Homage to Neglected Women Healers
Recently I was in Milan and was lucky enough to see Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition ‘Le Alchimiste’, at the Sala delle Cariatidi, Palazzo Reale.
Entering the vast palace rooms full of towering canvases, I initially had no idea what the exhibition was about, but marvelled at its scale and impact.
The paintings were in Kiefer’s characteristic, thickly encrusted impasto style, mostly in blues, earth colours and gold, with found objects like dried plants stuck to the surface, and each was a powerful portrait of an individual woman, their names written in gold across the top… names like Isabella Cortese, Martine de Bertereau, Sophie Elizabeth Von Clermont.
The compositions were semi abstract, primitive and dynamic.
It was only when I got to the last room and read the rationale behind the exhibition that I found out the women were all herbalists, alchemists and philosophers, ‘the precursors of doctors, chemists and scientists of our time’, yet never recognised by History, in fact erased from official texts. The exhibition is Kiefer’s tribute to these remarkable women; even the setting was chosen by him because of its grandeur and its statues of women, defaced by bombing during World War II and left in partial ruins as a memorial.
The overall effect was awe inspiring and moving in the extreme. I had seen Kiefer’s work before, at the Royal Academy and in one of the ‘Imagine’ TV programmes, but this exhibition had the strongest lasting effect on me.