"Lost Memory of Skin." (Photo: Ecco)

One way to judge the morality of a society is to look at how it treats its prisoners. Another is to look at how it treats its children. Russell Banks examines both in his new novel, Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco, 416 pages, $25.99). In this disturbing, intelligent, but ultimately misshapen book, Mr. Banks forces readers to enter into the mind of a convicted sex offender. This turns out to be not as sordid as it sounds, because the sex offender in question is something of an innocent. In fact, he’s a virgin. His crime is soliciting a minor for sex via the Internet, but as details of the encounter are revealed, it is difficult to find much malice in his intent. Mostly, it seems to be a crime committed out of loneliness.

Known only as “the Kid,” the young man at the center of Mr. Banks’s 17th novel lives in a tent beneath a south Florida causeway, along with dozens of other sex offenders on parole. The Kid is forced into this strange no-man’s land because he must reside at least 2,500 feet away from anywhere children regularly gather. The rules of geometry make this real-life law stricter than it at first seems. As the Kid explains it, convicted sex offenders must: “live outside a closed circle of 9.25 million square feet. Since every school, playground, or video arcade lies at the center of such a circle, and nearly all the circles partially overlap and often extend well beyond the others, when you step clear of one 9.25-million-square-foot forbidden zone, you immediately step into another.”

Cheating is not an option, since each offender is tagged with a G.P.S. device that tracks movement. Given these parameters, many residents break parole in order to return to the relative ease of prison life. But the Kid values his freedom—and this is one of his many sympathetic characteristics—and toughs it out on the causeway.

At 22, the Kid is one of the causeway’s youngest inhabitants. His nickname refers to his youth and his small stature, as well as his quiet, childish demeanor. He’s a high school graduate, but just barely, and accustomed to teachers and other authority figures treating him as if he were “borderline retarded.” He’s ex-military, having been discharged for distributing pornography. His closest friend is a six-foot pet iguana. The iguana, once a small lizard that the Kid could hold in the palm of his hand, was a gift from his mother, smuggled illegally from Mexico. It’s a poor gift for a child, but by no means the worst example of his mother’s parenting. As the details of the Kid’s past unfold, it’s clear that many of his problems can be traced to his mother’s neglect—that, and the amount of pornography he consumed as a teenager.

The Kid works as a busboy, which is the perfect job for someone accustomed to a life of invisibility. But he has a sarcastic sense of humor and a stray remark causes him to lose his position. Around the same time, the causeway is subject to a police raid, and the Kid’s pet iguana is killed. It’s at this low point that he meets the Professor, a sociologist who is interested in homeless communities as well as “the legal apparatus designed to deal with sexual offenders.” In the Professor’s view, the rise in pedophilia is the natural outcome of a culture that commodifies and eroticizes children. More radically, the Professor sees sex offenders as victims. He singles out the Kid as his ideal subject, and begins interviewing him about his life and the events that led to his arrest and homelessness. The Kid, at first suspicious of the Professor, gradually warms to his attention and opens up to him.

Until the Professor appears, the novel is filtered entirely through the Kid’s point of view, so it’s a relief, at first, to see the world—and the Kid—through the Professor’s considerably more sophisticated eyes. But the Professor is not exactly a reliable narrator. Although he’s respected in his field and married with children, he’s something of a loner. Two things keep him from fitting into normal society: his formidable intelligence and his morbid obesity. In some ways, he’s like the overfed, misanthropic genius at the center of Ian McEwan’s most recent novel, Solar. Both characters are hyperarticulate academics crusading against the destructive effects of unchecked capitalism. But where the girth of Mr. McEwan’s academic is played for laughs, as evidence of society’s helpless greed, Mr. Banks’s professor is portrayed, more darkly, as a man disembodied. Estranged from his family, the Professor keeps his past a secret from everyone, and his motivations for studying child pornography are never entirely clear. He’s a master of self-deception, “a man whose life and mind are carefully compartmentalized, methodically divided into boxes that rarely share a single side.”

The Professor doesn’t buy into the disease model of pedophilia and instead believes that the Kid and other sex offenders can be cured if they are “empowered.” To that end, he begins to help the Kid out, buying him food and supplies, and encouraging him to organize the causeway into a real community, where inhabitants share responsibilities and look out for one another. The Kid is suspicious of the Professor’s generosity, and skeptical of his plan, but at the same time, the Kid has become more empathetic as a result of his long conversations with the Professor. For the first time, the Kid finds himself wondering about the other sex offenders who live beneath the causeway and wanting to know their stories. His curiosity extends to the Professor, but the Professor remains mysterious. However, events soon conspire in such a way that he is forced to reveal himself to the Kid and, eventually, to enlist his help.

The novel becomes messy and, in some places, improbable, as the Professor’s and the Kid’s stories converge. In the second half of the book, Mr. Banks brings in a variety of new elements to keep the plot moving along, including a hurricane, a murder and a freelance journalist. Things start to feel clunky in the novel’s final chapters, when the journalist (referred to, annoyingly, as “the Writer”) engages the Kid in a question-and-answer session that is more or less a means of delivering the novel’s resolution. Part of the problem is that Lost Memory of Skin is narrated in the present tense, so gesturing toward the future is difficult. Another limitation is that the Kid is not the most introspective of characters and needs someone to draw him out. Left to his own devices, his thoughts flicker between pornographic images and strategies for survival.

Still, Mr. Banks does a remarkable job of charting the Kid’s growth. At the beginning of the novel, he is deserving of his nickname. His only goals in life are to stay out of prison and to feed his overgrown iguana. He identity is so completely defined by his shame that he goes to a public library and asks the librarian to show him an online listing of local sex offenders, so that he can see a photograph of his own mug shot. That’s his only way of understanding his place in the world: by looking at a picture on the Internet.

But by the end of the novel, the Kid “wonders for the first time if there is a way for him to give that two-dimensional image on the screen a third dimension and become wholly alive.” He doesn’t know how to go about this, but he suspects that “it has to be done mentally from the inside out.” It’s a small revelation, but it represents the beginning of his inner life. Although he is still under parole, and will be for many more years, he has achieved a kind of freedom of spirit. When Mr. Banks refers to the Kid as a hero in the novel’s final pages, the label seems right.

editorial@observer.com

Ceiling Tile with Female Face, from the Synagogue, Dura-Europos, ca. 245 CE

This Friday, the earliest known images of Christ, from the year 240, go on view in New York for the first time, and they aren’t where you might expect them to be. They are part of a remarkable exhibition at the relatively obscure N.Y.U. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a jewel-box of a museum on East 84th Street whose mission, according to exhibitions director Dr. Jennifer Chi, is “to break down preconceived notions of antiquity.”

“Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos” does so with a vengeance, in presenting 77 objects from an excavation in Syria that fundamentally altered the understanding of art, culture and religion in the ancient world.

The rediscovery in the 1920s of the abandoned city of Dura-Europos, which had been buried in the desert for 18 long centuries, rewrote history. Some of the excavations were co-sponsored by Yale University, which by agreement with Syria retained some of the finds; the objects in “Edge of Empires” are on loan from Yale.

Art and artifacts of stunning historical importance were uncovered. The paintings of Christ are part of a series of New Testament scenes that exhibition co-curator Dr. Peter De Staebler said are “the earliest dated Christian art in existence.” Narratives painted on the walls of Dura’s large synagogue, considered the best-preserved in the world, revealed a Jewish figural tradition that had been totally unknown—that had, in fact, been thought to be nonexistent. The rediscovery of these painted Bible stories—among them, Moses and the Burning Bush, the Sacrifice of Isaac and the Exodus from Egypt with the astounding representation of the hands of God (on display by photo and slideshow; the originals are in Damascus)—sparked a revolution in thinking about art and Jewish religious practice.

The finds at Dura also unexpectedly demonstrated that, far from being modern developments, religious coexistence and multiculturalism were thriving a couple of millennia ago on the outskirts of the Roman Empire.

The New Testament scenes were found in what is believed to be the oldest-known baptistery, which was part of a Christian “house-church” (a house that was used as a church). Dura’s house-church is considered the oldest such structure ever revealed. The Institute is showing three of the baptistery’s original wall paintings. From the city’s synagogue come 10 ceiling tiles, each elaborately painted with astrological signs, pine cones, fruit and faces; they’re being shown together for the first time. Then there are the various beliefs lumped together under the rubric “pagan,” and numerous structures were found in Dura dedicated to Greek, Roman and local gods. Some of the pagan imagery seen at the Institute is itself a blend of different pagan strains.

Not only did Christians, Jews and pagans worship side by side—the Temple of Aphrodite was located across the street from the synagogue—but the city was also inhabited by distinct populations of Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Persians. And they all apparently coexisted in harmony.

“That’s what’s so extraordinary,” said Dr. Chi. The discoveries to be made at this show are legion, but perhaps the most compelling is the fact that it presents objects of major religions and diverse populations that date from the same century and were excavated from the same site, indicating that all those groups apparently lived together peacefully.

Excavators even found a ring in the ruins, also now on display, engraved with the Greek word “omonoia,” meaning “harmony” or “concord.” The concept referred to agreements between individuals or political entities, and, according to Dr. Chi, it also referred to a melding of cultures. (Some scholars think it’s an engagement ring.) The art, artifacts and writings found at Dura spat in the eye of those establishment scholars who over the centuries assumed inherent hostility among religions and cultures.

And there was plenty else that caused people to sit up. The Christian narratives were created before the religion was state-authorized by the Roman Emperor Constantine—i.e., before the persecution of Christians was lifted—and before any institutional Church had even decided what the narrative components of the religion were. The Jewish narratives were created before rabbis reinterpreted, about a thousand years later, what “graven images” meant.

Founded by the Greeks, Dura prospered under the Romans until 256, when it was sacked by what more recently might be called Persian armies. Everything in the exhibit is from the Roman period. According to Dr. De Staebler, Dura had a population of around 10,000. But after it was sacked, the city was virtually abandoned. It remained unknown and unexplored for 18 centuries until accidentally rediscovered in 1920 by British troops. Because the area is so dry, Dr. Chi said, the objects are in what she calls “a remarkable state of preservation.”

Situated above the Euphrates River and at the intersection of international trade routes in the region, Dura thrived as both a military garrison and an important way-station for merchant caravans traveling to and from the Mediterranean and Arabian seas. The excavations, begun in the 1920s, uncovered “a multilayered society,” said Dr. Chi. Some of that complex layering can be seen in the concurrent use of the many languages that attest to Dura’s international character—Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Parthian, Persian, Hebrew and numerous dialects from as far away as North Arabia were found, sometimes in an unexpected hodgepodge. Inscriptions on the city gates were bilingual. A donor’s name on one synagogue tile is in Aramaic, and on another tile the same name is in Greek.

This cosmopolitan city’s cultural and social fabric is briefly explored with a portrait of a Roman actuary, objects of daily life like a child’s leather shoe, locally produced green-glazed pottery, plates and bowls imported from Tunisia and the Aegean coast and military artifacts like bronze horse armor. A painted wood and rawhide shield decorated with a Roman imperial eagle at the top and a lion at the bottom is considered the best preserved of its kind.

The exhibition also features an interactive display that shows the buildings found at Dura and some of their floor plans and photographs from the initial excavations in the 1920s and 1930s.

The display is clarifying, but museum-goers may be both flummoxed and delighted by what they find at the five-year- old Institute, which puts on two exhibitions a year. At most museums, curators almost invariably display ancient art as either Egyptian, or Greek, or Roman. Each culture’s objects are arranged separately and chronologically to demonstrate a supposed stylistic development. Go across the street to the Metropolitan Museum and you’ll see a superb example of how the ancient world is conventionally organized

N.Y.U.’s Institute presents what Dr. Chi calls “alternative viewpoints of ancient culture.”  Its faculty, composed of historians, archaeologists, epigraphers, art historians and others, is, she said, “not restricted by departmental disciplines,” just as the exhibitions are not forced into a conventional intellectual straightjacket. In contrast to usual museum practice, here aesthetic value is only one consideration in deciding what to show and, she said, “it’s not what you look at first.”

The Christian wall paintings may seem crude, for example, especially when compared with some of the pagan imagery whose forms had been developed by artists over centuries. But consider the mere fact that miracles are being represented—one shows Jesus and Peter walking on water, another the Healing of the Paralytic—at a time when Christian iconography was scarcely in existence and gospel had not yet been separated from apocrypha. These paintings, part of a programmatic series of scenes about salvation, may be the earliest manifestation of the visual church.

“We are not about the greatest hits,” said Dr. Chi, “but about finding a balance between art and context.”

editorial@observer.com

That's your URL, not your house.

You were probably told to share, say “please,” and play nice in preschool. But, for some brokers, that message doesn't quite stick.

David Innocenzi is a broker at Heddings Property Group. He was using TheInnocesiTeam.com for his brokerage business. But this summer, when he clicked to renew his membership of the domain name, it was mysteriously taken, according to The Real Deal.

Prudential Douglas Elliman, who itself pinched Heddings' domain name, recently sued for having almost the exact same thing done to it. In a lawsuit against Saunders & Associates last June, Douglas Elliman made headlines for complaining that such theft exploited “the identity and goodwill earned by its competitors.”

But this is now exactly Mr. Innocenzi’s problem. And although nabbing someone's domain name is about as common and unenforceable as nabbing someone's seat on the train—even City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has been cyber-squatted—what is astounding is the blank stare that Douglas Elliman gave Heddings as soon as it was called out for its theft. A spokesperson for the firm claimed they had no knowledge of the matter, and the domain name was immediately returned.

Although Mr. Innocenzi  declined to name the two Douglas Elliman brokers responsible, his own Italian name, meaning “innocent,” may help score him votes on the playground.

The Real Deal has a whole series of tales about such dealings, and you can read the rest here.

Moreno and Mata, also a former NYPD officer, had been acquitted of rape charges, but were fired from the force directly after the ruling. Mata is expected to be sentenced later this afternoon.

The two men were originally scheduled to be sentenced in June, but the ruling was delayed after attorneys requested to view an HBO documentary about the Manhattan District Attorney sex crimes unit, the group prosecuting the case.

Joseph Heller in 1979.

Catch-22 made Joseph Heller famous, but it made itself a lot more famous. It was a book so big it broke free of its author, then flattened him like a boulder. His failures were to it as fertilizer.

“In general, his critical reputation declined,” writes Tracy Daugherty in Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller (St. Martin’s Press, 560 pages, $35.00). “Catch-22 grew in stature.” When Heller got accused of plagiarism, the book’s sales surged. When he wrote a bad movie, they soared. It was the touchstone for every disparagement of his subsequent books. It was also the touchstone for many disparagements of him. “Either that guy is wearing a mask, or he didn’t write that book,” insisted one student of Heller at Yale. When, at the end of his life, Heller returned to pen a sequel, “people were mad at Joe for messing with their memories.” The artist as an old man found himself unwelcome in the mansion of his youth.

Joseph Heller was born poor on Coney Island in 1923. He served as a bombardier in the Second World War, attended New York University on the G.I. Bill, then went to Columbia and Oxford on merit. A spell of learned dithering ensued. Heller tried to write fiction  and got cowed. Then he tried to teach it, and got bored. By the mid-’50s, when he was in his 30s, Heller had abandoned academe for Madison Avenue, where he got a job writing copy for Henry Luce. (Heller’s second novel, Something Happened, was an inspiration for Mad Men.) Here, Heller learned to drink martinis. The dithering had become rewarding. “A few executive officers discovered they were alcoholic … and a few men, like Joe, kept getting promoted,” Mr. Daugherty informs us. Bosses depended on him. Colleagues bowed to him. He had a beautiful wife. He cheated on her anyway. “[Heller] did not have it in him to become an aesthetic monk,” Mr. Daugherty writes. Heller admired Dostoevsky, but he didn’t go home to a garret.

Instead, he went home early. “‘The novel, you know,’ people whispered whenever Joe and Shirley [Heller’s wife] left a party early,” Mr. Daugherty writes. Heller hadn’t sworn off fiction; he’d just deferred it to the night shift. “[Heller] had drawers and drawers full of file cards,” recalled a friend. “He was very organized.” When the Second World War ended, in 1945, the race to write the great Second World War novel broke out. There were frontrunners. And then there were those who nobody knew were running. A decade on, unknown to most, Heller saw himself in the race. The gray flannel suit overlay fluorescent ambitions. “Joe … recognized that contemporary American writing, hobbled by outmoded conventions, was unable to document the nation’s new realities,” Mr. Daugherty writes.

It was a heady period for American fiction. It was also a hair-raisingly competitive period. As you tried to get going on your war novel, other people kept coming out with their war novels, which were alarmingly good. “Suddenly, World War II belonged to Norman Mailer,” Mr. Daugherty writes. In 1948, Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead. The book had flaws, but it was big enough to transfigure its author with fame. “[Mailer and I] were about the same age … and it put me in my place,” Heller later wrote. Mailer wasn’t alone. “[Heller] decided he was falling farther off the planet when James Jones’s From Here to Eternity appeared [in 1951],” Mr. Daugherty writes. In 1957, Jack Kerouac published On the Road.

“Mailer and others were mired in received notions of craft,” Mr. Daugherty writes. As Heller’s book lumbered into being, it posed a salient contrast to the work of his peers. It was not another James Jones novel. It was not a brooding epic. “War was not [Heller’s] primary subject,” Mr. Daugherty writes. “It was a pretext for verbal pyrotechnics and social critique.” Heller was trying to do War and Peace à la Lenny Bruce, and the dissonance made editors squeamish. It wasn’t easy on the writer, either. “At one point, Joe was working with at least nine different drafts, both handwritten and typed.”

Eventually, an agent emerged. She found an editor. Robert Gottlieb, a youthful ruler over the depleted offices of Simon and Schuster (and now an Observer contributing writer), decided to take on Heller’s book. “Robert Gottlieb was just a kid, really,” Mr. Daugherty writes. “And the company was his to play with.” In 1953, a 10-page excerpt of Heller’s manuscript had appeared under the title Catch-18. By the time it came out, in 1961, the title was Catch-22. Its author was antsy. When Catch-22 got a bad review on page 50 of The New York Times Book Review, Heller memorized it. He would have been better off memorizing the weather. The book has sold 10 million copies.

“It was past its prime before it ever came into its own,” as Mr. Daugherty writes of Coney Island. In his writing, Heller was a master of the hairpin turn—the absurd swerve from expectation that sends the reader skidding into laughter and perplexity. From Catch-22: “Nately’s mother, a descendant of the New England Thorntons, was a Daughter of the American Revolution. His father was a Son of a Bitch.” Heller’s life mimicked this pattern of his art. Freed by Catch-22 to pursue his fiction, Heller would discover that his debut had been his crescendo. As a reviewer of a late novel, Picture This, observed, “[Heller’s] biggest mistake was writing his best novel first.” Or as Martin Amis wrote in an essay on Vladimir Nabokov, “Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.” Heller’s talent had the lifespan of a Roman candle.

Age brought Heller grief. He put on weight. His promiscuity snowballed. He was bamboozled by the call of Hollywood. Heller had relished the success of Catch-22, but he soon came to rue the expectations it had raised. “The fear that he might not be able to pull off another book never left him,” Mr. Doherty writes. What books Heller wrote always sold, but tended to receive a wan welcome from critics. Something Happened got applause. Good as Gold got heckled. The rest were met with ferocity. In 1981, Heller left his wife. He was found to have Guillain–Barré syndrome a year later. “When they name a disease after two guys, it’s got to be terrible,” said novelist Mario Puzo, a friend of Heller. Heller survived, but with a fraction of his former vitality. He would marry one of his nurses within a few years. “She knew little about Joe’s literary accomplishments, except he ‘looked like Norman Mailer.’” Soon, Heller was envying Mailer the pluck it must have taken to “have four wives and stab one.”

“A writer can only be discovered once,” Heller once remarked. Mr. Daugherty has produced the definitive life of Heller, a stringent portrait of the man embedded in a panorama of his era. Affection for his subject sometimes induces Mr. Daugherty into folly. It is, for example, outlandish to credit Heller with changing “the emphasis in fiction from the story to the way the story is told”; Joseph Heller did not invent literary style. For the most part, though, the biographer is clear-eyed about his subject’s shortcomings. Heller wrote an immortal book. Then he lost his mojo. The life is looked upon as a lesson in the transience of excellence. “He could have rested on his laurels, reading from Catch-22 wherever he went, but … he still wanted to write, and to send ripples through American literature.” Once, Heller had it. He still wanted it. He couldn’t get it back. In 1994, “[Heller] reread Catch-22 for the first time in years, and found himself tickled, amazed he’d once commanded such an extensive literary vocabulary. ‘[M]y reaction was, ‘My god, what talent I had.’”

editorial@observer.com

Last week the architect Rafael Viñoly was speaking—not kindly—about colleagues of his who think they can do things besides make buildings. "This is a profession," he said dryly, "that generates an enormous amount of arrogance."

Some architects have tried to design clothes; others, high-end chairs. Still others have attempted to design sets for operas, a phenomenon that goes back to at least 1816, when the German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel created iconic backdrops for Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

This last group—the architects who spend their off-hours doing opera—is one that has gotten rather hip in recent years, growing to include famous contemporary masters like Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and even Rafael Viñoly. Mr. Viñoly, 67, the principal of his blazingly successful eponymous firm and the designer of buildings from the Tokyo International Forum to Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, doesn’t pretend that he’s immune to the temptation to try other arts. In 2004, he designed the sets for a production of Shostakovich’s The Nose at the Bard SummerScape festival, and he worked on a Chicago Opera Theater production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria in 2007.

This summer Mr. Viñoly has returned to the Bard festival to design (with Mimi Lien) the sets for New York’s first fully staged production of the sumptuous Strauss rarity Die Liebe der Danae, which opens on Friday, at Bard’s theater in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; it’s directed by Kevin Newbury and conducted by Leon Botstein.

"Architects feel empowered to give opinions about politics and sociology and philosophy without knowing much about it," Mr. Viñoly said by phone from Beijing, where his firm is building an engineering school. "Kind of in the same way that they think they can design furniture or fashion or utensils for dining. I think architects tend to believe that they can almost do anything, which is a wonderful characteristic, but in some cases you just fall flat. Theatrical design is just a completely different vocabulary. It’s a very, very difficult thing to do well."

He’s right: when architects play set designer, the results can be iffy. There was a mixed response to Mr. Libeskind’s designs for a production of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise in Berlin in 2002. Last year Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who designed the "Bird’s Nest" stadium for the Beijing Olympics, made their Metropolitan Opera debuts with a visually muddled production of Verdi’s early opera Attila (Miuccia Prada did the Mad Max-esque costumes; it was a boldface-names kind of night). Santiago Calatrava designed five sets for a 2010 New York City Ballet festival called "Architecture of Dance"; a couple of the designs were pretty enough, but they seemed to have little to do with the dances.

Mr. Viñoly, though, has largely been praised. The Wall Street Journal wrote of the Chicago production of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, "It’s the rare unit set that works so well." His elegant set for The Nose at Bard in 2004 appeared to be made of corrugated metal, with the geometric edges and sharp angles of old Russian Constructivist posters. It was a success, as was his very different design for Bard’s Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, which opened in 2007. Atop a little hill at the center of campus, the building, with its glass facade, curves sinuously.

"Sometimes it becomes self-referential and detached from the piece," he said of the theatrical work some architects do, but his own designs have seemed straightforward and self-effacing, intelligent and resonant with the work at hand. Much like his buildings, they know when and how to assert themselves.

Mr. Viñoly comes by opera honestly: his father directed productions for the National Opera in his native Uruguay, and Mr. Viñoly himself studied piano from an early age. He even considered a career as a musician before choosing architecture in his late teens. "There’s something about the tempo of opera that I’ve always been interested in," he said, and he and Mimi Lien, his collaborator on Die Liebe der Danae, have created a shifting, modern environment for the opera’s bittersweet love plot.

"We wanted to make it into something in a way very cinematic," Mr. Viñoly said, "creating levels of intimacy and grandeur. The whole idea is that instead of having a vertical sort of transformation of the stage in which everything comes from the top or bottom, in this case everything comes from the sides. By virtue of that, you start seeing the scene move and the different configurations of the space are created in front of your eyes."

There’s something about the serene boxlike shapes of Mr. Viñoly’s new addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art that’s reminiscent of his pared-down boxlike set for Il Ritorno d’Ulisse. It’s possible, in other words, to trace vague connections between Mr. Viñoly’s set designs and his buildings, but he discourages them.

"They’re parallel, not intersecting interests, and ... that is what [is] valuable for me," he said. "In theater, you’re always working on something which by definition is temporary. That is in and of itself a gigantic difference. What we do in architecture has a different sense of responsibility. It’s always about the future performance of the building. In the theater, everything is ephemeral. Everything is almost weightless and without a very clear definition of how you made it."

editorial@observer.com

Take Anselm Kiefer, the 66-year-old German painter with a taste for the grand and sometimes bombastic themes of national identity and collective memory, who first came to notice in the 1980s. He combined German mythology with Jewish mysticism in sprawling, brooding, often lugubrious paintings that incorporated humble materials like glass, straw, wood and even dirt. His big, expressive paintings put him in the same league as big, expressive American stars like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel.

The first of those artists died; and the second turned to country music and film. Mr. Kiefer not only survived the ’80s but continued to evolve intellectually and stylistically as a painter. A leading figure in contemporary art for more than 40 years, he has achieved the kind of cognoscenti recognition that gave him a cameo role propping up a naked Courtney Love as she traipsed around a hotel in a New York Times Styles section profile last fall. He’s built a global base of collectors who eagerly snap up his new work, which he still produces in prodigious amounts. Over the last two and a half years, his popularity has ramped up, with a dozen shows in New York, London and in Europe at galleries like White Cube, Yvon Lambert and Gagosian. The latest Kiefer show—consisting of 20 of the artist’s signature canvases exploring the theme of alchemy—opens this week at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, in Salzburg.

But even given all of these gallery exhibitions, and some solid results in recent auctions—Christie’s set a new worldwide record of $3.6 million for the artist this May in New York and sales in London in late June saw Kiefers sell well above presale estimates—his performance on the resale market (that is, the trade in older works) has been more leaden than golden. When a leading auction house specialist who has sold some significant Kiefers was informed that almost $14 million in Mr. Kiefer’s art had publicly traded in the first half of 2011 the expert raised an eyebrow, and replied, “Really? I had no idea.”

That’s because $14 million is an impressive number in the Kiefer market. When the market for contemporary art last peaked, in 2007, Mr. Kiefer’s full-year sales shot up to $8.3 million. In 2008, they spiked to $12.3 million. But compared to some of his slightly older German peers—so far this year, Georg Baselitz has sold $25 million at auction; Sigmar Polke, who recently died, $40 million and Gerhard Richter’s sales topped $100 million—Mr. Kiefer is an underperformer.

“Given his critical acclaim, his auction records are lackluster to say the least,” observed prominent Kiefer collector Andrew J. Hall, the head of Phibro, the commodities trading firm. “Not much comes to auction, and when it does it never performs as well as his fame would suggest.”

Not that Mr. Kiefer’s collectors or his dealers are complaining: one of the distinctive features of his art is its unsuitability to anything that might be thought of as decorating. “He almost intentionally makes his work difficult for domestic settings,” said Mr. Hall. “He’s dismissive of what most people would consider very large paintings. He calls those works sofa paintings.”

Mr. Hall, who owns some Kiefers that span 25 feet and rise up to 10 feet high, knows a thing or two about the difficulty of housing the artist’s work. After an altercation with his neighbors in Fairfield, Conn., over a 42-ton concrete sculpture that sat on his lawn from 2003 until 2007, he decided to put some of his Kiefers on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. After a successful two-year loan from 2008 to 2010, Mr. Hall now has plans to open a new structure at the North Adams museum some time this fall to permanently display around a quarter of his Kiefer holdings.

Not surprisingly, museums provide the backbone of the market for Mr. Kiefer’s uncompromisingly large works, but even his more manageable output has strong institutional support. The Metropolitan Museum in New York owns a suite of 20 of the artist’s rare watercolors, a few examples of which sold particularly well in London last month. Such museum support adds prestige to an artist’s oeuvre but also limits the supply that can create liquidity in an artist’s market.

“You don’t see rampant speculation,” said Robert Manley, head of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary department who made the recent record price of $3.6 million selling the 1983 painting To the Unknown Painter this May.

To the Unknown Painter had the benefit of being an almost living room friendly 6 feet by 8 feet, but that’s not the reason the haunting depiction of a German courtyard sold so well. “His architectural paintings are always going to sell for the most,” said New York dealer James Cohan. “It’s the last architectural painting in private hands to come to market.”

It had the benefit of coming from a recognized body of the artist’s work with decades of critical acclaim, and sold at Christie’s to an unnamed American private collector. But on the whole, although Mr. Kiefer has been an art star since the 1980s, his prices haven’t risen until recently. According to data compiled by Artnet, his market leapt forward in 2007 when the number of works selling at auction nearly doubled from the previous year. Work was drawn onto the market that year because of a rise in prices in 2006, when the artist’s average price peaked at $454,640. So far this year, Mr. Kiefer’s auction sales have generated an average price that is 15% higher, at $521,477.

If Mr. Kiefer’s market has remained at something of an even keel, this may be because his dealers have worked to keep it that way. Even faced with rising demand at auction, they’ve maintained careful control over his secondary market. “Sometimes the works come back through the gallery,” said Mr. Ropac, “and we can place these easily.”

Not only do many works go back through his primary galleries but when work comes up at auction a dealer like Mr. Ropac pays careful attention to who might be on the other end of a telephone line. In London, Mr. Ropac was a visible underbidder on several works that sold well above their six-figure estimate range during the evening sale at Christie’s but he never went in for the kill.

“I knew who else was bidding,” Mr. Ropac said. “I felt it was not so nice to bid against a client.”

That kind of restraint makes Mr. Kiefer a bit of a safe haven. “It’s very blue chip in that way, without big peaks and valleys,” Mr. Manley says. “He creates enough to feed the international demand for his work.”

International is right. A museum in Australia is planning to open a Kiefer room. There’s a strong presence in Tel Aviv. Then there’s Asia where, according to Mr. Cohan, the tradition of history painting in China seems to drive some of Mr. Kiefer’s appeal. “Dealing with complex subjects that are metaphors for current events touches a nerve in many different traditions,” Mr. Cohan said. Mr. Ropac points to strong demand from collectors in Hong Kong and says that two Chinese buyers are planning make the trip to Salzburg this week to attend his opening. And Mr. Kiefer has been shown in Korea since the early 1990s.

Then, somewhat surprisingly, there is the United States. Many think of Mr. Kiefer as an artist whose work is too cerebral for American tastes—many of his works are painted books or photographs and he makes all manner of assemblages—or too far from the brightly colored Pop art that dominates the American market. But Kiefer collectors see things differently.

“We have some fairly extraordinary contemporary art hanging in our house,” said Mr. Hall. “But when guests who have no knowledge of art come to our house, the one painting they’re most attracted to is the Kiefer. The imagery is straightforward; there’s a narrative there; it’s what they think art should be.”

Demand for his work extends far beyond art centers like New York. The Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, Calif., has added three Kiefers—a book sculpture, a dress sculpture and an important painting—in the past few years. Two were gifts from Minnesota collectors Donna and Cargill MacMillan Jr. who have a house in that snowbird community.

Visitors seeing those works have prompted demand through dealers like Chip Tom of Heather James Fine Arts in Palm Desert. “The buyers that we’re dealing with are long-time collectors and very knowledgeable,” said Mr. Tom. “It’s not going into these trendier collections with all the artists who came around since 2000. It’s going to people who are looking for things with a more conceptual bent, who have deep collections with other pieces from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.”

Mr. Tom has sold a handful of works in low six- and high five-figure range over the past three years. The gallery is looking to get its hands on more work if it can, which might, in turn, explain the recent strong results at auctions in London for Mr. Kiefer’s mixed media pieces and watercolors.

“Those watercolors, I couldn’t believe the prices,” said Mr. Hall. “I was bidding on them.” One, an image of a rose, made a healthy £97,250 or $156,275, against a high pre-sale estimate of £30,000-40,000 ($48,208-64,277). Mr. Ropac doesn’t think that price is abnormal for the watercolors. Perhaps he’s heard the rumors that Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Campbell wants to create a room to show the museum’s 20 Kiefer watercolors if and when the museum takes over the Whitney Museum’s building on Madison Avenue.

Mr. Ropac feels that Christie’s put low estimates on the watercolors to incite interest. He should know. He was one of the bidders gunning for the other watercolor, a prosaic view of mountains. It had also been estimated at £30-40,000 ($48,208-64,277), and Mr. Ropac won it for a whopping £163,250 ($262,333). He told The Observer that, because the current show at his gallery features mountainous landscapes, Mr. Kiefer wanted his dealer to have this 1972 watercolor in inventory, to better serve loyal collectors.

But Mr. Ropac thinks the $3.6 million record for To the Unknown Painter makes a poor benchmark for Mr. Kiefer’s market. “The painting was good but not one of his absolute top paintings,” the dealer said. “A lot of what we see in the secondary market isn’t always prime.”

That’s another way of saying that, in the still mostly secretive world of private sales, Mr. Kiefer’s best works could be selling even higher.

editorial@observer.com