Yesterday I learned something that has a direct impact on the construction of Art History. Watching a documentary on abstract Art, I was introduced to the name Hilma Af Klint, a women from Sweden who was Theosophist born in 1862. By 1907, she was painting abstracted shapes and forms that she claimed were diagrams of the spiritual realities she discovered through her theosophical search. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon was finished in 1907, which is considered a representational segue into the birth of abstraction. Her work, while not in the Artistic tradition of those history has come to consider great painters, predates the pure abstractions of Kandinsky, the accepted founder of abstract Art. And yet I never studied her, not even a mention, in my years as an active student of painting.
In the show I watched, the narrator highlighted her disconnect to the greater Artistic world as her works were the spiritual searches of a mystic and not the compositional searches of an Artist, but that dismissal of the Artistic importance of her work seems stiflingly academic. As Giordano Bruno, a monk, should be studied in association with space travel, so should Klint be studied in the development of the Avant Gard. Her greater spiritual awakenings foretold the development of Art away from the image or physical representation, as Bruno’s spiritual awakenings opened up a larger universe for the discoveries of science. And certainly, she channels the medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, another under-celebrated clairvoyant spiritual Artist.
I still know little about Hilma Klint. She is said to have written over 150 journals describing her spiritual quest. The one early, naturalistic painting shows Artistic sense, talent, and some degree of education. Her work is very geometric, balanced and evocative. It speaks of concepts beyond words yet they are diagrams of real ideas. I don’t know if she was known to the Artists who opened the flood gates of abstraction; there are a great deal of similarities in some of what I have seen to the works of Paul Klee twenty years later. Often discoveries are made simultaneously but geographically and philosophically independent of each other.
I am not sure why she is less known, even to Artists, than she is. There was more distinctions between endeavors in her day, perhaps, to say that as her focus was on Theosophy and therefore her contributions to Art are sequestered under that guise. There is precedent for using symbols and arrangements of forms to represent ideas or graph concepts (the Venn diagram, the color wheel, the Chakras) and coupled with the newness of abstraction as an idea relative to Art, not to mention ever festering misogyny, it may not be surprising after all that this explorer has gone under the radar.
I am grateful not only to have learned of a person from our past that might enhance our future, but for the chance to be humbled by the ever changing realities of history. Facts are fleeting. Even the laws of physics get changed and modified as we continue to grow and learn. I hope there are other Artists that pop up which challenge our view of history and how Art evolved. We need to be humbled in order to grow together.