File Note 11: Hilma af Klint

The spiritual content of Hilma af Klint’s paintings may seem less relevant in our technological culture. We might consider her claim to have painted from the astral plane under the guidance of Higher Beings as delusional, but perhaps, considering the current looseness of the term spiritualism, there is still plenty we might glean from this work. 

When af Klint was painting, during the first decades of the twentieth century, Theosophy promised meaning beyond the encroaching mechanistic universe of the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, spiritualism now suggests the possibilities beyond earthbound pragmatics, from the far-fetched to the subtly inexplicable. 

Another way to relieve af Klint’s work of the prejudice levelled at mysticism would be to consider it in relation to art history. Af Klint’s figurative compositions have distinct surrealist tendencies — the interleaving of the feasible and the fantastical, the abstract and the figurative, for instance. And she is a precursor of many who explored the symbolic power of the human form, from Francis Bacon to Phillip Guston to Keith Haring. 

But in fact even the apparently secular paintings of early twentieth-century Modernism were influenced by spiritualism. A number of artists, including Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, followed the teaching of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. Although Mondrian is usually thought of as an arch modernist, reconfiguring the natural world into the formal language of painting, some works belie the mystical impulse behind his quest for balance and divine order (see Evolution, 1911). Like af Klint, he pursued the transcendental possibilities of painting, searching for ways to represent a truth beyond positivist sensory evidence.

Throughout her life af Klint moved between figurative and geometric abstraction, often fusing the two — an angel constrained or protected by a circle is a recurring image, and the apparent abstract spiral of The Dove Nr. 1 (1915) has distinct figurative connotations now, in the age of genetic engineering. Geometry, one of abstraction’s basic vocabularies, is an embodiment of the mathematical universe of human construction, as well as an articulation of metaphysical phenomena through such terms as ‘balance’, ‘centre’ and ‘harmony’. The square, circle and triangle have conveyed mystical expression throughout history, from the ancient Egyptian pyramids to mediaeval occult and metaphysical charts to crop circles. For many twentieth-century artists the progression from representational art to abstraction was irreversible: Mondrian and Jackson Pollock are cases in point. Af Klint, however, never entirely abandoned figurative imagery. Unlike Mondrian’s reductive progression towards linear composition, her body of work builds up into a library of reflexive forms, both abstract and figurative — the chromatic symbolism of the sexes, for instance: blue for male and yellow for female, with green as the union of the two. 

Hilma af Klint was academically trained in Stockholm and was an accomplished draftsman; during her lifetime she made her living as a portraitist and landscape painter. Why, though, were her spiritualist works, which she considered her life’s work, undiscovered until the 1980s? Just before her death, in 1944, af Klint left her work to her nephew, instructing him not to exhibit it for twenty years. Nobody knows af Klint’s reasoning behind this decision. Perhaps she sensed that the climate of the art world at the time would be adverse for such spiritual content — especially as Clement Greenberg’s assertion of art for art’s sake was in the ascendant. Or maybe in an atmosphere of war the world was rather too visceral. Now, however, the paintings seem to possess a renewed significance, beyond those intended by the artist herself. Viewed from the other end of twentieth-century art history, her innovative attitude towards image construction seems to prefigure the liberated practices of artists today.