Artist of the week: Hilma af Klint
“In 1944, three great pioneers of abstract art died,” said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. One, Wassily Kandinsky, claimed to have created the first abstract painting in 1911; another, Piet Mondrian, refined this non-representational art down to pure colour and shape; the last was arguably just as important, but until recently was largely forgotten. This was the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, a spiritualist medium who had begun creating abstract paintings at least five years before Kandinsky. It is only in the past few years that she has started to be acknowledged as a trailblazer. While the likes of Kandinsky and Mondrian won plaudits for their achievements, af Klint was quietly making work that was every bit as revolutionary as that of her famous male counterparts. She created an extraordinary series of strange, visionary images influenced by science and theosophy, an occult spiritual movement popular in early 20th century Europe. Supposedly guided by “higher powers”, she aimed to “transcend the physical world and the constraints of representational art” and to make “the invisible visible”. Later this year, “Covid willing”, af Klint’s work will be at the forefront of a major exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted to overlooked female modernists, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. If it does its job, it will present a comprehensive challenge to the long-accepted “masculinist” version of the story of modern art.
Born in 1862, af Klint was introduced to spiritualism as an art student, said Januszczak. She devoted herself to automatic writing and drawing in order to contact divinities she called the “High Masters”. This transformed her art, and in 1906 she created her first abstract pictures. Intended for a “sacred”, never-built space known as the Temple, these “huge, lyrical, otherworldly” paintings were “filled with gentle cosmic swirling and spooky staircases of coloured geometry”, and were quite unlike anything ever seen in Western art. Over the decade that followed, she created nearly 200 of these mysterious and “unknowable” paintings, always insisting that they “were not really her work”, and that “she was merely the conduit through which the High Masters were expressing themselves”. This partly explains why her legacy went forgotten for so long: her work was dismissed as “cranky religious sign language”. There is also a hint of sexism to her airbrushing from history: the fact that Kandinsky and Mondrian were also devotees of theosophy has largely been overlooked.
We are now starting to acknowledge that art historians made an “egregious error” in ignoring af Klint, said Elizabeth Horkley on Hyperallergic. It’s impossible to be certain of her influence, but it is clear that she was not working in an artistic vacuum: Kandinsky, for one, visited her “at least once” between 1906 and 1915, and whether or not it was a direct influence, the “characteristic cursive shapes” that she derived from automatic drawing are echoed in the work of Cy Twombly, and her geometrical forms in that of Josef Albers. When she died, after spending most of her life “in quiet obscurity” on a Swedish island, af Klint left behind 1,300 paintings, most of which weren’t exhibited in her lifetime, said Stuart Jeffries. In her diaries, she recorded that the “High Masters” had told her that the world was not ready yet for her work. “Maybe they had a point.”