The spirit led world of Hilma af Klint

 

'What a Human Being Is' 1910 Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint, posthumously, has become the artistic equivalent of a 'rock star' and one who appears to be permanently on tour. Wherever she goes, she can break box office records, as she did at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018-19. You can even buy Hilma af Klint scarves and socks - the height of art gallery shop acclaim! 

When she died in 1944 in relative obscurity, she had bequeathed her artwork to her nephew with instruction not to show it for at least twenty years, imagining that a future audience would be more receptive, which has turned out to be deeply prescient; and, since she appeared at 'The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985' show in Los Angeles in 1988 her reputation has gathered pace.

This has primarily rested on the fact that her pioneering of abstraction pre-dates that of Kandinsky and that, being a woman, the reality of her pioneering was obscured from view. Would her paintings' reception have been different if she had not labored under the very real marginalization that woman artists suffered at the opening of the twentieth century? 

Though, as Julia Voss aptly shows in her new (and newly translated) biography of af Klint the latter is certainly true - even though af Klint was of the first generation of women to study formally at the Swedish Academy of Art, she would labor under the general assumption that female artists were less significant than male artists, relegated to the back room of exhibitions, barely tolerated - but the first assumption is more debatable. 

For abstraction was 'in the air' and as early as the late nineteenth century was making itself manifest. There was, for example, the remarkable work of Georgina Houghton who in 1871 had held, at her own potentially ruinous expense, an exhibition of her extraordinary abstract paintings to almost universal incomprehension. As Voss shows, af Klint may have known of this work because it had been referenced in publications to which she had access and emerged from a common thought world, namely that of spiritualism.

At this juncture, I can confess that I had picked up Voss' biography with a significant degree of hesitation: how would it treat af Klint's artistic purpose - with the backward, and thoroughly modern, lens of the sidelined female protagonist of abstraction who happened to attend seances and, like many cultural figures in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, show an interest in Theosophy and the Occult (which was essentially the Guggenheim's curatorial view) or as a person to whom her art was a function of her spiritual vision, a vision directed and supported, by her encountering spiritual beings. I was completely relieved to discover it was the latter, not the former.

This is, in part, I think, because Voss comes from a German tradition of biographical writing of telling the life from the sources available with the minimum cultural/social background necessary for comprehension eschewing sociological analysis or amateur psychotherapy and, in this case succeeding brilliantly! 

There is, for example, her consecutive relationships with two women where she envisages for herself the role of a man. You can imagine what amateur psychotherapy might make of this but Voss cleaves to af Klint's own evaluation - she was a man in a prior lifetime and that is what is spiritually required by the moment - make of that what you will but it gives you a sense of the profound, almost phenomenological approach of the biography, which I confess to finding wholly refreshing.

Meanwhile, you come to deeply feel the importance of af Klint's spiritual journey, the felt realness of her interaction with her guides, sustained over her lifetime from her first seance aged seventeen, and the depth of her related study, most especially with the works of Rudolf Steiner (and there is a fascinating addendum listing the works in af Klint's library where Steiner predominates).

This engagement with Anthroposophy was sustained even as her actual encounters with Steiner were limited and only encouraging at the margins - though he did not tell her to keep her works private for fifty years until a generation emerged who could understand them - a legend oft-told and with no evidence to support it! All her strenuous attempts to show her abstract works were followed through with Anthroposophical connections - at Dornach, in Amsterdam, and in London - again belying the commonly held assumption that she sat in reclusive obscurity in Stockholm when in truth she was nothing if not active on behalf of her transformative art even as all her attempts were ultimately thwarted.

And why thwarted? Partly because the medium of her message was still 'revolutionary' ahead of common taste and accepted understanding but also because she deeply felt her art should be seen as a whole - she had been told as much by her guides. She even designed a tower in which her work could be displayed in its appropriate order leading people through the stages of their own spiritual growth as reflected in that of the conscious development of the cosmos. A tower that would have required significant resources, and accompanying vision, to accomplish, resources that have never materialized (as yet).

You emerge from Voss' book with a vivid picture of a life well-lived in service to the spirit that always remained open-ended toward its ultimate meaning. She never foreclosed on a given understanding of who her spirit guides were, as to what was their status in the transcendent kingdom but equally, she never flinched from imaging her art and its language of abstraction was necessary to convey important spiritual truths to the contemporary world. Abstraction is indeed almost certainly the wrong word because it suggests a removal from the world, something less than concrete, when af Klint felt every shape, every form was bringing one closer to the world as it truly is, stripped of accident, returned to its eternal, harmonious balancing of forces. 

This was a view commonly shared in theosophical circles and the art it influenced; and, one which might be intelligently compared to the underlying aesthetic of a much earlier exploration of the 'abstract' or 'non-figurative' in the art of Islam. Both imagining that the 'accident' of the time-bound concrete too easily leads the mind astray from contemplation that moves one 'upwards' through purity of form to the non-pictorial transcendent. 

This then returns us to her popularity - it cannot be that her audiences are aware of the complex meanings of her paintings, often illuminated by the notebooks she kept and by referencing them to theosophical/anthroposophical patterns of thought and expression, helpfully pointed to by Voss - and the energy of being the 'neglected founder' perhaps has only so long to run?

Simply put maybe in af Klint one is faced with a very contemporary version of an artist resting in an arresting spiritual vision of things that carries a conviction in its wholeness and integrity - and might simply also be true, a truth glimpsed by the soul beyond any intellectual deciphering of particular meanings. In this, she reminds you of Blake (and his ongoing popularity) whatever is going on here, its authenticity has been marked by the integrity of the life and that is a meaning (whatever else is held) that remains, and is, deeply alluring.