Hilma af Klint — Cultural Digest #13
She's Electric - the true pioneer of abstractionism and why art history has to be rewritten.
Peak 2020. I am getting ready to bed into my sofa for the three millionth time that day. I’ve completed television — all the hot picks bar Tiger King, too exploitative and upsetting for me, but The Last Dance, I May Destroy You, Normal People have all gone down an absolute treat plus anything and everything from any back catalogue that can be found on any streaming platform in existence has been hungrily devoured — seriously everything from Taskmaster to The Wire.
I am now ready to take on film. I’ve already cleaned out the entire Studio Ghibli collection, I’ve consumed every morsel of interest that MUBI and the BFI on demand have to offer as well as once again, anything and everything from any back catalogue that can be found on any streaming platform in existence. I’ve been invited to join BAFTA and decide to take them up on their offer, for the unreleased films, you understand — you get access to all the unreleased films through the BAFTA membership, so that you can vote on them for the awards. Delish. There are hundreds to consider though so where to begin? The platform has exponentially improved since the pandemic but at the time it was more like watching something at school, teacher wrangling a giant unwieldy TV on wheels with an ancient temperamental VHS situation — less Netflix, more, confusing database.
I discover through a lot of trial and error that the easiest way to navigate this weird wordy not in the least appetising buffet of hundreds of scrumptious films is to select lots of filters. I’ve been assigned a Group to ensure I watch a minimum quota which helps to narrow things down, so I’ve applied my Group filter along with Films Not In The English Language and Documentary Film - two of my go tos for new films I tend to really enjoy - and I am presented with one option:
Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint.
Let’s see… it’s about art lovely the genesis of abstractionism my FAVOURITE (huge Kandinsky fan over here) it’s in Swedish ooh I’m learning Swedish (it’s 2020 after all) it’s about a woman who pre-dates all the men credited with pioneering the abstractionist movement wait, what? No one’s ever heard of her because she was basically erased *presses PLAY* from history. There’s evidence to suggest that some of her work was plagiarised by some of the ‘greats’- I ALREADY PRESSED PLAY DATABASE DO I HAVE TO KEEP PRESSI- oh ok, you’re just, yep, no no, take your time. Buffering…. Buffering… Deep breath… I think, yep… Can I sit dow-
Ninety three minutes later I have had a transcendent experience. Equivalent to the Divine connection for whom Hilma af Klint acted as a conduit? Yeah, pretty much. The affinity I feel to this human is profound, as a woman, as an artist, as a mystic. I am expanded. She is the embodiment of a spiritual being having a human experience, bringing forth that connection into form, into vision, into art, at the turn of the 20th century.
Here is a human being interrogating existentialism through abstract shape in an effervescently feminine way. Who has as great an understanding of quantum physics as the men who are just beginning to theorise on it — or perhaps even greater? For her it manifests and communicates in a creative as opposed to academic form. The first known theories of quantum physics formally presented to the German Physical Society by Max Planck, were put forward in 1900. Af Klint was painting geometric shapes with titles like “the atom is dividable”, as early as 1889. Kandinsky, who?
In this moment, I’m aware living as I do in this world, that I am an atom in the universe, possessing infinite possibilities of development and I want to explore these possibilities.
Hilma af Klint
Right now at the Tate Modern in London, a large body of af Klint’s work is currently being showcased for the first time in this country. But not all of it because it has been paired alongside Piet Mondrian’s — for fear that people might not come to see a relatively unknown woman’s work maybe — are the record breaking Barbie numbers still not enough for you Mr Tate? I mean, just give her her own show.
Of course the second I got a chance (rather late in the day, this weekend just gone and the exhibition’s been on since April) I hot footed it down there. I glanced at Mondrian’s work, sure, but truthfully I couldn’t engage with it whilst it resided in the same room as af Klint’s which works on you like a magnet, directing you to your True North, though I did observe enough of it to notice that speaking of Barbie, not unlike the comparison I recently drew between the Barbie and Oppenheimer posters, one artist’s work bears their name on absolutely everything they ever created and one artist’s work bears their name on barely a single piece of it. Can you guess whose was who? I’ll give you a clue: one of them is a man everyone’s heard of and the other is a woman you haven’t, someone who was making work so egoless and pure of spirit that it mattered more that it was created at all than who it was that created it. Hilma af Klint even left instruction for a large number of her works to be left untouched until 20 years after her death, dare I suggest that she foresaw that the world wasn’t ready for it but knew when it would be? She marked them with a symbol, a cross and a plus sign — her symbols for the Divine masculine and feminine energies. She was also creating works so advanced, so attuned to scientific discovery that I believe they would have left Oppenheimer himself (who was yet to be born!) a little shaken.
In 2012, MoMA in New York, left af Klint out entirely from a retrospective celebrating the history of abstractionism “Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” despite knowing about her, despite these dates falling beyond those of her creations, arguing that as she didn’t exhibit her works during her lifetime that it couldn’t be taken seriously nor counted as part of the movement. But women weren’t granted the same privileges as men to exhibit their work, even aristocratic woman of extreme privilege as af Klint was. The documentary provides evidence of a pretty hilariously petulant letter from Kandinsky (written in 1935) stating that he is the first person to ever create an abstract painting and wants it on the record. The date he created this first work, he says, is 1911. You sure you want to stick with that date Wassily? ‘Cause just FYI, the images of af Klint’s I have shared in this piece from her Ten Largest series, were created in 1907, oh and did I already mention that she’d been doing this since the 1880s anyway? Kandinsky is still however, credited with being the first abstract painter in human history.
Can you hear me screaming from my vagina?