A Gallery Walk with Hilma af Klint
What Do You See?
If you are new or have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art for the very first time, get ready to practice your art talk. Our contributor, Karen Grace, an art teacher and historian, will take you for a virtual walk. If a friend forwarded you this article, welcome; if you like it, share it or why not subscribe?
When the news seems all bad and likely to get worse, it can feel self-indulgent to bother with something as optional as art. But let’s not forget that works of art, and the people who make them, have superpowers.
Artists can rattle our cages and wake us up, they can make us feel – joy, anger, the sublime, the whole range of emotions, including empathy for the struggles of others. A work of art can nurture us when hard things must be done and it can also help us remember the beauty of life itself and the things worth fighting for.
Here's the trick though, the art world also has a bit of a bad rap for being exclusive and stuffy and for not always doing the best job at making art accessible to everyone. Many people know art is supposed to be important but haven’t the foggiest idea how to get anything out of it, let alone how to discuss their feelings about art with others. My hope is that maybe the next few paragraphs might give you some ideas about how to look at art and talk about art with other people. So, let’s take a look at an artist and her work and see what we can see.
Since moving from Seattle to Stockholm in 2020, I found my way to an artist completely new to me, the Swedish icon, Hilma af Klint. Her paintings are ethereal and in a full candy box of colors. They loom large at the poster and frame shop around the corner and were recently featured in a series of Swedish postage stamps. The inaugural issue of the new Vogue Scandinavia even used her work as inspiration for a new font and photo shoot – they refer to af Klint as their muse. She is quietly everywhere here.
This group of paintings seen above, called The Ten Largest are the first you are likely to see in any search for af Klint’s work. (Yes, there really are ten but they are so large as to be hard to get in the same photograph!) As a card-carrying art lover, I am rather likely to jump right in to tell you what I see in these paintings or why you should find them interesting or even important. But I am curious... what do you see? What do you think these paintings could be about? One of the wonderful things about art is that once an artist hangs their work up in the gallery, we, the viewing public, get to make of it what we want. There is no test (I promise!) and it really is up to you.
I could also ask: What emotions do they look like to you?
Now if we look at the titles of the individual paintings you would see that they are called things like Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, and Old Age. I wonder which one feels like the age you are now? Why?
Here’s that link to The Ten Largest again. Go ahead, just look. Think. The reading can wait.
I asked my at-home guinea pigs for some thoughts and here’s what they said:
Age 8 - They’re really big! I see eyes, and flowers and over there there’s blue and yellow but they don’t make green – they make orange. There’s some cursive writing but I can’t read it. A bunch of them look really happy and beautiful.
Age 11 – There’s flower patterns, abstract, and different background colors. There’s a mermaid in one. I feel like the youth one. I think of spirals as a way of life because your feelings can go up and down like a spiral and this one is made out of spirals. Those shapes feel like me. The adulthood ones feel more complicated.
Age 50 – Are they really the largest? Why choose that name? Lots of flowers and seashells, fruit and popsicles. Are there words there? Are those magical incantations? Maybe that’s a Venn diagram...
These are just a few of their thoughts, to give you a sense of their reactions. In having conversations about art, I’ve learned it’s always important to stay open, ask questions, and really listen. I find it amazing how much we can puzzle through on our own, just by giving it a try (and how much more we can learn listening to someone we care about puzzle through it with us).
After you have spent some time with your own ideas, go ahead and read the helpful notes the curators sprinkled throughout the exhibit for you. It is sometimes nice to learn a little bit more about the artist and what their big idea was. When I learned about these paintings and I saw the date I was dumbfounded. These look like they could have been painted yesterday but they are over a hundred years old! And why had I never heard of her before? I had to learn more!
So who was she?
Hilma af Klint was born in 1862 in Stockholm and she was one of the first women accepted to the Swedish Royal Academy for Art. She was classically trained but began making these incredibly unique abstract paintings in 1906, several years before artists like Kandinsky would be credited with inventing abstract art. She was inspired by the tremendous scientific and spiritual explorations of her time – atoms, evolution, philosophy, and theosophy and her belief in spirits and communicating with other realms. Her paintings have only more recently come to light – they were rejected and hidden in their own time, packed away in an attic no less, until the world was ready for them.
It is even quite possible that Kandinsky, who had not seen her work, was inspired by Hilma by way of his friend Rudolf Steiner, who had very definitely seen it.
Since their discovery, af Klint’s works have been derided as “not art” and perplexingly as “not paintings” by establishment types. It has been minimized as “only illustrations” or, heaven forbid, “spiritualist.” It seems that those who write the canon are reluctant to revise it. And yet her paintings are beloved by those who know them. An exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 was wildly successful.
However, even with a list of recent sold-out exhibitions, af Klint’s work and legacy are still a bit problematic. Not only can she not be fitted into an acceptable timeline of the history of art but her works are tricky to even get to see (or study). She stipulated that her paintings should only ever be sold in series and should not be split up and the majority of her works are owned by a foundation in her name. Stockholm’s Moderna Museet has a special arrangement with the foundation and they regularly have at least a couple of her works on display. But otherwise, her works are challenging to visit.
In the language of art collectors and museums af Klint’s paintings don’t have as much value because they cannot be bought or sold. Sadly, without the promise of money to be made off of them, her art is less likely to continue to be seen or discussed, and those history books will continue to print, without revision. And so, the work of this pioneering woman continues to be underrecognized and undervalued.
There is so much joy in these paintings – I am certain that we need them now more than ever – a gift from Hilma af Klint into a hopeful future. The questions she asked and her story are still so very relevant today. What do invisible things look like? What universal truths do we share? What makes us human? And perhaps most importantly, we can be inspired by her perseverance to speak (or paint) our truths no matter what people with power may think of them right now.
Hilma af Klint Inspiration
You can learn more about af Klint by reading the following two articles: Hilma af Klint: a painter possessed and In Search of Hilma af Klint, Who Upended Art History, But Left Few Traces.
The documentary Beyond The Visible - Hilma af Klint about her is excellent.
There is a full biography by Julia Voss available in German, just released in Swedish, and coming soon in English as well as a graphic novel The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint set to be released this year.
The Ten Largest are just a few more days in New Zealand so if that is in your neighborhood, GO SEE THEM!