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Video: Why the first abstractionist considered herself the chosen one and forbade her to show her paintings: Hilma af Klint
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
While many of Hilma af Klint's famous contemporaries published manifestos on abstraction and exhibited extensively, af Klint kept her groundbreaking paintings a secret. She rarely exhibited them, convinced that the world was not yet ready to understand her work. And she even set a condition that her paintings should not be shown for 20 years after her death. Only by the beginning of the 21st century, af Klint's mystical works began to attract serious attention.
About the artist
Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter known for her large-scale abstract paintings and botanical drawings. Born in Sweden in 1862 to a middle-class family, she studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she learned about classical drawing and painting techniques. Af Klint's landscapes and portraits were rarely exhibited. She never shared her abstract works with her contemporaries and wanted them to be hidden from the world until society was ready for this. She soon became an influential artist in Stockholm, exhibiting skillfully executed figurative paintings and briefly serving as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists. During these years, she also became deeply interested in spiritualism and theosophy.
Spiritual practices af Klint
Like many of her contemporaries at the turn of the last century, Hilma af Klint craved spiritual knowledge. Even as a teenager, she was engaged in spiritualism. At the age of 30, she became a member of the Edelweiss Association. The mysticism and philosophy of the Order of the Rosary also became an important source of inspiration for the artist. The first large group of Af Klint's largely biased works, Paintings for the Temple, arose directly from these spiritual systems. The paintings painted during these years were partly based on the spiritual practice of af Klint as a medium and reflect mysticism.
Subsequently, Hilma af Klint and four of her colleagues formed the Friday Group. Every Friday they gathered for spiritual meetings, consisting of prayer, New Testament study, meditation, and sessions. The group established contact with higher spiritual forces. Hilma af Klint felt that over time she became the chosen one and received more and more important messages from the supreme forces. After 10 years of esoteric exercises within the "group", Hilma af Klint, at the age of 43, agreed to take on the great commission of the spirits - to paint the temple.
Temple series
The frescoes of the temple consist of 193 images, divided into series and subgroups. The works represent one of the very first abstract works of art in the Western world, as they predate the first non-figurative paintings by contemporary European artists by several years. Hilma af Klint's interest in the spiritual was shared by the pioneers of abstract art - Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Frantisek Kupka. Unsurprisingly, they were attracted by Theosophy, which offered a non-standard alternative to the static approach of academic art. Abstract art meant a radically new form of expression. Rather than reproducing a simple visual impression, the artists wanted to arrive at a new starting point and move closer to a more spiritual reality. Everyone found their way into abstract painting.
Testament of Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint was well aware of the uniqueness of her creation. She worked intensively on herself and her personal development. The question that she constantly asked herself: "What message do my works carry?" She actively searched for answers in philosophy, religion and in the archives - but in vain. Hilma af Klint had a vision that her art would contribute to influencing the human mind and, possibly, the entire society. However, she felt that her contemporaries were not yet ripe for this art.
In her will, she wrote that her work - 1,200 paintings, 100 texts and 26,000 pages of notes - should not be shown earlier than 20 years after her death. Another important condition from the will is that the works for the temple of Hilma af Klint should only be kept together. Only in 1986, at the Spiritual in Art exhibition in Los Angeles, her work was shown to the public. And thanks to the sensational exhibition Pioneer of Abstraction in 2013 in Stockholm, it attracted international attention. It was the most popular exhibition ever hosted by the Museum of Modern Art. Today, the surviving works of Hilma af Klint are in the possession of the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm.
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