As visitors enter the signature exhibition marking the Israel Museum’s 60th birthday, they are greeted with a faint smell of mildew.

It’s no accident.

The odor emanates from “Ages of the World,” a monumental, pyramid-like installation by Anselm Kiefer, perhaps the foremost living German artist.

The work is a towering, four-meter-high pyramid of canvases in different stages of decay, piled among old photo albums, history books and giant dried sunflowers, as well as a scribble of dust, brittle paint chips and mid-sized rocks. Many of the 140 canvases were previously stored in shipping containers and left to the elements, a feature of Kiefer’s usual process — and the source of the scent.

It’s all part of Kiefer’s oeuvre, his longtime dedication to destruction and reconstruction, decay and rebirth, and the legacy of World War II and the Holocaust. Those motifs invite viewers to look back as Israel’s foremost cultural institution marks six decades since its 1965 founding on a hilltop near the Knesset, and also hearken back to a landmark moment in the museum’s history.

“This is like the closing of a circle,” said curator Orly Rabi, who worked with Kiefer’s Paris team to reassemble the installation at the museum, after American collector Martin Margolis donated the piece for the museum’s 60th celebrations. She was referring to a solo exhibit Kiefer mounted at the Israel Museum in 1984, a visit that profoundly influenced his later work with Hebrew Bible and Kabbalah themes.

The Kiefer installation is one of a few new or renovated exhibits the museum is staging for its diamond jubilee. The museum’s director, Suzanne Landau, also said the exhibits give the museum a chance to appreciate its achievements following a difficult time for Israel.

“We started marking the museum’s 60th during 2025, during the war, while hostages were still in Gaza,” Landau said. “Now we have the chance to go into our collections, to think about what the Israel Museum has........

© The Times of Israel