Hilma af Klint’s Vast Cosmic Synthesis at the Guggenheim

Installation view. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Guggenheim Museum, October 12, 2018 – April 23, 2019.

Between 1906 and 1915, a young artist in Stockholm worked tirelessly under the instruction of a set of spirit-guides to complete a set of 193 paintings. She dreamed that they would one day decorate a circular temple that spiraled upward. Over a hundred years later, that vision came partially true, with the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future installed in the Guggenheim’s high round atrium. Hilma af Klint’s work, largely unknown until about 30 years ago, feels like a surprise and revelation for several reasons. She was a successful female artist in Stockholm at a time when women did not have professional careers, and she was a visionary who painted abstract paintings avant la lettre. For the former, Hilma produced careful botanical illustrations; the focus of the exhibition is her magnificent body of abstract paintings, particularly the 193 paintings for the temple.

Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 13. 1915. Oil on canvas.

The exuberantly colored paintings look as though they could have been made yesterday, so easily do they fit the visual mores of our time. Hilma intended these paintings “for the future”, when they would be more readily understood as diagrams that reveal the essential nature of the universe. Abstraction as we often understand it–simplifying the form of a real object like a tree or chair to get at its essential nature, for example–is not what is happening here. “Nonobjective” painting, which the Guggenheim was founded as a temple to, use geometries to attain a spiritual dimension instead of relating to the physical world. Hilma’s work, although spiritual and geometric, operates by yet another means.

Group VI, Evolution, No. 7. 1908. Oil on canvas.

The artist’s extensive notebooks and journals detail how she saw these works as diagrams of natural and scientific phenomena, such as atoms and evolution. It is as if she was attempting to make a periodic table of the cosmos in 193 paintings. A devout Christian, Hilma famously claimed that spirits guided her early work, telling her what to paint. Today that sounds like quackery. It was more common and accepted within society, and, indeed, the scientific community at the time. Her approach is painstaking: she strives for an accurate analysis of the systems of the cosmos using visual means. 

Installation shot, Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 5 – 8, Adulthood. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.
Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood. 1907. Tempera on paper, mounted on canvas.

The The Ten Largest series represents the different stages of life. Each line and color aligns with a complex symbology that Hilma created. For example, Hilma associated the blue of the above work with childhood. These ten paintings are presented in order of childhood, to youth, to adulthood, to old age on the Guggenheim’s walls, which is what the artist intended: they were meant to be seen as a series and only in that order can they represent that whole lifespan of a person. Hilma made these large, roughly 10×8-foot paintings on the floor (before Pollock). This series is the first you encounter at the Guggenheim, setting the stage for the exuberant and complex paintings the fill the circular ramp.

At the same time, watercolors like the gorgeous Tree of Life illustrations show how Hilma also worked on a very small scale. She was an inveterate planner and notetaker. Partially this is because she wanted to make sure future generations understood her work. Notebooks contain detailed instruction on different symbols or the meaning of certain colors. This care points to her confidence that future generations, if not her own, would appreciate the detailed, god-given visions that she presents.

Altarpieces (from left to right): Group X, No. 2, Group X, No. 3, Group X, No. 1. All oil and metal leaf on canvas. 1915.

After 1915, and a personal crisis, Hilma’s practice changed from one of explicit direction by spirit guides to a more self-directed selection of imagery, in series of paintings such as Evolution, Dove, Swan. For Hilma, the scientific and spiritual worlds were naturally conjoined, and so she moved easily between the subject matter of Evolution to the trio of Altarpieces (above). At the same time as Hilma explored a radically non-representational mode of painting, she was trained and successful as a botanical draftsperson, of which there are a few examples. Her life’s work, therefore, seems to have been one of vast synthesis. Hilma’s colorful iconography illustrates no less than the interconnected nature of all natural systems and world religions. Sweeping from the micro of a botanical illustration like the one below to the paintings above, Hilma could see a world in a grain of sand, and then create a visual analysis of its place in the cosmos.

Untitled. 1890s. Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper.

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is on view through April 23 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Carl Larsson’s Idyllic Spring

Spring

I’ve just returned from a quick visit to Sweden (my grandmother’s 90th birthday). The snow there has melted, and spring has just started to peak out from under the dead leaves. Carl Larsson’s images are representative of some of the idyllic Swedish days, full of light, that are just starting. 

Breakfast under the Big Birch Tree

Similar to Norman Rockwell in America, Larsson’s focus was on the home and happy families, and encapsulate the best and most charming aspects of Swedish life at the turn of the century. Also like Rockwell, advances in technology allowed his work to spread and become popularly known. Larsson’s watercolors could be reproduced easily through new printing techniques, just as Rockwell’s illustrations were spread on the cover of magazines. Having only spent the warmer months there, my memories of Sweden are just as idyllic.

Flowers on the Windowsill

Take a tour of Carl Larsson’s well-preserved and beautifully decorated home here

If good knitting meant macabre…

Lump of Meat on a Stool, 1999

then we would have a winner.

Yesterday Beautiful Decay featured interesting work from a Swedish artist that I can’t seem to dig up much information on. Leif Holmstrand’s creates crocheted and knitted sculptures and performance pieces that at their best combine simplicity and clear color with a darker underlying significance.

Cover for Matthew Barneys Cremaster Cycle, 2006

Prams, 2006

No Arms, No Legs, 1999-2004