Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Guggenheim
Hilma af Klint: Painting for the Future at the Guggenheim
October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019
Weeks after viewing the revelatory Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim, three thoughts continue to circle around in my mind.
First, naturally, is about the artworks themselves, starting with the fact that the 196 works are in such outstanding condition after having being hidden away in storage for over four decades, which strikes me as a minor miracle in itself. Beyond that, I am in awe of the work’s sophisticated abstract imagery, its frequently ambitious scale, and af Klint’s undeniable technical mastery. Her use of abstraction, which we now accept with ease, was no doubt shocking to viewers at the time of its creation, having predated Kandinsky, the putative father of modern Western abstract painting, by more than a decade. Without belaboring the point of who should get credited historically as the originator of Western abstract art (an art-world re-enactment of the “who discovered America, Leif Erikson or Christopher Columbus” debate), I want to dwell instead on the striking audacity and originality of her vision.
Hilma af Klint
The SUW/UW Series
Left: Group IX/SUW, The Swan No. 17, 1915
Oil on canvas
59 1/4″ x 59 3/8″
Right: Group IX/SUW, The Swan No. 16, 1915
Oil on canvas
60 3/4″ x 59 3/8″
Although a visionary, af Klint was not an Outsider Artist, but embarked on the “Temple” artworks after having trained as a professional painter and in possession of an active career, albeit of traditional portraits and landscapes. So while she left the formulaic tropes of late 19th century representational art behind, she carried over and increased her considerable technique and sense of finish. Her thin, feathery brushwork, frequently covering large areas with a single color, is never haphazard or aimless but, rather, reveals an unbroken attention given to the application of each stroke.
Hilma af Klint
The SUW/UW Series
Group IX/SUW, The Swan No. 17, 1915
Oil on canvas
DETAIL
The overall care and sense of touch communicates a meditative intelligence of singular power, predicting and echoing Minimalist art of the 1960s, where the transparency and immediacy of process plays a significant role in how we experience the work. It is hard to overstate just how pivotal af Klint’s choice, insistence, that her work be experiential rather than depictive or illustrative is to the understanding of her project. That is, she does not seek to record or represent one of her spiritual enlightenments but instead to create a mechanism for viewers to experience enlightenment via the contemplation of her art. In this her work has much more in common with that of Eva Hesse or Agnes Martin than it does with Kandinsky or even the more visually similar Malevich. Indeed, shunting aside the traditional illustrative approach popular in her time in favor of a first-person experiential relationship between artwork and viewer may arguably be a modernist leap forward on par with her origination of Western Abstraction. It was this insistence on favoring the experiential over the depictive that led her to largely ignore the painting criticism of her hero, the foremost Spiritualist thinker of her time, Rudolf Steiner.
Hilma af Klint
The SUW/UW Series
Left: Group IX/SUW, The Swan No. 15, 1915
Oil on canvas
59 1/4″ x 58″
Right: Group IX/SUW, The Swan No. 14, 1915
Oil on canvas
59 3/8″ x 59 3/8″
Which brings me to my second thought: To what degree should af Klint basing this work on the Spiritualism of her time, philosophically and experientially, play in our own attempts at understanding? As viewers, how dependent are we on an understanding of early 20th century Spiritualism in order to access meaning in af Klint’s work? If we are being honest, we can never know what any artist was actually thinking, or how that thinking (that we don’t really know) in reality impacted the production of the final works. We only have the work and our personal relation to it. Therefore I would argue that, beyond our recognition that art is always about something greater than its mere status as an object, the particular philosophy used by any artist – and, again, all artists generate work from some starting philosophy – is outside our personal relationship to a work and thus largely irrelevant. We come to appreciate any artwork, whether immediately or over time, from where we stand as individuals, through our own psychology and perspective. In simpler terms, not being a Christian does not keep me from a deep appreciation of Christian art, any more than not having a deep interest in Minimalism keeps me from liking Donald Judd. And I suspect most reading this piece would not dispute this point.
Hilma af Klint
Group IX/UW, The Dove
Left: No. 3, 1914
Oil on canvas
61 1/8″ x 45 3/8″
Right: No. 1, 1915
Oil on canvas
59 3/8″ x 45″
Yet while Spiritualism may not be a requirement to our understanding of these works, I find the role it played in af Klint’s ability to make them fascinating. I am not speaking here of the artist’s séances with her group, or even her later individual fugue-like states that, according to her, were the genesis of her abstract visions. Rather I am thinking of the artistic authority she gained through those experiences. In this aspect, this self-granting of authority, af Klint does overlap with the Outsider Artists. For one of the recurring back stories for most Outsider Artists, who were not trained artists and often quite old when they even began making work, was that they received instructions directly from God to start making their art. That they believed God told them to make art trumped all other issues – training, the appropriateness of subject matter, traditional approaches to rendering and color – and allowed them to bring their unique visions to fruition without fear of criticism. So too in the case of af Klint in receiving her visions from the spirit realm. The authority given to her by her guiding spirits or, if you prefer, that she somehow managed to grant herself, is what gave her the right and the nerve, according to her, to leave behind traditional imagery in favor of an idea of painting never before seen. It is what gave her the self-assurance to set aside Rudolph Steiner’s misguided aesthetic suggestions. None of which is easy for any artist to do at any time, let alone a woman working within the strictures of a completely male dominated society 110 years ago.
Hilma af Klint
Series II
My third thought involves a foray into counter-factual history: What if af Klint’s work had been brought out of hiding when she intended twenty years after the time of her death, in 1964, rather than forty years later in 1984? By the ‘80s we were entering a period of Neo-Expressionism and Post-Modernism, where Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Judy Pfaff, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, and Jean-Michael Basquiat were all ascendant. Not the most sympathetic cultural moment in which to introduce af Klint’s art.
Hilma af Klint
Series II
No. 2b, The Jewish Standpoint at the Birth of Jesus, 1920
Oil on canvas
14 1/4″ x 10 5/8″
Ah, but the ‘60s was a period when Minimalism and Formalism occupied a major place in the cultural dialogue, with artists like John McLoughlin, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Eva Hesse, who are all undeniably closer to af Klint’s sensibility. How much different might the reception been then for af Klint’s minimal works on paper and large meditative paintings? That is, how different might our perception of her work been if it had been introduced to us when she predicted would be the right time for us to see it? Of course, her predictions for the future came out of her Spiritualist inspired fugue-state meditations, so how much time can we spend imagining a historical “what if” that was, after all, merely a product of her fervent imagination.
And yet, here we are seventy-four years after her death, walking up the Guggenheim, a spiral ramped tower, contemplating her amazing art, just as af Klint’s spirits told her we would.
Hilma af Klint
