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?
I have spent a long time shying away from sharing the spiritual aspect of myself despite my coming on this platform specifically to share ideas borne directly from that aspect of myself, but that way of existing would have been completely alien to Hilma af Klint, who was compelled to simply be who she was, regardless of what anyone thought. Her work is fearless, egoless, feminine, spiritual, bizarre and brilliant. It is visionary because it is completely unique. I find her acutely inspiring. Though comparisons have been drawn with Mondrian in this recent exhibition in terms of the development trajectory of her work, to me this grossly dilutes what af Klint was doing. And though I hate to genderise so much there is a really obvious distinction between her work and the men of the abstractionist movement between whose work you can see a direct correlation, like they were in an arms race with one another. There is nothing in existence like af Klint’s work from that time or before it.
A thought crystallises the universe into geometrical figures. You must learn to ignore your fear, for without the will to believe in yourself, nothing good will happen.
Hilma af Klint
Af Klint wasn’t isolated but she was certainly not exposed to the same level of influence as those who came after her and who laid claim to the movement she began, though there is a possibility that she and Kandinsky met. In 1914 (some seven years after she created her master works and two years after Kandinsky had first exhibited some of his abstractionist paintings) af Klint showed some of her academic paintings at the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö where Kandinsky also exhibited work, a landscape. Did they come across each other? Did they discuss their ideas? Maybe even prompting enough insecurity in the latter to write a letter to make sure that he was the one to be remembered? I’m just speculating of course but I can’t help but be reminded of the first filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché, also forgotten to ‘history’ — the first person to ever film a narrative story (hundreds of them actually, until the men around her cottoned on that that might be a good and profitable idea and brought an end to her career) but who has never been credited with that honour even in the wake of another documentary I highly recommend: Be Natural: the Untold Story of Alice Guy Blaché.
In recent months I have felt an overwhelming pull to fully embrace the spiritual aspect of myself. The same pull that compelled me to go to the Tate, push aside the tall reeds of Mondrian and arrive at the real historical site, the temple of this wonder of the world, to be in the presence of Hilma af Klint’s work. When I arrived at the exhibition’s climax in the space where the Ten Largest were hanging I was moved to tears — you couldn’t not end with these colossal works she created in 42 days, because Mondrian seriously did not create a thing that comes even close. By the way, I’m not bashing Mondrian here I am only drawing a comparison because the Tate forced me to. I genuinely think it was a mistake to pair them and undermines the magnitude of both of their accomplishments. As is observed in the documentary, Leonardo da Vinci would have made for a far more appropriate companion, a research scientist who was also an artist. But let’s get back to the room. I felt so connected to this great work. I honestly couldn’t believe I was in the presence of these creations. That I could see the detail of the brush strokes, the crease of the warped paper, the cracked aged paint, the choice to curve the line there, the creative intuition. A young girl next me stood up eagerly, she asked me if I was Sian Clifford, yes I said, then in a profound turn of events we looked each other in the eye and something so beautiful happened that hasn’t happened to me before in this context; I saw her intuition flood through her, our souls connected, we nodded knowingly at each other and she sat back down. We both turned away to return to be with the holiness of these paintings. She recognised and honoured my need for solitude as well as her own, I recognised and honoured her for seeing into my soul and granting us both that peace, for we were in a sacred place.
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Meanwhile, af Klint was whispering to me from the walls. To grant me the courage to be who I really am? Certainly to embolden the process. I am not yet emerged from the chrysalis though I know that Substack is serving as my vessel for a transformation I have been undergoing consciously for over a year now. It is where I am learning how to bring my artistic self and spiritual self into a deep, loving, committed and authentic union, something af Klint did effortlessly.
Though she left a room’s worth of journals and diaries and sketchbooks, not a one amongst them contains any personal details from her life - relationships, lovers, fond memories, nothing. There are extensive records of the seances she attended though - a popular late 19th Century social norm where she likely met with August Strindberg; her trips abroad and the art she saw are all notated too - “Bellini Madonna, beautiful”; the sisterhood The Five (De Fem) that she shared with four friends. There are also decades of drawings of a temple, an idea, a space she was evolving to eventually house her works though she passionately believed that the real temple was the one that resides inside us all, the place we can go to to be in union with spirit, the space she created from, the space where she felt that all faiths were interconnected. She herself had no interest in the Self beyond it serving as a conduit for spirit. What an aspiration to seek to embody.
As I left the exhibition, a young man also leaving passed by me, late 20s early 30s maybe, bespectacled, sure of himself, friend sloping along in tow: ‘Mad as a hatter’ he said, dismissively of that great work and skipped off.
I felt a sudden shock of shame and tension jolt through my body. It’s as if I can feel the contortions, the shapes that women, that I, have had to bend ourselves into for centuries to avoid, to evade, to deny that Divine intuition and wisdom and mysticism I believe we were born to, lest we too be perceived as ‘mad as hatters’, or worse. I feel an ancient rage bubbling up from the depths of me, I don’t know quite where it came from but I hear my body reverberate with the low rumble of a mantra, a growl that could easily ascend into a roar:
We are the women that you did not burn.
I want him to catch my eye, like the young woman’s did a moment ago but he is too quick to march himself off into the folds of surrounding people without a second thought. Just as well, I think, he is too ungrounded, my look would knock him off his feet. It’s not his fault, either. He is just subject to a culture which values patriarchal logic and reason over empathy and awe, control over intuition, thought over feeling. I could go on…
So we know now that the universe is 95% dark energy, dark matter. But the strange thing is, nobody gets excited about this. I think our world has become more blunted, stupid, dulled - unless somewhere out there there’s a Hilma af Klint painting it all, so in a hundred years we’ll see what we’ve missed. I think this world has forgotten how to marvel. In 1900, we still knew how to marvel. Today we sit in front of our iPhones and media and are bored.
Ernst Peter Fischer, Historian of Science
I think you might be right Ernst. I also can’t possibly miss an opportunity here to give a nod to the sweet sweet irony that our film culture is dominated by a formulaic superhero narrative borne from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and couldn’t be further from the notion of such wonder, I also cannot ignore the fact that recent disclosures about aliens have barely ruffled a feather amongst us. We have forgotten how to marvel, yes. We have also forgotten how to question. To explore. To expand. To defy. And sadly I don’t count narcissistic megalomaniacs trying to conquer Mars.
Who are we and why are we here? Quantum mechanics is no longer just a theory but proven fact. And still we cling ever more fiercely to our boundaries of separateness despite knowing that we don’t just belong to one another, we are inseparably a part of the same whole. An ecosystem, a universe, a consciousness. Truly there is nothing more powerful that 2020 could and should have taught us.
What I needed was courage and it was granted me through the spiritual world, which bestowed rare and wonderful instruction.
Hilma af Klint
The true companion piece to this exhibition is the documentary, lovingly directed by Halina Dyrschka. I urge you to seek out both. The film first for context, ideally. Then, go, immerse yourself in these visual poems of truth and beauty in person: observe the Divine Feminine embodied, in action (you don’t have to identify as a woman to feel this, it’s much more about energy). Let it work on you. Discover how each piece makes you feel. If you can, take a moment to sit in solitude with the ones you are most drawn to, then dare to listen to the whispers of your soul.
Were you already familiar with Hilma af Klint’s work? Have you made it to the exhibition or seen the documentary? How did her creations make you feel? Where are you stepping into yourself in surprising and expansive ways? Where are you feeling the fear and doing it anyway? I’d love to hear from you <3
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