“Lay your shadow on the sundials / and let loose the wind in the fields. / Bid the last fruits to be full,” go lines in “Herbsttag” (Autumn Day), written by Rainer Maria Rilke in 1902. Rilke’s poem, says the German painter Anselm Kiefer, “has been in my memory for 60 years. I know many poems by heart, they are in me, and every now and then they emerge.” This one emerged while Kiefer was in London, taking photographs in Hyde Park on a day of exploding fall color. Alchemy and its defining materials—lead and gold—have long been a motif in Kiefer’s art, and the alchemy of autumn is the focus of these paintings, with their silhouetted trees in browns and greys, their leaves of gold. —Laura Jacobs