The voices and paths of abstraction

About the exhibition "Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian - Forms of Life" on show in London until 3 September.

Another woman forgotten by art history, you might ask! Had you heard of the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint before the Tate Modern organised the exhibition "Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian - Forms of Life", on view in London until 3 September? Perhaps at the exhibition devoted to her in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York? Or the one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2017, "Jardin infini", which gave him a place of honour? Or perhaps you remember the "Traces du sacré" exhibition that introduced her to the Paris public in 2008? In any case, Hilma af Klint is only today a star of modern art, even though she was born on 26 October 1862 in Stockholm into a family of naval officers, entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 20, and died on 21 October 1944 in Danderyd. This theosophist and pioneer of abstract art, even before Kandinsky or Malevitch, had in fact herself wished that her abstract work should not be revealed until twenty years after her death, stipulating this very formally in her will. No work of art for sale in any art gallery for at least two decades... Not the ideal way to make a name for yourself on the art market! Even during her lifetime, very few insiders were able to see the heart of her work: Hilma af Klint only showed her contemporaries her most anodyne landscapes and her most naïve bouquets. But the essence of her work lay elsewhere...

The problem is that her last wishes were so well respected that it was not until 1986 that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art finally revealed Hilma af Klint's work to the general public with the exhibition "The Spiritual in Art - Abstract Painting 1890-1985". It was this famous spirituality, born of her passion for the theories of Rudolf Steiner, that led the Moderna Museet in Stockholm to refuse the donation of over 1,300 works and around a hundred notebooks by the artist's nephew and legatee in 1970. Pontus Hulten, then director of the Swedish museum and a fervent supporter of the avant-garde, had judged Hilma af Klint's work to be too esoteric.

"So really, abstraction was born on a small island in Sweden? That's something that shakes up a lot of certainties and chronologies," points out Emmanuelle Lequeux in her article for Beaux Arts magazine in June. "And yet! In 1905, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka and Malevitch had not yet opened the royal road; they were still taking their first steps on the path away from figuration. Meanwhile, an unknown woman opened the door wide: invisible forces had given her the key. On her canvases, she transcribed their melodies of form and geometry. Then came decades of silence. It wasn't until 1986 that her work left the family attic for the first time. Hilma af Klint finally entered the history of art, a pioneer among pioneers. Some 1,300 paintings and drawings, and 124 notebooks, emerge from their night: they radiate.

After her five years of academic training, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts provided Hilma af Klint with a studio in 1887, which enabled her to discover the exhibitions of Edvard Munch and Ernst Josephson organised by the institution. In this studio, she painted landscapes and portraits as works of art for sale in a fairly conventional naturalistic style. Until her younger sister died, and she herself, like her fellow painter and writer August Strindberg, entered the world of spiritualism, which was very much in vogue throughout Northern Europe at the time. With the women's collective she formed at the time, five artists found themselves summoning the dead, practising automatic writing and drawing under their dictation. This was thirty years before Surrealism. "Hilma af Klint's first botanical drawings date from this period, inspired by her summers spent in the heart of nature, in a manor house near Lake Mälaren. Under her brush appeared the symbols (the snail, the lily) that heralded her later canvases", writes the journalist from Beaux Arts Magazine.

Then, one night, Hilma af Klint heard a voice. It was that of a spirit who urged her to deepen her dialogue with the entities of the beyond... His name was Amaliel. The year is 1905. Amaliel entrusted Hilma with a mission: to create "paintings for the Temple", by painting the immortal aspects of man on an astral plane. Thus were born the first abstract paintings under the title Primordial Chaos (Urchaos): biomorphic forms, cryptic words, indecipherable signs... Urchaos is the original chaos, from which everything is born. This was Hilma's first abstract series. Her first steps into abstraction.

Hilma af Klint was obviously not untouched by influences. As mentioned above, thanks to her studio at the heart of Stockholm's art establishment, she has seen Munch's works of art, and those of Josephson, including the drawings he made during schizophrenic crises on the island of Bréhat. "In her mind," writes the journalist from Beaux Arts Magazine, "they undoubtedly echo her own mediumistic experiences. She was also fascinated by the esoteric doctrine of theosophy, under the influence of the movement created by the Russian Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), until she discovered another school of thought: the philosopher Rudolf Steiner was very active in Sweden at the time, where he presented his theory of anthroposophy, developed in the 1910s, at numerous sessions. Less oriental, more Christ-like, it appealed more to Hilma af Klint. Did the guru visit her studio in 1908? It's possible. In any case, they met often in the years that followed.

Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian both paved the way for abstraction by drawing inspiration from the forms of nature, scientific advances, spirituality and philosophy. Hence the current exhibition of their works of art at the Tate Modern.

Illustration :

Left: Hilma af Klint The Ten Largest, Group IV No.2, Childhood 1907 Hilma af Klint Foundation
Right: Piet Mondrian Composition with Red, Black, Yellow, Blue and Gray 1921 Kunstmuseum Den Haag