Voss suggests Af Klint was a pioneer of abstract painting, a label that fits in some ways – her work certainly isn’t representational in the normal sense – but jars in others. She saw her work as a spiritual calling, supercharged with meaning in ways most of her contemporaries struggled to grasp. Most, but not all. Af Klint socialised and collaborated with other visionary women. This Serpentine exhibition focused primarily on af Klint’s body of work, The Paintings for the Temple, which dates from 1906–1915. The sequential nature of her work was highlighted by the inclusion in the exhibition of numerous paintings from key series, some never-before exhibited in the UK. This is a unique chance to discover the visionary work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and experience Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s influential art in a new light. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021 and David Zwirner, London, in 2022, this book features a text by the art historian Susan Aberth examining af Klint’s spiritual and theosophical influences. With a conversation between curator Helen Molesworth and the US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo discussing connections between Tree of Knowledge and Native theories, the book broadens the scope of philosophical interpretations of af Klint's timeless work.

It is likely that Hilma af Klint scholarship is on the brink of some radical changes regarding attribution and authorship. Also included is a newly commissioned essay by the celebrated af Klint scholar Julia Voss, a contribution by the artist Suzan Frecon, and a text by art historian Max Rosenberg that further develops the conversation around why af Klint’s work was not recognised in its time.

Joy Harjo is a poet, musician, playwright, author, and member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. Susan Aberth is the Edith C. Blum Professor in the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the institution. A moving biography, told in vivid illustrations, this graphic novel features key moments in the life of Swedish artist and pioneer of abstract painting Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Long underrecognized, af Klint is amid a sensational rediscovery that continues to take art audiences by storm. This book presents first detailed survey of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking Tree of Knowledge series.

Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Af Klint painted in near isolation from the European avant-garde. Fearing that she would not be understood, she stipulated that her abstract work should be kept out of the public eye for 20 years after her death. While the works were not exhibited for a further 20 years, it subsequently came to be understood alongside the broader context of modernism at the turn of the 20th century.

Books

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint,” a début graphic novel by the Berlin-based artist and graphic designer Philipp Deines (published, perhaps ironically for the once commercially unappreciated af Klint, by David Zwirner Books, an offshoot of the super gallery), examines how af Klint’s art was shaped by her seagoing ancestors, the haunting loss of her younger sister, the prejudice she faced from the male artistic establishment, her romantic relationships with women, her travels, and her fascination with spiritualism and the occult. The book carefully grounds af Klint, who is heralded these days for being a visionary far ahead of her time, in the solid realities of her life. In the book’s afterword, Julia Voss, Deines’s collaborator and wife, who is the author of her own af Klint biography, writes, “Hilma af Klint in the hotel. Hilma af Klint at the train station. On the train. Inside the studio. Or by the sea, on the cliff that gave her family its name. . . . The more Philipp drew, the less isolated Hilma af Klint appeared to us.” Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art. Max Rosenberg is an art historian and associate director of research and exhibitions at David Zwirner. The documentary attempted to answer this fundamental question of "how," but the question still eludes. By what force can someone invent a visual language with no precedent? By what force can someone develop something so new that nothing else like it in the world exists, essentially, all by themselves?

In recent years we have heard much about The Five, the spiritualist group of women—af Klint, Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman, and Mathilda Nilsson—who channeled messages from “higher powers” from 1897 to 1907. A gifted medium, Cassel would eventually come to dominate the group, while af Klint played a more subsidiary role. It was working together outside of this quintet, however, that af Klint and Cassel each began to receive messages from the spirit realms asking for their participation in a “special mission.” The ensuing visual collaboration resulted in numerous preliminary sketches and twenty-seven small oil paintings executed between October 1906 and September 1907; this is the inaugural series of “The Paintings for the Temple” and thus a crucial juncture in the history of abstraction. Titled “Series I” or “The First 26 Small Ones” (the title would be changed later to “Primordial Chaos”), this body of work endeavored to visualize the so-called Akashic records: a supernatural compendium, as elucidated by Theosophy’s cofounder and chief theoretician, Helena Blavatsky, of all universal events and thoughts occurring in the past, present, and future and concerning all life forms. Analyzing the works in Cassel’s notebooks, Martin has convincingly been able to parcel out fourteen works belonging to her in this series and includes two comparisons that illustrate the women’s different styles. Cassel paid greater attention to detail, for example, and her application of paint was more careful and smoother than af Klint’s expressive surfaces, resulting in a deeper saturation of color. Anna Cassel, untitled, n.d., watercolor on paper. 15 1/2 x 10 1/2″. Voss respects her subject deeply, sometimes to a fault. Her reluctance to discuss Af Klint’s sexuality takes scholarly caution to extremes. But the same discretion pays dividends when discussing the artist’s dreams. She resists the temptation to instrumentalise Af Klint’s mysticism. The woman who emerges in Voss’s exacting portrait is strong-willed, purposeful and confident; ahead of her time and perhaps ours too. Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture.One of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century, af Klint was a pioneer of abstraction. Her first forays into nonobjective painting preceded the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian and radically mined the fields of science and religion. Deeply interested in spiritualism and philosophy, af Klint developed an iconography that explores esoteric concepts in metaphysics, as demonstrated in Tree of Knowledge. This rarely seen series of works on paper renders orbital, enigmatic forms, visual allegories of unification and separateness, darkness and light, beginning and end, life and death, and spirit and matter. Thus she catapulted her life’s work into the future, out of the first half of the twentieth century into the second, safe from the judgment of her contemporaries. They were not to have the last word. At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian. Many consider her the first trained artist to create abstract paintings. With Hilma af Notes and Methods , we get to experience the arc of af Klint’s artistic investigation in her own words.

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe. Although they never met, af Klint and Mondrian both invented their own languages of abstract art rooted in nature. At the heart of both of their artistic journeys was a shared desire to understand the forces behind life on earth. What’s interesting, the author suggests, isn’t that Af Klint, in a century awash with spiritual fads, heard voices. It’s that, as far as her genius was concerned, those voices weren’t wrong.

Reference

In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art—a wish that found a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda. Kurt Almqvist’s essay, “The Significance of Anna Cassel to the Art of Hilma af Klint,” likewise strives to redress the occlusion of Cassel’s influence on and contribution to af Klint’s work, as well as underscore the importance of collaboration and collectives in their milieu. For those of us who seek clarity regarding the plethora of esoteric organizations active in Sweden at this time, Almqvist lays it all out in a marvelously succinct manner along with a timeline of Cassel and af Klint’s memberships and levels of involvement. It is here where we get a better understanding of their move toward Rudolf Steiner’s Rosicrucian theosophy and later Anthroposophy, his educational, therapeutic, and pseudoscientific expansion of the former.