Exhibition Review:
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York, October 12, 2018 — April 23, 2019
The resurrection of mainstream spirituality is upon us: ‘witch kits’ sold in stores containing tarot cards, crystals, and sage, the discovery and interpretation of natal charts in astrology, and finding a balance with one’s chakras. There is a reliance of faith in ourselves and in a higher power, whether it’s a god or the universe, that drives our passions and will to live. Spirituality in art reoccurs in many traditional forms throughout art history, from the paintings on ancient cave walls before time to the naturalist paintings of Thomas Wilmer Dewing in the 1800s to the mixed media works of Fred Tomaselli in current day. However, art history’s timeline of movements and spiritual execution must be rewritten to include Hilma af Klint, the first artist of abstractionism whose painterly style was ahead of her time, and is finally being celebrated.
Hilma af Klint was born as the fourth child of five in 1862 to a prominent military family in Stockholm, Sweden. Throughout her childhood, she and her family would spend their summer in a remote estate; her association with nature will become one of her inspirations in both her commercial and abstract work. Af Klint’s inspiration from nature is paired with her growing interest in spiritualism: in 1879, she began participating in séances to contact the dead and followed the teachings of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Buddhism; her passion for contacting higher powers and spirits only ignites further when her sister Hermina dies a year later.
While she participates in spiritual teachings, af Klint also attends the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts from 1882 to 1887. Her career there is quite successful and she also forms a pivotal friendship with a group of four other women who are also interested in the occult and spiritual practices. The Five, or de Fem (as they liked to call themselves), engaged in séances with spirits they called the High Masters, each being given a name: Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor. During a séance in 1906, The Five are commissioned to create a body of work for a spiritual spiral temple; while the other four reject such request out of fear of madness, af Klint accepts the task, ultimately creating 193 paintings in several series. Her connection with the High Masters brings about the first bodies of work that is considered abstract, “art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but seeks to achieve its effects using shapes, forms colors, and textures.” The movement originally dubbed Kandinsky as the founder. From then on, her career and the timeline of art changes forever.
The Guggenheim recently unveiled Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, the first major American exhibition of the Swedish spiritualist, taking up nearly every spiral floor of the museum. Curated by Tracey Bashkoff and David Horowitz, on display is over 165 paintings, automatic drawings, and journal entries for The Paintings for the Temple, the extensive production of abstract, nonobjective paintings made between 1906 and 1915 for her High Masters’ temple.
Af Klint’s Paintings for the Temple begin in the first gallery space full of giant (ten feet high) paintings from the set Group IV, The Ten Largest. Her most outstanding works are depictions of the cycle of life: childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. The paintings, decorated with spirals, flowers, and what could be microscopic-organisms’ shapes, are an ode to how our dynamics change between one another over time. These were painted automatically, as she described the High Masters taking control of her arms while her mind was blank. In №1, Childhood, for one example, two rings of white and pink flowers interlink above a circle lined with yellow sperm-like shapes. They surround two white ovular shapes with a cursive ‘a’ inscribed in one and a ‘v’ inside the other. The abstract womb structure is further encompassed by a singular line of orange swirls. Below the orange line work at the bottom of the painting are two sets of blue and yellow circles and in between the sets is a shape reminiscent of ovaries. In all of af Klint’s Paintings For The Temple, she dubs yellow to represent men and blue to represent women. From this interpretation, one can conclude that the first painting is about the birth of a new life. Her Group IV series successfully brings about a feeling of life and the wonders of it with her use of bold shapes and colors. It simplifies what we are on this world and in this universe — a beautiful and grand creation that is microscopic in to the rest of the universe.
The dynamics and dualities of life are recurring themes in af Klint’s work, and as you travel further up the spiral of the museum you see her work take form from something random to more symmetrical and balanced, which one can see most obviously in her series Group IX/SUW, The Swan. The common composition between most of the paintings in this set is of literal duality — a white swan on a black background above a black swan with a white background, a circle divided in half with layers of blue, yellow, and pink on one side and black and white on the other, a white triangle touching the tip of a black triangle on their respective white and black backgrounds — on the coexistence of life and death, man and woman, yin and yang, light and dark. The erratic, automatic paintings of The Ten Largest represent the eccentricity of life while The Swan series represent life broken down to its absolute core of living and dying.
At the near end of the spiral is the display of her final series: Group X, Altarpieces, three final paintings made as a main centerpiece for the unmade temple. There’s a sense of holiness about them that is not felt in her other paintings; gold auras that reference the medieval era of art symbolize a higher power or perhaps a form of heaven. The large triangles that are paired with the circle in two of three paintings represent the divinity of femininity and masculinity, once again drawing inspiration on the coexisting dualities of life. All three paintings are shown under a gold, dim light, contrasting the cold fluorescents of the other paintings as a way to draw your focus into the artworks’ divinity.
This spiral is something of rather importance to not only af Klint’s spiritualistic beliefs, but for the viewer as well. The sacred temple for the High Masters was inspired to be a spiral shape; the spiral is often associated with the journey of life and the expansion of one’s consciousness. The Guggenheim’s spiral structure is not only respect to af Klint’s conceptual temple, but for the audience to follow along her developing thought process as she worked more and more on her magnum opus. During my visit, one viewer said she spiraled into madness while another said that af Klint created an art form that she wanted to develop to the very end. What I appreciate most about the space is that it contributes to the open-ended terms we have with her artworks — it’s a respectful granted wish that af Klint have her work hung in a spiral building, but it also shows her possible spiral into madness that her colleagues wanted to avoid. Whatever one’s interpretation of her work is, her art has made an impact on the history of art and how art, no matter the process, comes to be.
Af Klint is the true founder of abstractionism, creating unique artworks well before Kandinsky and Pollock, yet it wasn’t until recently that she came to light. As a female artist of the early 1900s, af Klint’s work was not taken as seriously as her male counterparts, being that it was seen as primitive and had no meaning; having known this, af Klint requested that her work was to be shown 20 years after her death — it wasn’t until thirty years later (1986) that some of her paintings were displayed, and it wasn’t until this year that an American audience had the privilege of seeing her nearly complete set of works. The Guggenheim’s Paintings for the Future intends to shed light on Hilma af Klint’s history and her artwork to the future audience she intended to have. Her ability to set aside the constraints of the ego and just paint makes her artworks like a breath of fresh air — artworks one might confuse as being made in modern day. It’s time to embrace the work of female pioneers in the art world, and today we start with Hilma af Klint.
