Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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This Serpentine exhibition focused primarily on af Klint’s body of work, The Paintings for the Temple, which dates from 1906–1915. The sequential nature of her work was highlighted by the inclusion in the exhibition of numerous paintings from key series, some never-before exhibited in the UK.

Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. The documentary attempted to answer this fundamental question of "how," but the question still eludes. By what force can someone invent a visual language with no precedent? By what force can someone develop something so new that nothing else like it in the world exists, essentially, all by themselves? It is likely that Hilma af Klint scholarship is on the brink of some radical changes regarding attribution and authorship. Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.Best known for his abstract work, Mondrian in fact began his career – like af Klint – as a landscape painter. Alongside Mondrian’s abstract compositions, you will see the rarely exhibited paintings of flowers he continued to create throughout his life. Also on display will be enigmatic works by af Klint in which natural forms become a pathway to abstraction. Also included is a newly commissioned essay by the celebrated af Klint scholar Julia Voss, a contribution by the artist Suzan Frecon, and a text by art historian Max Rosenberg that further develops the conversation around why af Klint’s work was not recognised in its time.

Af Klint’s paintings will be exhibited at Tate Modern next April, but it’s taken a long time for the art world to catch up with the visionary Swede. Voss’s biography, published in Germany in 2020, and only now translated into English, is the first of its kind. An award-winning art historian and former art editor of the Frankfurter All gemeine Zeitung, Voss taught herself Swedish to decipher Af Klint’s huge archive of notes and decode her mysterious life story. She saw her work as a spiritual calling, supercharged with meaning in ways most of her contemporaries struggled to grasp Despite her enormous popularity, there has not yet been a biography of af Klint—until now. Inspired by her first encounter with the artist’s work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research af Klint’s life—not only who the artist was but what drove and inspired her. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic. Voss suggests Af Klint was a pioneer of abstract painting, a label that fits in some ways – her work certainly isn’t representational in the normal sense – but jars in others. She saw her work as a spiritual calling, supercharged with meaning in ways most of her contemporaries struggled to grasp. Most, but not all. Af Klint socialised and collaborated with other visionary women. Af Klint’s paintings came crashing into this venerable canon like a meteor. Suddenly her huge canvases were hanging next to those of recognized modernist masters. The unknown Swedish woman seemed to come out of nowhere, and the reception was largely nega­tive. The American critic Hilton Kramer wrote: “Hilma af Klint’s paintings are essentially colored diagrams. To accord them a place of honor alongside the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, and Kupka . . . is absurd. Af Klint is simply not an artist in their class and—dare one say it?—would never have been given this inflated treatment if she had not been a woman.” Kramer wasn’t the only person who thought so. Silence fell again on the subject of Hilma af Klint. One of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century, af Klint was a pioneer of abstraction. Her first forays into nonobjective painting preceded the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian and radically mined the fields of science and religion. Deeply interested in spiritualism and philosophy, af Klint developed an iconography that explores esoteric concepts in metaphysics, as demonstrated in Tree of Knowledge. This rarely seen series of works on paper renders orbital, enigmatic forms, visual allegories of unification and separateness, darkness and light, beginning and end, life and death, and spirit and matter.

The University of Chicago Press

While her paintings were not seen publicly until 1986, her work from the early 20th century pre-dates the first purely abstract paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich.

This book presents first detailed survey of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking Tree of Knowledge series. At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian. Many consider her the first trained artist to create abstract paintings. With Hilma af Notes and Methods , we get to experience the arc of af Klint’s artistic investigation in her own words. Both artists shared an interest in new ideas of scientific discovery, spirituality and philosophy. Af Klint was also a medium, and this exhibition showcases the large-scale, otherworldly paintings she believed were commissioned by higher powers. Hilma's name has been mostly forgotten (until recently) through a combination of sexism and genius. While she showed a few select people her work, she understood that it would take time for others to get to her level. She had no doubts that what she was doing was special. Hilma wrote that she wanted a spiral museum to house her work. You have to pretty sure of yourself to write such clear instructions about your “Temple” of a museum. In an uncanny twist of fate, her work was housed in a spiral museum. The Guggenheim's tide-turning 2018/2019 exhibition "Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future" put her work in the famous Guggenheim corkscrew architecture.

In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art—a wish that found a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda. Around the age of seventy, Hilma af Klint began to separate the documents and artworks she would preserve from those she would destroy. In this she was no different from many artists, but in other ways she was, and she knew it. Af Klint was not just an artist. She was also a mystic who said that her most powerful, abstract works were painted under the direction of higher spirits communicating from the astral plane. Since the late nineteenth century, an array of spiritualist teachings had been revolutionizing religious understanding the world over. For example, Theosophy, among the most popular, sought to reconcile the spirit with the natural and scientific worlds, and many artists embraced it: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, and Arthur Dove all studied Theosophy; none of them, however, ever publicly suggested their canvases were the expressions of any consciousness other than their own. Realizing the world was not yet ready for what she had created and what motivated it, in 1932 af Klint wrote that none of her paintings or drawings should be shown until twenty years after her death.