A woman artist in the era of the avant-garde would have needed permission to prosper. However, Hilma af Klint He didn’t ask for it, and he never wanted it. What sense did it make to want to make his way in a world that was going to reject his artistic and philosophical proposal.
Hilma af Klint was born in Sweden in 1866, and in 1906, years before any of her contemporaries known worldwide as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich either Piet Mondrian, paints his first works of abstract art. Throughout her life she created more than a thousand works (including paintings and works on paper) and yet she goes completely unnoticed. as it was not considered by art historians, who decided to separate abstraction from mysticism in order to categorize abstract art as a purely aesthetic artistic movement, despite the fact that both movements were intrinsically related.
Although some of his works had been shown in previous exhibitions, it was not really until 2018 when She is revealed as an artist to the world, thanks to the monographic exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York Hilma af Klint. Paintings for the Future (Hilma af Klint. Paintings for the future). That same year, the criticism Robert Smith publish in The New York Times an article titled «Hilma Who? “No More” (“Hilma, who? Never again”), in which he celebrates his rediscovery and the fact that his paintings destroyed the established idea until now, of modernist abstraction as an exclusively masculine artistic project. Although she has remained away from the art circuit for so long, in current exhibitions in which her work appears alongside that of her contemporaries (such as the current exhibition at the K20 Museum in Düsseldorf, Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, Dreams of the future), it is inevitable to feel overwhelmed by the power of his paintings which, with their organic shapes and bright colors, eclipse classic works of abstract art in a beautiful exercise of poetic justice.
It was on the island of Adelso, also in Sweden, where Hilma af Klint used to spend her summers since her childhood, where her fascination with nature and organic life would begin, which would accompany her throughout her life. In 1882, she was one of the first European women to enroll in Fine Arts at the Stockholm school, and a few years later, graduating with honors, she was able to access a shared studio at the Kungsrträdgården, the artistic neighborhood of the city. During that time he supported himself financially by painting and selling commissioned landscapes and portraits, as well as illustrations for encyclopedias and other treatises. It is then that he becomes involved in spiritualism and theosophy, very common movements in the cultural and artistic circles of Europe and America during those years in which the religious beliefs rooted in society and the scientific advances that flooded everything were amalgamated. At that time, Hilma also studied other subjects such as occult, spiritualist and Buddhist writings, and in 1889 he entered the Swedish lodge of the Theosophical Society. During this time he founded The fray group either The five (Five o’clock) with four other women. The group meets in his Stockholm studio to conduct meditation and spiritualism sessions, and perform practices such as writing and automatic drawing, four decades before the surrealists used it as their statement artistic.
The way in which Hilma thinks and deals with contemporary issues, as well as the conditions and questions about the planetary, the environmental, the biological and the spiritual, and how she expresses all these ideas directly in her painting, creating her own language, is something which had not been seen until then. She investigates the relationship of people with those around them, human experiences, and what it means to be human. The connection between all things. Her work is marked by binomials: spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, visible and invisible.
All the themes he deals with in his paintings are really challenging in the historical moment in which he lives. Also his way of expressing them. Hilma af Klint goes beyond seeking a mere visual representation. She seeks a connection between different worlds. For her, the spiritual is everywhere. There are also physical sensations in her paintings. Bodies, figures, allusions. Mind and body are completely united for her. In her paintings there are metaphysics, symbols, diagrams, invented alphabets. Painting as a way to connect with other worlds, a kind of portal that unites the interior and exterior.
The Serie The ten larges (The ten greatest), It is made up of ten monumental paintings, and the objective is as ambitious as the format itself. They symbolize the ten states of human life, from birth to old age. They are very powerful paintings, predominantly abstract, but with botanical and scientific motifs, ranging from the bright colors and almost folkloric motifs of the periods of fertilization or gestation, to the muted and faded colors that announce death. The cycle of a life that ends. Many of the invented words, or “given by the spirits” that the artist wrote down in her notebooks also appear in them.
His level of production of paintings, drawings and writings is extraordinary. Very intense. Between 1906 and 1915 he produced 193 paintings: The Paintings for the Temple in which he tries to represent the “spirit” of the world. They are a kind of spiritual exercises, but also a record of herself. In them we see experimental aspects, the form and the themes that she deals with in her work. She paints academically, but in a different way, as if it were a different and sometimes automatic set design. The shapes intertwine and even collide with each other. She loads her images and her philosophy with meaning, she also codes the colors (for example, feminine blue, masculine yellow) and does so by writing everything down in her notes and her notebooks in an almost scientific way.
As much as Hilma af Klint is directly related to theosophical mysticism, the context of the technological revolution that took place at the beginning of the century (in Sweden with great intensity) also exerts a great influence on her. She is interested in the discoveries of her contemporary Marie Curie and technological and industrial advances. Science is always present in his life and is another of his sources of inspiration. In his own way, he tries, with precision, to make the invisible visible through his paintings. In them, science is mixed with suspicion of mysticism. Atomic representations are united with messages from the spiritual world. For the painter everything is connected and is part of the same cosmos.
Although Hilma Af Klint had a first group exhibition in 1913 in which she exhibited her “spiritual paintings”, and another in 1928 in London, in which she participated with the group of anthroposophists, her paintings remained practically hidden, kept secret. throughout her life, and it was in fact a conscious decision that she made herself at the time. She only showed her works to those she considered should see them. Like-minded friends, theorists, poets. In her notebooks she left a note in which she explicitly indicated that her paintings should not be shown until twenty years after her death, because she was convinced that, even if this were not the case in her time, the following generations would be prepared. to understand his work.
A woman artist in the era of the avant-garde would have needed permission to prosper. However, she did not ask for it, and she did not want it either, because what sense did she have in wanting to make her way in a world that, without trying to understand her meaning, was going to diametrically reject her artistic and philosophical proposal. She never sought acceptance from her contemporaries. She was part of a group of liberated women who created their own rules in Stockholm in the midst of the other revolutions. They were her own network. They did not need to travel to Paris to free themselves, because they had already managed to live freely in their own city. Hilma af Klint was not one to accept anyone telling her what to think or what to believe, and perhaps that has something to do with her being ostracized from the group of abstract artists of her time. Despite this, if you compare her technique with that of the recognized geniuses of her time, such as Kandinsky or Mondrian, you can see how she is much faster in abstraction, braver in pictorial decisions and more open to exploring new possibilities. forms of representation that would occur rapidly from the first decades of the twentieth century. In a way, she created a path and at the same time departed from it.
She was an artist with great self-awareness, always independent, ahead of her time, with enough courage to affirm that her contemporaries were not prepared to understand her work, and the necessary trust in future generations to maintain that they were. They would know how to receive it from a more open perspective. I like to think that’s how it is. That she created all those impressive series of paintings looking to the future, imagining a viewer capable of understanding what at that moment could not be understood. Today, finally, we admire her work with fascination, a work that has achieved, on its own merit, a place in history.
