Petruschki's Journey Into The Blue - Chapter 9 -Hilma Af Klint - Images from the invisible world

For the German version of the blog post click HERE

The cover picture: -The swan no.17- 1914-1915 155x152cm by Hilma af Klint

"I was told I was a pioneer and committed to an incomprehend working method."

Hilma af Klint, February 10, 1908, notebook HaK556 Source: Hilma af Klint Foundation

The clairvoyant Hilma af Klint

She is considered the pioneer of abstraction. It took many decades before she was granted this title. For a long time she was completely forgotten. She created something absolutely new with her pictures, something that the world had not yet seen. There were no traditions to orientate herselve by, nothing to refer to. For her there were spirits that inspired her.

More than the visible world, she was interested in the invisible and wanted to represent it ... vibrations, rays, currents, feelings, thoughts. As early as 1906 she had developed her own abstract visual language of organic and geometric shapes. A few years before Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malewitsch, who are still considered pioneers of abstract art in the 20th century. There was such a thing as a race to see who painted the first abstract painting. Kandinsky himself declared one of his paintings as it and it is said that he therefore had predated a painting of his. Julia Voss mentions this encyclopedia entry in her article “Die Thronstürmerin” in the FAZ, in which Kandinsky had written about himself in 1919: “Kandinsky Wassily - painter, graphic artist, writer -, the first painter to base painting on the purely picturesque means of expression and deleted the representational in the picture. In 1911 he painted his first abstract painting. "

In 1932, at the age of 70, af Klint decreed that her works could not be exhibited until 20 years after her death. This testified to an extraordinary clairvoyance: works by artists who were not particularly recognized during their lifetime were often lost or destroyed. And the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. In 1937 there was the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which meant the destruction of many works of art that did not correspond to the fascist ideas of the murderers and warmongers. Abstract art, especially by a woman, would undoubtedly have fallen victim to their will to destroy.

Hilma af Klint Nyckeln till hittills-varande arbete, Serie WU/Rosen, nr 5, Group 3, 1907

My “discovery” of Hilma af Klint happened on another trip. On a trip into the blue through a sleepless night as I lay in bed and moved over the comments from Instagram to Instagram profile. I came across a page called Spiraltempel and I found it very interesting, yes exciting, what photos and audiofiles Julia Voss had published there about Hilma af Klint.

Dr. Julia Voss has written a book about the artist Hilma af Klint, who is extraordinary in every respect. It is titled "Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen" (Astounding humanity) and was published by S. Fischer Verlag in February 2020. She devoted 4 years to research and learned Swedish for it. It's a great success and was on Spiegel's non-fiction bestseller list for some time. So it was through her that I came to learn about Hilma af Klint.

I later remembered seeing something about Hilma af Klint in the 2016 Oliver Assayas film “Personal Shopper”. Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, whose twin brother recently died of a heart condition. She is also sick with it. They had promised each other that whoever died first would give a sign to the other when he died. While Maureen is with a possible buyer couple for her brother's house, she discovers a picture by the artist Hilma af Klint, whose paintings were inspired by messages from the world of spirits…. Here is the trailer for the film, which, by the way, starts with Hilma af Klint.

In 2020 there was also a film about Hilma af Klint herself. Actually, its premiere in the cinemas should have been in March 2020. But then the virus came. Programmkino.de says: “An absolute must for art fans and a visual experience of special quality for cinephiles: the documentation about Hilma af Klint“ Beyond the Visible ”… In play scenes and interviews, with photos and again and again with her paintings, drawings, Halina Dyrschka looks back at the Swede's life through the paintings. From her biography she develops an exciting journey to the roots of artistic creation and into the work of an unparalleled artist. "

The universe is infinite like art

This post about Hilma af Klint follows the chapters about Hans Hartung, whose works I was able to see on our trip. He, too, tried to paint the invisible. Oscillations and vibrations of the universe. A painting from the year he died was entitled "Energies That Rule the Universe". This work is three meters high and 5 meters wide, he painted it when he himself was already very frail. Hilma af Klint also painted gigantic abstract pictures, 72 years earlier. I don't want to belittle Hartung's innovative painting, I adore this artist. But it is so amazing and extraordinary that in those times, early in the 20th century, a woman would paint pictures in these huge formats. Abstract pictures, without the non-representational being known in art. Still, not unlike in the Baroque or the Renaissance and in the following centuries, at the beginning of the 20th century, women were restricted to copying, small formats, miniatures, portraits and decorative landscapes.

Here we see one of her large-format pictures from the series, “The ten largest”. At first I thought about some pictures that they are very feminine, they have a kind of transparency, something flowery, easily growing. But it didn't take long and I felt the strength and peculiarity, the incomparable and the great message that they convey. A lot has changed, even if art history is still largely a man's view. But we can hardly imagine what a difficult act of liberation it was 100 years ago to go this way as an independent artist. Without anything beforehand to align and grow with it. To be the first and face a wall of resistance. The more works I saw of her, the less there was this question, female-male. Rather, I soon felt that by then I myself had been trapped in a strange code of judgment.

To give an idea of the beauty of these large-format paintings, here is a photo of the exhibition “Hilma af Klint - Paintings for the future” 2019 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Hilma af klint Paintings for the future Foto: cortesy of Salomon. R. Guggenheim Museum

The spirits who she called, who called her

During a séance which Hilma af Klint attended in 1904, she was told by higher beings to paint pictures on the astral plane, pictures that represent the immortal aspects of man.

A few years later the demands of the higher beings became clearer and she began with the "Temple Paintings." She worked on it in two phases, from 1906 to 1908 and from 1912 to 1915. The pictures are painted in series that are branched and varied. The ten panels made in 1907 with the title “The ten greatest” occupy a special position. They are huge formats, over three meters high and about 240 cm wide, in tempera on paper, which was then stretched onto canvas. They are compositions of geometric and floral shapes, letters, tendrils and spirals in bright colors. Everything is full of symbolism. The feminine lies in blue and the masculine in yellow. Quelle

Unwavering

Hilma af Klint in her studio around 1895

Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm on October 26, 1862 as the daughter of the naval officer Victor af Klint and Mathilda Sonntag. The family was aristocratic and wealthy. She was the fourth of five children. Even as a child, she is said to have had visions, perhaps because the family was extremely religious and the first-born child died before Hilma was born.

At the age of 17 she took part in séances. In 1880 her sister Hermione died and her interest in spiritualism and religion grew.

In Sweden women were already able to study at that time. In the rest of Europe that wasn't even possible. She was one of the first female students to attend the Royal Academy of Liberal Arts in Stockholm, where she studied drawing, portraiture and landscape painting from 1882 to 1887 and graduated with honors. She later said that she had tried to forget what she had learned in order to paint the pictures that the spirits or higher beings had commissioned.

Hilma af Klint around 1901 and undated Self Portrait

-After graduation, she was given a studio in the “Atelier Building” of the Academy in central Stockholm, which at that time was the main cultural center of the Swedish capital. The building also housed Blanch's Café and Blanch's Art Gallery, where traditional academic art collided with the ideas of the artists' association, which were inspired by the French open-air painters. The Hilma af Klint Foundation.

She was often described as a withdrawn artist who had little social contact, like a vestal priestess. (The word vestal virgin appeared in her works as well.) But when you consider that she lived and worked in these studios for 11 years, it's hard to imagine. She had met Anna Cassel at the art academy. They remained close friends for life. They earned their living by painting landscapes and portraits. 1900/01 both worked as illustrators at the Swedish Veterinary Institute.

Hilma af Klint, Sailor

What an expressive young face she has captured on the canvas. I see sadness and doubt, with the effort not to show it. A whole story at a glance.

Hilma af Klint Late summer scenery 1903

Complicity

With Anna Cassel and three other women, Sigrid Hedman, Mathilde Nilsson and Cornelia Cederberg, she founded De Fem (The Five). A group of artists interested in spiritualism who regularly held seances on fridays. They believed they were receiving messages from ghosts and recorded these transmissions in a shared book. Ananda, Gregor, Clemens, Amaliel and Esther were called these higher beings. The women wrote and drew “automatically”, that is, without intervention of willful or rational control. This method was later used in Surrealism. André Breton described the Écriture automatique as a process in which writing follows thinking uncensored, chasing it, so to speak.

Hilma afKlint Urkaos 1906-1907

The first series of pictures ordered by the higher beings is called Urkaos (Primordial Chaos) and illustrates the creation of the world. There are 26 small pictures with motifs that show basic elements that she later developed further in her largest paintings. Snail shells, spirals, U and W are central and repeated symbols. The texts contained in the motifs are: Avonwener, Vestals and Ascetics in the service of the Lord, Evolution, Ararat, Eros.

“What I needed was courage. And I found itthrough the influence of the spiritual world, which gave me rare and wonderful instructions. "

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint and the Girl on the Stairs by Peter Ras is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The series The Swan

I found this beautiful photo on my trip to Hilma af Klint. It was photographed by Peter Kirkeskov Rasmussen at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The paintings are, like the cover picture of the blog post, from the series “The Swan”, which was created between 1914 and 1915. So at the beginning of the 1st World War. Hilma af Klint worked in series. In each series she works on a topic that interested her. There are figurative as well as abstract paintings. In The Swan she deals with the future sublimation of matter by the spirit. Quelle. In the paintings of this series I see the struggle between two opposite poles. Even impossible love.

Hilma af Klint Paintings fromthe series The Swan Foto: Museo Picasso Malaga

Here are three pictures from the series “The Swan” in the exhibition -Hilma af Klint - Pioneer of Abstraction- in the Picasso Museum in Malaga 2013. The exhibition came from Stockholm, then went on to the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum der Gegenwart, Berlin and finally came to Malaga.

In 1970 her entire collection was offered as a gift to the Moderna Museet. The museum refused! It wasn't until 1986 that pictures of her could be seen publicly for the first time, in the exhibition The Spiritual in Art, Abstract Painting 1890–1985 in Los Angeles. At that time, however, her works were not given much attention.

There is a very nice short video from the Museum der Gegenwart, Hamburger Bahnhof, about the exhibition Hilma af Klint - Pionierin der Gegenwart. You can wonderfully see how Hilma af Klint's works look in the exhibition rooms.

Hilma af Klint The Swan Nr.1 Group IX, 1915

This picture also belongs to the series The Swan

Hilma af Klint painted her central works between 1906 and 1915, 193 paintings, of which 111 between November 1906 and April 1908 in 16 months. That means a big job in four days.

“The motifs were painted by me without sketches and with great force. I didn't know what the pictures were supposed to be, but I worked quickly and confidently without changing a single stroke of the brush. "

Hilma af Klint

She left 26,000 pages of text and 1,300 paintings.

Hilma Af Klint Altar Painting Nr.1, Gruppe X, Moderna Museet

Occultism Spiritism Theosophy Anthroposophy

Spirits and spirituality… When Hilma af Klint started the seances at a young age, occultism was in vogue in Europe. This is not surprising, because in these decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were many discoveries and developments in the “invisible” world. From Morse code to radio waves, photography, X-rays, the first films. Hilma af Klint was also a trained scientist. Creating art meant viewing these scientific achievements in your own way.

From her work with spiritualism, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky developed (read the Wikipedia entry about her, it makes you speechless what kind of life this woman has led) a syncretistic esoteric doctrine, modern theosophy, which promises initiation into occult secrets and combining elements of gnosis, hermeticism and other traditions of western esotericism with eastern religions. The word was probably made up of theology and philosophy. Although theosophy basically declares the equality of all being, there have always been accusations of racism. The Nazis also tried to make some use of it. See the swastika, das “Hakenkreuz” of the nazis.

Hilma af Klint joined the Theosophical Society in 1888. Rudolf Steiner became its general secretary in 1902. Later he founded anthroposophy. In 1908 Steiner visited Hilma af Klint in her studio. He is said to have told her that no one would understand her pictures for the next 50 years. He also expressed himself strangely towards the higher beings: He is said to have written her that she could only ask him for advice again if her guru allowed her to do so. Find Jacobson writes about her in his very interesting blog: “In 1914 Hilma af Klint dreamed that she was in Rudolf Steiner's room. She was looking for something but had to flee the room because she went blind when she was there. This clearly shows the devastating effect Steiner had on her self-esteem. "

For many years she repeatedly traveled to Dornach, where Steiner had founded the Goetheaneum. She wished that her work would be exhibited there. She also made designs for the ceiling painting of the 2nd Goetheaneum after the first one burned down. In the year f Steiner's death, she and her partner Thomasine Andersson decided not to return there because there were so many arguments about Steiner's successor.

Hilma af Klint, Buddhas standpoint on earth, Serie II, Nr.3a, 1920

Love, traveling and the museum in a suitcase

For a long time Hilma af Klint was considered an artist who lived in seclusion, stayed alone all her life, traveled little and did not want her pictures to be exhibited. It was her own fault, so to speak, that nobody knew her. In fact, she lived with Thomasine Andersson for decades. They met in 1913. Thomasine Andersson had taken care of Hilma's sick mother. When the mother died, they moved in together and traveled often. They remained inseparable until Thomasine Andersson died in 1940.

In 1903 Hilma af Klint traveled to Italy with Anna Casals to see the works of the Renaissance there. She visited Belgium, Holland and Germany. She went to London in 1928. She traveled eight times with Thomasine Andersson to Dornach, Switzerland. Source: Julia Voss Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen.

Later she had photographed and colored her works, including the large-format ones, so that all paintings were available in a small, portable format. And she traveled with Thomasine Andersson to show the pictures. She traveled with a museum in her suitcase.

Hilma af Klint Pleiaden Nr.14 1908

The spiral temple

She had also received the spiral temple from the higher beings. A snail-like building she designed to display her work in. On the island of Vals it was to become the power center of a new movement. But that never happened.

It is an unbelievable, wonderful event that the big exhibition of her works 2018/19 took place in the Guggenhein Museum in New York, in this building that looks like a gigantic protective snail shell for art. Hilla von Rebay, an artist who moved in the European circles of modernism, advised Salomon R. Guggenheim on the creation of his art collection. She was also interested in theosophy and spirituality and attended courses on the subject with Rudolf Steiner in Berlin around 1904. Together with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright she had chosen, she was responsible for planning what is now the Guggenheim Museum and probably had a great influence on the design. It seems that she initiated the famous snail shape. It is not known to what extent she knew about Hilma af Klint's designs. But it seems very obvious to me that these two women had a connection. It's crazy that Hilla von Rebay's work is completely forgotten. At least that's how it looks to me. I am not an art historian, however. I had never heard of her before. I find her works, which I looked at on Wikipedia, very interesting. In 2005 there was a memorial exhibition of her works in the Guggenheim. And apart from a few publications about her, I haven't found much.

But now to this incredible miracle. The exhibition of Hilma af Klint's work at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Paintings for the Future from October 2018 to April 2019 curated by Tracey Bashkoff. It became the most visited exhibition this museum has ever had. Lines of people stood in front of the museum to look at Hilma af Klint's pictures. Never before have so many catalogs of an exhibition been sold, never have there been so many new members for the Guggenheim Museum. There is a very nice video from the Guggeheim about this exhibition.

“If you like to hallucinate but disdain the requisite stimulants, spend some time in the Guggenheim Museum’s staggering exhibition.” -The New York Times

“These paintings are a revelation, and like nothing that came before them.” - The Economist

There is another exhibition with her participation that I find incredibly exciting. Namely Weltempfänger in the Lenbachhaus in Munich from November 6, 2018 to March 10, 2019. Curated by Karin Althaus and Sebastian Schneider. I think the title is amazing. But what an exhibition it was! I quote from the museum's website: “The exhibition" Weltempfänger "gives an insight into an extraordinary and largely unknown chapter of modernism: Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) in England, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) in Sweden and Emma Kunz (1892–1963) in Switzerland each use their own abstract, highly charged imagery. All three wanted to make the laws of nature, the spiritual and the supernatural visible in their work; They followed their convictions with perseverance and assertiveness ... As "world receivers", the artists were able to attribute the creation of the paintings to an external source. This gave them the freedom to overcome social, cultural and aesthetic boundaries in their work and the necessary energy to actually do this. "

Have you ever heard of these women? Me at least not until then.

Hilma af Klint, from the series “The dove”

In the Arte / NDR production -Ihrer Zeit voraus, Hilma af Klint- (Ahead of her time) from 2019 by Julia Berkert, you can see relatively at the beginning her great-nephew Johan af Klint. He tells a moving story of how he and his father unpacked her paintings in 1967 or '68. Also otherwise a documentary worth seeing.

And something else about Hilma af Klint's clairvoyance: in 1932 she created the paintings: Lightning over London and The war in the Mediterranean. So 7 years before the Second World War began.

For all optimists in the north, the exposition Hilma af Klint, Artist, Researcher, Medium exhibition in Malmö has been extended until mid-April 2021. You can also watch the exhibition in nine interesting videos.

From December 5, 2020 to May 2, 2021, the exhibition Origins of the World. The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century will take place at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Hilma af Klint is represented with two paintings.

The Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta is currently building an exhibition center for Klint south of Stockholm in the city of Järna.

Hilma af Klint, The 10 greatest, Adulthood 1907

Here is another work of The 10 greatest from 1907. Adulthood. Imagine this picture is 3 x 2.50 meters.

At some point I will also explain more about Hilma af Klint's symbolism. For example: The almond shape that arises when two circles overlap is called Vesica piscis and is an ancient symbol for the development towards unity and perfection.

And what is your connection with the spirits and the universe? Do you have experiences in which the universe suddenly gave you a helping hand?

Here I am telling you one of my favorite universe stories. It doesn't have much to do with spirituality now, but maybe with ghosts that have briefly reorganized something.

My son made his first public appearance in drama school. I was very lucky to have traveled from quite a distance. And waited in his small and very empty apartment under the roof when he was at the final rehearsals for the big evening. I was also a little sad because I couldn't give him a opening night present. I would have loved to give him a table for his apartment. He loved big wooden tables. But firstly, I didn't know my way around this city at all, secondly, I didn't have a car and thirdly, I only had a few hours to organize it. So it seemed impossible. A little sadly I looked at shimmering dust particles in the sunlight, my eyes almost closed, despite all the anticipation and happiness.

I startled at a very strange noise. First I heard a groan, then a rumble, a moan, a howl. A poltergeist. I was surprised, because as far as I knew, my son lived alone on the floor.

Soon I thought that someone needed help. So I rushed out the door and looked into the stairwell. Just a few steps below me there was a beautiful, fairly large wooden table at an angle down the stairs. Behind it, a woman poked her red head out and said with a snort: The tenant has long since disappeared from one day to the next and has left all the furniture that I now have to get rid of.

I quickly asked her if I could have this beautiful table. She was relieved. And with a little effort the table was inside. I will never forget my son's amazement at this opening night present. And the wonderful feeling of wonder.

And what did you experience?

The next chapter will be an announcement of what to expect in the coming weeks.