Nonetheless, in another work, “How to Meet an Angel”, Kabakov gives us hope: if a person manages to climb the steps of the ladder 3600 feet toward the sky, an angel will fly to him. And here the ladder represents not only the path to another world, but also a chance to see a miracle with one’s own eyes. In this context, the bronze installation of “How to Meet an Angel” on the façade of a clinic for the mentally ill in Amsterdam can be interpreted as a symbol of hope for salvation.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, How to Meet an Angel, installation on the facade of the Mentrum Clinic, 2009, Amsterdam, photo by Emilia Kabakova

Many artists have created largescale works on the “stairway to heaven” motif. The Chinese artist Yu Hong’s twentyfoot painting of the same name (V1: 99) was inspired by the 12thcentury icon “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” (V1: 98) in St Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt. In Hong’s interpretation, men and women of different ages climb up or fall from a ladder that has no end or beginning. The dynamic poses and the characteristic details of their clothing of each character reveal their respective social status. This lends the work a theatrical-satirical tone and distances it from the sacred and sublime original.

A compatriot of Hong, Cai Guo-Qiang, created a truly evanescent “stairway to heaven”, a fleeting (2.5 minutes) but vivid performance using modern pyrotechnics. This enchanting display literally rose up over Huiyu Harbor in Quanzhou (V2: 351), in the artist’s homeland, early in the morning: a 1650-foot fiery ladder, which Guo-Qiang dedicated to his creative path, appeared in the sky. Its fiery, explosive nature, as a universal symbol of divine power, adds the theme of the duality of experience. In most cosmological texts, fire and flame are associated with both the creation of the world and the apocalypse, i. e. with uncontrollable forces of nature bearing both creation and destruction.

Infinity is an integral characteristic of the “stairway to heaven”. This is central to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installation (V1: 260). Since the 1960s, a primary theme of Kusama’s work has been numerous repetitions and reflections. Here it takes the form of a luminous road with no beginning or end, of which the viewer encounters only a small segment. An optical illusion makes the construction – a steel ladder wrapped with fiber-optic cable and two large round mirrors placed above and below it – appear endless, leading upwards to meta-space.

A different point of view on the heavenly ladder (V2: 278) is offered by Fabrice Samyn, depicting it from the opposite perspective with a wide base and steps narrowing as they get higher. Turning the iconographic symbol of man’s connection with God upside down, the artist transforms it into an instrument created by God for communication with man. The installation’s title, “You are the salt of the earth”, also suggests this interpretation. It is a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel (Matthew 5: 13,14), in which Christ speaks of the great strength of spirit a person needs in order to travel the path of self-improvement and resist the forces of evil.

Stairs were used to represent the dialogue between the earthly and the divine long before the birth of Christian culture, in ancient architectural forms such as the Babylonian ziggurat and the Egyptian pyramid (markedly in the step pyramid of Djoser), symbolizing the ascent from various elements of nature to a common divine whole. The Dogon people’s stairs (V1: 217) are both a manifestation of the hierarchic nature of the cosmic world order, and in addition to their ritual character have a utilitarian function. The long, winding sandstone stairs, with graded steps and forked peaks, allow the inhabitants of the area around the Rocks of Mali to get to and from their homes.

Some Biblical scholars have noted the connection of the heavenly stairway with the Egyptian Ladder of Hathor, along which the souls of the dead ascend to heaven. Based on texts inscribed on the walls of corridors and pyramid chambers, Egyptologists concluded that the inhabitants of Ancient Egypt believed that they could reach the world of the dead only by climbing this ladder, and that deities guarding it (Horus and Set) assisted the deceased, turning the ladder into a path to heaven. During the Ancient and Middle Kingdoms, a wooden model of the ladder would often be placed in tombs; later, priests would draw a ladder on papyrus to illustrate texts from the Book of the Dead.

Stairs and ladders as ritual symbols have developed into a familiar metaphor for the passage out of the world of the living. In this context, a ladder appears in the finale of Slava Polunin’s lyrical show “Chu”. The show tells the story of a group of old clowns, who have only one thing left to do as their lives near their end: to leave on time. A ladder decorated with gold funereal tassels, lowered from “heaven”, indicates the solemnity of the moment; but it is not the ladder that predicts the clowns’ departure. At the appointed hour, an angelic guide comes for the hero, who is late, and punches his one-way ticket, thus marking the end…

Chaim Soutine, The Red Staircase at Cagnes, 1923–1924, oil on canvas, 28.5 × 21.25 ins

In Mihail Chemiakin’s work “The Ladder” (V1: 253) a border between two planes is clearly marked. The passage here represents not the transition between worlds, but rather the choice of a moral path. The change in color from red to white can be seen to symbolize the choice between spiritual purity (white) or bodily passions (red), if we consider red and white to be symbols of the diabolical and the divine. The dichotomy of red and white, present in European culture since the early Middle Ages, today is most often associated with the Russian Revolution.

Red and white tones predominate in Chaim Soutine’s paintings, notably in his “Red Staircase at Cagnes” – a profoundly tragic image that reflects the artist’s dramatic life and its constant psychological stress. This landscape from the artist’s early period is an attempt to comprehend the meaning of color. Soutine was very interested in red as the color of both life and death. His red staircase, reminiscent of the backbone of the split carcasses so often depicted by the artist, runs along a crooked street, conveying the finiteness of the flesh and the “fluidity” of being. Here once again we find the heavenly staircase, uniting the carnal and the sublime, the inaccessible but possible.

Leningrad nonconformist Gennady Ustyugov’s 1993 painting ”Whither Leads the Ladder?” (V1: 159) can be seen as a reference to Russian Orthodox Marian iconography. Ustyugov places the ladder, in dialogue with a female figure, against the background of an unreal landscape. The bent position of her translucent body reminds the viewer of the angels in Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity” icon, and her head is tilted toward a ladder, suggesting it is a way to the mountaintop. The female figure is imbued with the mood of estrangement from the earthly and the readiness to make a journey; the presence of a ladder as a transcendental sign gives hope for salvation, hope that the soul will gain strength and recover after suffering. The painting largely becomes a mirror of the internal state of the artist himself, who has defined his primary question in the work’s title: does the ladder represent atonement or punishment?