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Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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Both artists shared an interest in new ideas of scientific discovery, spirituality and philosophy. Af Klint was also a medium, and this exhibition showcases the large-scale, otherworldly paintings she believed were commissioned by higher powers. Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. It is likely that Hilma af Klint scholarship is on the brink of some radical changes regarding attribution and authorship. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021 and David Zwirner, London, in 2022, this book features a text by the art historian Susan Aberth examining af Klint’s spiritual and theosophical influences. With a conversation between curator Helen Molesworth and the US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo discussing connections between Tree of Knowledge and Native theories, the book broadens the scope of philosophical interpretations of af Klint's timeless work. Around the age of seventy, Hilma af Klint began to separate the documents and artworks she would preserve from those she would destroy. In this she was no different from many artists, but in other ways she was, and she knew it. Af Klint was not just an artist. She was also a mystic who said that her most powerful, abstract works were painted under the direction of higher spirits communicating from the astral plane. Since the late nineteenth century, an array of spiritualist teachings had been revolutionizing religious understanding the world over. For example, Theosophy, among the most popular, sought to reconcile the spirit with the natural and scientific worlds, and many artists embraced it: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, and Arthur Dove all studied Theosophy; none of them, however, ever publicly suggested their canvases were the expressions of any consciousness other than their own. Realizing the world was not yet ready for what she had created and what motivated it, in 1932 af Klint wrote that none of her paintings or drawings should be shown until twenty years after her death.

Hilma's name has been mostly forgotten (until recently) through a combination of sexism and genius. While she showed a few select people her work, she understood that it would take time for others to get to her level. She had no doubts that what she was doing was special. Hilma wrote that she wanted a spiral museum to house her work. You have to pretty sure of yourself to write such clear instructions about your “Temple” of a museum. In an uncanny twist of fate, her work was housed in a spiral museum. The Guggenheim's tide-turning 2018/2019 exhibition "Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future" put her work in the famous Guggenheim corkscrew architecture. At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian. Many consider her the first trained artist to create abstract paintings. With Hilma af Notes and Methods , we get to experience the arc of af Klint’s artistic investigation in her own words. One of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century, af Klint was a pioneer of abstraction. Her first forays into nonobjective painting preceded the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian and radically mined the fields of science and religion. Deeply interested in spiritualism and philosophy, af Klint developed an iconography that explores esoteric concepts in metaphysics, as demonstrated in Tree of Knowledge. This rarely seen series of works on paper renders orbital, enigmatic forms, visual allegories of unification and separateness, darkness and light, beginning and end, life and death, and spirit and matter. In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art—a wish that found a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda. Although they never met, af Klint and Mondrian both invented their own languages of abstract art rooted in nature. At the heart of both of their artistic journeys was a shared desire to understand the forces behind life on earth.Finally, we get a brief glimpse into some of the ideas behind the extraordinary images by Cassel compiled in this book. The Saga of the Rose, as we have seen, constitutes the first two series presented, dating from 1913 (“Untitled Series I”) and 1915 (“Untitled Series II”). The fifty oil paintings that make up “Untitled Series I,” executed between March and June of 1913, are nothing short of breathtaking in their pictorial diversity and symbolic richness. They appear to amalgamize dreams, visions, and numerous occult traditions, from Freemasonry to esoteric Christianity. “Untitled Series II” counts ninety-eight oil paintings from 1915, the year that “The Paintings for the Temple” were completed (though the temple itself never was). Like the previous grouping, they encompass a dazzling array of imagery, from a bird with a human skull, to mysterious architectural interiors , to iconic symbols (keys, arcane signs, numbers), and totally abstract geometric forms. The stately grandeur of her decorations—their palette largely restricted to grays, soft blues, and gold—seems to foreshadow the secret initiations and unearthly revelations that await their proposed temple. Anna Cassel, No. 4. 4 January 1911, 1911, graphite and colored pencil on paper. 12 x 15 3/4″. Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. A moving biography, told in vivid illustrations, this graphic novel features key moments in the life of Swedish artist and pioneer of abstract painting Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Long underrecognized, af Klint is amid a sensational rediscovery that continues to take art audiences by storm. The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe. This Serpentine exhibition focused primarily on af Klint’s body of work, The Paintings for the Temple, which dates from 1906–1915. The sequential nature of her work was highlighted by the inclusion in the exhibition of numerous paintings from key series, some never-before exhibited in the UK.

Af Klint painted in near isolation from the European avant-garde. Fearing that she would not be understood, she stipulated that her abstract work should be kept out of the public eye for 20 years after her death. While the works were not exhibited for a further 20 years, it subsequently came to be understood alongside the broader context of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. What’s interesting, the author suggests, isn’t that Af Klint, in a century awash with spiritual fads, heard voices. It’s that, as far as her genius was concerned, those voices weren’t wrong.Best known for his abstract work, Mondrian in fact began his career – like af Klint – as a landscape painter. Alongside Mondrian’s abstract compositions, you will see the rarely exhibited paintings of flowers he continued to create throughout his life. Also on display will be enigmatic works by af Klint in which natural forms become a pathway to abstraction. The documentary attempted to answer this fundamental question of "how," but the question still eludes. By what force can someone invent a visual language with no precedent? By what force can someone develop something so new that nothing else like it in the world exists, essentially, all by themselves? The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint,” a début graphic novel by the Berlin-based artist and graphic designer Philipp Deines (published, perhaps ironically for the once commercially unappreciated af Klint, by David Zwirner Books, an offshoot of the super gallery), examines how af Klint’s art was shaped by her seagoing ancestors, the haunting loss of her younger sister, the prejudice she faced from the male artistic establishment, her romantic relationships with women, her travels, and her fascination with spiritualism and the occult. The book carefully grounds af Klint, who is heralded these days for being a visionary far ahead of her time, in the solid realities of her life. In the book’s afterword, Julia Voss, Deines’s collaborator and wife, who is the author of her own af Klint biography, writes, “Hilma af Klint in the hotel. Hilma af Klint at the train station. On the train. Inside the studio. Or by the sea, on the cliff that gave her family its name. . . . The more Philipp drew, the less isolated Hilma af Klint appeared to us.”

Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art.

A Biography

Af Klint’s paintings will be exhibited at Tate Modern next April, but it’s taken a long time for the art world to catch up with the visionary Swede. Voss’s biography, published in Germany in 2020, and only now translated into English, is the first of its kind. An award-winning art historian and former art editor of the Frankfurter All gemeine Zeitung, Voss taught herself Swedish to decipher Af Klint’s huge archive of notes and decode her mysterious life story. She saw her work as a spiritual calling, supercharged with meaning in ways most of her contemporaries struggled to grasp Susan Aberth is the Edith C. Blum Professor in the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College. Conceiving of herself as a mix of two spirits - male Asket and female Vestal - Af Klint “experienced her sexual encounters with friends”, Voss writes, “from a place beyond clear gender relationships”. Elsewhere, though, she floundered; she was sidelined by male artists and struggled for exhibition space, living in near total anonymity. But Af Klint was buoyed by her own self-belief. Her life, like her art, was bold, colourful, self-contained. Af Klint’s paintings came crashing into this venerable canon like a meteor. Suddenly her huge canvases were hanging next to those of recognized modernist masters. The unknown Swedish woman seemed to come out of nowhere, and the reception was largely nega­tive. The American critic Hilton Kramer wrote: “Hilma af Klint’s paintings are essentially colored diagrams. To accord them a place of honor alongside the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Kupka . . . is absurd. Af Klint is simply not an artist in their class and—dare one say it?—would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.” Kramer wasn’t the only person who thought so. Silence fell again on the subject of Hilma af Klint. In recent years we have heard much about The Five, the spiritualist group of women—af Klint, Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman, and Mathilda Nilsson—who channeled messages from “higher powers” from 1897 to 1907. A gifted medium, Cassel would eventually come to dominate the group, while af Klint played a more subsidiary role. It was working together outside of this quintet, however, that af Klint and Cassel each began to receive messages from the spirit realms asking for their participation in a “special mission.” The ensuing visual collaboration resulted in numerous preliminary sketches and twenty-seven small oil paintings executed between October 1906 and September 1907; this is the inaugural series of “The Paintings for the Temple” and thus a crucial juncture in the history of abstraction. Titled “Series I” or “The First 26 Small Ones” (the title would be changed later to “Primordial Chaos”), this body of work endeavored to visualize the so-called Akashic records: a supernatural compendium, as elucidated by Theosophy’s cofounder and chief theoretician, Helena Blavatsky, of all universal events and thoughts occurring in the past, present, and future and concerning all life forms. Analyzing the works in Cassel’s notebooks, Martin has convincingly been able to parcel out fourteen works belonging to her in this series and includes two comparisons that illustrate the women’s different styles. Cassel paid greater attention to detail, for example, and her application of paint was more careful and smoother than af Klint’s expressive surfaces, resulting in a deeper saturation of color. Anna Cassel, untitled, n.d., watercolor on paper. 15 1/2 x 10 1/2″.

Hilma af Klint's daring abstractions exert a mystical magnetism, and this book represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the institution. Kurt Almqvist’s essay, “The Significance of Anna Cassel to the Art of Hilma af Klint,” likewise strives to redress the occlusion of Cassel’s influence on and contribution to af Klint’s work, as well as underscore the importance of collaboration and collectives in their milieu. For those of us who seek clarity regarding the plethora of esoteric organizations active in Sweden at this time, Almqvist lays it all out in a marvelously succinct manner along with a timeline of Cassel and af Klint’s memberships and levels of involvement. It is here where we get a better understanding of their move toward Rudolf Steiner’s Rosicrucian theosophy and later Anthroposophy, his educational, therapeutic, and pseudoscientific expansion of the former. Voss respects her subject deeply, sometimes to a fault. Her reluctance to discuss Af Klint’s sexuality takes scholarly caution to extremes. But the same discretion pays dividends when discussing the artist’s dreams. She resists the temptation to instrumentalise Af Klint’s mysticism. The woman who emerges in Voss’s exacting portrait is strong-willed, purposeful and confident; ahead of her time and perhaps ours too.During her mystical artistic process, Hilma took rigorous and organized notes. This book is a collection of those notes, and they help explain her thinking. For example, a color was not just a color to Hilma. A circle was not just a circle. Each symbol or color has a specific and highly creative meaning. Some colors meant certain genders of life stages. Her works are like puzzles or mazes, rich with meaning to uncover for the careful looker. As you can already imagine, I immensely enjoyed this book. Hilma is one of my favorite artists! This is a unique chance to discover the visionary work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and experience Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s influential art in a new light.

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