Sometime last year, I tweeted: “are Hilma af Klint selfies the new [Yayoi Kusama] infinity mirror selfies?” Selfies taken in Kusama’s 1970s mirrored chambers blew up in the art world in 2018, with laypeople and art history buffs alike waking early to book exhibition tickets months in advance. In early 2019, a comparable buzz was building around the rediscovered abstract paintings of Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). After years of critical and popular neglect, af Klint was finally receiving her due. On the heels of several well-received European exhibitions ‘Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future’ opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in October 2018. Around the same time, my Instagram feed began to swoon with pastel spirals and vivid geometric motifs – images from af Klint’s dazzling large-scale works. Then in March 2019, Tavi Gevinson, perhaps the archetypal millennial tastemaker, posted a photo of herself grinning in front of “Adulthood,” a pale violet and orange painting from af Klint’s ‘The Ten Largest’ series. Clad in an eccentric ensemble by Belgian designer Dries van Noten, Gevinson captioned the pic, “Matching Hilma af Klint” with a DNA emoji. 12,786 people liked it.
In Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (2019), German filmmaker Halina Dyrschka explores the implications of af Klint’s historical and contemporary reception. In addition to providing an engrossing portrait of an artist responding to sexism and other ideological influences of her time, Beyond the Visible sheds much-needed light on the role major institutions have played – and continue to play – in the widespread omission of women from the canon of Western art. As contemporary New York-based artist Josiah McElheny observes in an interview clip, “In science, a citation can always be overturned, but in art history it seems like citations cannot be overturned […] so it makes it almost impossible to insert anyone into art history.” Dyrschka addresses this challenge head-on, saying in a voice-over at the beginning of the film: “[L]et’s rewrite art history.” The following documentary is structured as a biopic-cum-mystery, with Dyrschka investigating why af Klint’s contributions were overlooked in her day and well into the 21st century. Within the first ten minutes of the film, several Swedish and international art historians, curators, and artists provide context for the significance of the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual contributions. Meanwhile, Dyrschka shows details from paintings with what runs the gamut from non-representational illustrations of revolutions in natural science, radio waves, and X-rays to spiritualist mediations on nature and the afterlife to Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), a series of 193 paintings and paperworks created to adorn a never-built theosophical site. Next, a recurring historical reenactment scene, shot from above, is introduced: an actor playing af Klint prepares a large canvas on the floor, then begins sketching in pencil and preparing and mixing pigment, before finally painting. These shots work surprisingly well as a unifying thread in the film and also remind viewers of the immense scope of af Klint’s vision and output.
Early in Beyond the Visible, split-screen images show motifs and details from af Klint’s works alongside comparable details in paintings by Modernist and Postmodernists heavyweights such as Vassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. In all of these side-by-side examples, af Klint’s work precedes the male artist’s by several years. Next we learn that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) published a book in 2012 titled Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which included no mention of af Klint. In one of the more deliciously pointed voiceovers, Dyrschka relays that: “In answer to my inquiry, the [MoMA], the so-called Vatican of art history, replied they weren’t so sure whether Hilma af Klint’s art actually worked like abstract art. After all, she hadn’t exhibited in her lifetime, so how could one tell?” This question is a bit of a red herring, as making an absolute argument about why or why not af Klint’s work should be classified as pioneering would risk repeating the kind of monolithic thinking that overlooked some of her contributions in the first place. Nevertheless, unpacking questions related to artistic recognition – including nested queries about peer influence, homage, and accreditation – becomes a means for Dyrschka to reveal the high stakes of challenging established narratives in art history. Yet she is also careful to incorporate nuance into her study of af Klint’s life and reception. We learn, for instance, that the painter was widely respected by many of her peers and worked out of a state-sponsored studio in downtown Stockholm for years. We also learn that it was af Klint’s own decision to refrain from showing the richly imaginative and complex works she created for a theosophical temple for at least twenty years. Instead, she left these works to a nephew, Eric af Klint, whose family shows up in the documentary as quite overwhelmed by the responsibility of managing such an inheritance. The question of af Klint’s exclusion from mainstream European and North American Modernism, specifically Abstraction, is complicated, then, by Dyrschka’s attention to af Klint’s motives. She was inarguably ambitious, as evidenced by the conceptual density, formal experimentation, and sheer volume of the work produced. In drawing thoughtful attention to the scientific and spiritual influences that informed af Klint’s development, however, Dyrschka reminds viewers that the painter’s goals may elide or circumvent contemporary notions of ambition or success.
An additional question, mainly left for the audience to ponder, is why af Klint’s work has achieved such popular traction in the present day. Throughout, discursive clips are balanced with panning shots of the paintings that help render, in visual terms, the immediate and mysterious appeal of af Klint’s sensibilities. In ‘The Ten Largest’, a breathtaking tempera on paper series featured in the Guggenheim retrospective, bold and smooth brushstrokes map 10’x9’ canvasses with lavender, orange, pink, and blue abstract shapes, swirls, and loops; cursive words and numerals; and dotted wavering grid lines. The effect of looking at some of these paintings is akin to reading psychedelic nautical maps – a comparison perhaps obliquely reflecting the influence of af Klint’s naval officer father and nautical cartographer grandfather. Other works look like blind contours of a dream, with varying playful and dramatic compositions and colour contrasts. Significantly, perhaps, af Klint’s signature bright palette recalls a kind of sleek-yet-playful Scandinavian design aesthetic that feels very “on-trend” today. (Here, we may also recall Gevinson’s painting-and-outfit matching Instagram post and wonder whether at least some of af Klint’s fervid contemporary reception can also be chalked up to how great her images look on social media.) Yet reviewing the artist’s expansive views on the coalescence of scientific discovery and spiritual enlightenment, one wonders if af Klint’s theosophical leanings are the foundation for her contemporary renaissance. The cross-disciplinary curiosity found in her searching and ebullient works suggests a period wherein notions of futurity and research into the natural world carried less dire implications. Without minimising the challenges af Klint faced or evoking a sense of false nostalgia, there’s something hopeful about her images that feels especially reassuring in the present. Now, living in a time when information is often captured and transmitted without a physical site or transcript, there is something inspiring about af Klint’s efforts to make sense of that which exceeds physical sensation. Her attention to energetic forces – spiritual, scientific, and in the natural world – feels apropos at a moment when individuals are seeking meaning beyond dichotomies of religion and technology, or looking for ways to understand them in dialogue. As Iris Müller-Westermann, former senior curator at Moderna Museet Stockholm and the organiser of a groundbreaking af Klint retrospective, remarks, “Klint’s project was something much grander than what we today call ‘art.’ It was all about seeing the world we live in in a larger context, to understand who we really are in a cosmic perspective.”
Esmé Hogeveen is a staff writer at Another Gaze
