Anselm Kiefer: The Women Alchemists Exhibition review
By Ann McCoy
Anselm Kiefer has specifically chosen Milan’s Sala delle Cariatidi, a room held up by forty war-damaged Caryatid columns, to present a pantheon of female alchemists who have mostly been erased from history. Leonora Carrington’s The Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess (1964) is a rare example of a woman alchemist celebrated in contemporary art. That a male artist has resurrected this feminine history, and the holistic mysteries it represents, is miraculous, especially in our era with its rational bias. Thirty-eight large-scale panels resembling altar pieces (all 2025), some over eighteen feet in height, unfold like screens across the great room and adjoining salon. The women’s portraits, some suspended on gold leaf surrounds like the Christ in Matthias Grünewald’s Resurrection (1510), suggest divinity. The monumental scale, metal leaf, bravura, and Kiefer’s gargantuan atelier have been employed to full effect to celebrate these forgotten practitioners of a lost art. The scarred caryatids look down upon the female alchemists whose precarious fates could include being burned at the stake.
Alchemy is far more than a precursor to modern chemistry. With the advent of modern physics and the phenomenon known as “observer shift,” we now know that the alchemists had a point—psychic processes determine outcomes. Transformation in the inner world affects transformation in the outer world. Carl Jung linked processes occurring both in the collective and personal unconscious to alchemical processes and brought this lost art into the modern world. Alchemy is all about incarnation, bringing spirit into matter, something omitted in positivist approaches. Then there is transmutation (lead into gold), where both the spiritual and the chemical move from lower to higher states. Kiefer’s art for decades has made transmutation manifest as molten crucibles of metal poured over his work produce chemical changes in situ. Here, in Lapis niger, a boulder (named after the mysterious black rock found beneath Rome) hangs precariously by a thread over a woman alchemist lugging a crucible of molten gold on her back.
