Hilma af Klint: Our Medium to a Future, Beyond Politics
I was invited to accompany my friend Haley to Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Future today, on the second to last day of the showing…
I was invited to accompany my friend Haley to Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Future today, on the second to last day of the showing. This would be my first time at the Guggenheim, and what a first time it was —witnessing a tome of works that were destined to be hosted here, a “temple of spirit,” appropriate for modern times, built without any connection to af Klint’s works and honoring her intentions for her work.
The Ten Largest, №7, Adulthood, Group IV, 1907, by Hilma af Klint. Photo: Albin Dahlström, The Moderna Museet, Stockholm/Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
What first struck me upon first glance of af Klint’s paintings, The Ten Largest, was the color palette of her world. Pastoral and remarkably distinctive from the male abstract modernists, Mondrian or Kandinsky. More soft, more lush, and more tender to the viewer. I was pulled in by this delicacy and intrigued by the seemingly deliberate and careful compositions of her pieces: shapes and colors balanced by one another but without heavy-handed intention, as though they are not aware of shapes outside themselves yet are dropped into a place of belonging. One does not have to necessarily think as hard or question in order to enter af Klint’s world.
As af Klint progresses from childhood to adulthood to old age, more and more legibly identifiable letters appear in her work. By the time I finished making my way through the exhibition, I could accept letters and symbols as organic and natural shapes as af Klint’s circles and squares. I don’t think a piece of artwork has ever shown me how to look beyond the predetermined meaning of language as viscerally and effectively before; I imagine this is largely due to the holistic and flowing nature of af Klint’s work, which affords a viewer’s experience to shift by creating room for process.
Hilma af Klint, The Swan, №1, Group IX/SUW, 1915 Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
It makes much sense to me that af Klint could not reconcile her work with the strictly introspective mode of creation advocated by other theosophists. By assuming the role of medium, thereby removing her self from the center of her work, she accesses the humility required to create art from a mode of inquiry, and, most importantly, sincerity. Haley points out a diptych of swans as her favorite as it allows a transition from representational to abstract modes of artwork without elevating the status of one over the other. I agree. This is representative of the entire M.O. behind af Klint’s placement in 2019.
The exhibition progresses to explicitly struggle with dichotomies. A sign suggests that af Klint uses blue to represent females and yellow to represent males. This tension of duality continues to seek resolution and explores, visually, paths for synthesis. I experience a growing feeling of universality from af Klint’s work and finish feeling that I have finished reading an entire book, or that I have gotten a sense of recurrent order, or a feeling for the invisible forces that unify me with insects, or unify the curves of letters with charts of planetary orbits.
Haley and I sit and we agree on the timing of this exhibition. It has been a refreshing breath in a place protected from the overt legibility that dominates the politics of today.
I feel af Klint allows polemics yet does not permit their overrule. Paintings for the Future attains a peaceful selflessness through a humbled pursuit of some bite at the truth of what is beyond us, casting hope for others who are burdened by the postmodernist inquisitions of today, which recurrently force us to mostly answer about ourselves.
Perhaps it is time to move beyond tribal politics or the localization of self. Perhaps we can let af Klint be our medium to a transition.