall was to be a memorial to war heroes. The vast, barrel-vaulted space would have culminated in an apse containing an oversize statue of a muscular, sword-bearing warrior flanked by enormous eagles. Kiefer has transformed the function of the building by covering the apse statuary with an abstraction: pieces of paper printed with black ink in the medium of woodcut. Kiefer's inscription refers to Honoré de Balzac's Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu (1831), the bittersweet story of an aging Baroque painter named Frenhofer, who works for many years to perfect a woman's portrait, painting layer upon layer, until only a hint of the image remains—an undecipherable abstraction. Among the ironies here is Kiefer's use of delicate washes to render the hard-edged masonry of the Nazi building.