BY ELLE BORISSOW

Swedish Visionary artist-pioneer Hilma af Klint led a life informed by the transcendental. As such, it is fitting that her seance-invoked automatic drawings led her paintbrush to produce a radically spiritual mode of abstraction, prioritising a turn inward despite her academically astute eye.

Instructed and dutifully executed according to her clairvoyant meditations in conjunction with Theosophy’s reverberations, af Klint saw herself as a vehicle through which the forms of her artwork must flow to elucidate a new ‘higher’ form of creation uniting science, religion and art. The physical manifestation of these other-worldly encounters involved the recording of shapes, motions, colours, and symbols revealed during the automatic drawing sessions, which she then used as the basis for her compositions - some of the most prevalent motifs including the structure of nautilus shells, spirals (interrelated to the overlapping of circles), the tree of life, and the symbolic use of yellow and blue to represent androgynous combinations of the feminine, and the masculine. She writes in depth about her encounters with Amaliel, Georg, and Ananda, whose extra–temporal encouragement of af Klint from the ether tracks her participation within various artistic circles in Sweden, where she became one of (if not the) earliest abstract painters in Europe.

Figure 1: Hilma af Klint, portion of *The Ten Largest* series including *No. 4, Youth, No. 7, Adulthood, No. 2 Childhood,* tempera on paper pasted on canvas (315 x 235cm), on display in *Paintings for the Future Exhibition* at the Guggenheim 2018. (image credit, Guggenheim Museum).

In consideration of influences it would not be prudent to divorce ‘art’ and the extra-terrestrial from ‘science’ in af Klint’s artwork. Having studied anatomy in a veterinary setting, many anatomically influenced shapes drawn from organs, particularly the male and female sexual-organs, feature among her motifs, in addition to her acute awareness of contemporary discovery of the atom, which in terms of visualising a microscopic pattern creates an underlying invisible formal unity of the world in tiny spheres. The Ten Largest series is fruitful ground for analysing this. Theosophy posits this in terms of science, art and religion as three essential manifestations of the same energetic ‘forms of life.’

It is truly fascinating to consider a world beyond what each of us has come to believe is the ‘norm’; the presounding mysteries of the universe and the echo of unanswered questions. Art historically, we might consider af Klint’s working methods as being adjacent to the debate which surrounds ‘alternative’ (I use alternative here to mean anything which is not one’s own, but primarily in the sense of the Western historic narratives) - to go against the dominant grain. Her spiritualist methods find themselves in a grey area, yet to be satisfactorily chalked up with the post-Enlightenment Eurocentric thirst for empirical verifiability. It is fruitful, however – or, to my mind at least - to caution against such an impulse in many avenues of study. Particularly in art due to its interrelation with culture and belief. Although af Klint was of course a Swedish artist working within the European context, whose visionary ‘science’ of creation has now become (more) widely accepted, our (collective Western) understanding of the parameters which define ‘knowledge’ are still in need of vast expansion.

Though slightly tangential to this discussion of Voss’s biography of af Klint, in considering the way she ‘makes’ meaning in her compositions, and what it is to have ‘knowledge’ of the world, a contemporary interpretation of af Klint’s art could see it as crystallising an important critique of Western society and its post-Colonial identity – we might consider her synthesis of what have become today two seemingly disparate sectors, art and science, in the pursuit of deeper holistic knowledge of the universe. In doing so, we can assess the functionality of our own belief systems, of ascertaining knowledge about the world, and the necessity to shift our collective focus away from how multiplicity supposedly cannot equal empirical veracity, and instead towards an acknowledgement of the greater truth of our world’s dense multiplicity - and the immense value this holds. Indigenous knowledge being just one vital example of such which springs to mind when comprehending what the obsessive codification mission of Enlightenment Europe systematically pursued and tried to suppress, causing great damage and cultural loss to humanity in the process.

Figure 2: Hilma af Klint, image showing the spiralling display featuring her artwork as foreshadowed by the artist’s notes, in *Paintings for the Future Exhibition* at the Guggenheim 2018. (image credit, Guggenheim Museum).

In returning to af Klint, however, her work was deliberately enigmatic until relatively recently - the first major retrospective exhibition of her work Paintings for the Future saw the actualisation of her futuristic-dream for a heavenward spiralling exhibition space to display her ethereal works, with the smooth ascent of the Guggenheim providing the optimal vehicle in lieu of the “temple” she had aspired to build on a Swedish Island with her lifelong friend, and lover, Anna Cassel (See figure 2). After Paintings for the Future in New York, af Klint’s work was most recently displayed serially in the Tate Modern, alongside Piet Mondrian (whose work, I must admit, did take a reluctant backseat in the wake of af Klint’s formidable The Ten Largest series which captivated an entire hall, somewhat relegating Mondrian to the entryway). Figure 1 shows a similar panoramic display in the Guggenheim.

Such recent excavation of her work, and the art historical analysis of its intrinsically immeshed meanings which comprise the elusive ‘threads’ from which she weaves her visionary ‘tapestry,’ are divulged in Julia Voss’s 2022 biography to the open-minded reader. The biography itself, enabled through first hand collaboration with the artist’s grandson Erik af Klint and translation by Anne Posten, analyses the vast library of detailed notes, collected sketches, letters, and accompanying writings produced across af Klint’s long and wildly prolific career to place her several years ahead of her male contemporaries (Kandinsky, and Malevich) in the pioneering of a spiritual abstraction influenced by theosophical circles. Voss writes in such a lively manner to capture an essence of what af Klint leaves behind in her reflections on the “underlying life-form” of the universe. This belief and honed intention led to the artist’s selective destruction of work in creation of a viable ‘time capsule’ for her future audience.

Contrary to ‘old’ art history’s patriarchal tendency to entangle the female artist with her biography excessively, Voss’s exploration functions not in diminishment of af Klint’s art, but rather inversely, endows vital research into the communication of af Klint’s ‘unorthodox’ spiritual knowledge, arguably essential if we are to homogeneously comprehend the esoteric wonderment of the world beyond the visible which she captures on the canvas. In this respect, we might immerse ourselves guilt-free in the truly fascinating detail of af Klint’s artistry, and the life she led well ‘ahead of her time,’ to encourage an expansion of what we deem possible in relation to the knowledge we hold to be true.

Considering what it truly means to be a ‘visionary’ within the field of art, perhaps one might find that poised within the pregnant-pause enabled via a momentary suspension of any disbelief, that the truly marvellous resides;

…the nub of the prematurely-dismissed free thinker; their energetic flow, and embrace of ‘mysticism’ yet to be canonised by empiricism – the doctrine of tomorrow being yet unwritten. I imagine this is why Hilma af Klint felt the world was not yet ready for her message.

Bibliography

Voss, Julia. Hilma af Klint: A Biography, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago and London), 2022.

Bashkoff, Tracey. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Guggenheim Publishing, (New York), 2018.

Guggenheim Museum Website: Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Past Exhibition, October 12th 2018 - April 23rd 2019. https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint

Tate Modern Museum Website: Hilma af Klint & Mondrian, Forms of Life, Past Exhibition, Summer 2023. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/hilma-af-klint-piet-mondrian/exhibition-guide

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