Hilma af Klint's: Paintings for the Future

Linda Flores

4/12/2019

Prof. Cherow

Arts, Culture, and Media

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

This was my first time visiting the Guggenheim Museum. The experience was inspiring, Hilma af Klint's work is immediately visible as you walk in. as someone who has absolutely no prior knowledge to af Klint’s work, I never imagined it was made more than a hundred years ago. I was shocked when I realized these pieces were created as early as the early 1900’s. The curator Tracy Bashkoff states that “Hilma af Klint’s abstract work predates the work by artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, Malevich, artists that we have long considered the pioneers of abstraction. She begins working in an abstract mode as early as 1906” (Dover). Her work looks relevant and contemporary to this day, just the same as it might have received in the 1960’s by viewers experiencing her work for the first time. Her artwork seems to be timeless. At the time she was creating these pieces, she was considered to have broken the rules of art by creating pieces that didn’t conform with the traditional style that had been instilled from centuries prior. Her colors are feminine and her compositions are delicate yet abstract, this is particularly evident in her piece No.2 Childhood, 1907 from the untitled series Group IV, The Ten Largest.

  “She stowed her strange, massive paintings (so big her friend Anna Cassel built her a new studio to contain them) in secrecy until she died, penniless and obscure, in 1944. They would not be shown to the public for another 20 years” (Ventura), her reasoning for waiting decades before her art to be shown shows her devotion her religion. Her works were not meant for the public but dedicated to her spiritualism and to higher powers within the universe. I feel that af Klint knew that she was decades ahead of her time and understood that the masses still needed time to understand and appreciate her abstract works. She was less concerned about how society viewed her artworks because she considered herself to be a holy transcriptionist and a technician of the unknown.

Her process to creating these works is incredibly fascinating. She sketched out her paintings with graphite during her seances. She then transferred these geometric and graceful images onto a larger than life canvas. Hilma af Klint was a true artist who felt it was not her time to change the world, she showed that she did not believe in the commercialization of her work because she instructed her art not be shown to the public for another 20 years and died penniless. She allowed her spiritualism and devotion to guide her in all her artistic decisions.

Hilma af Klint’s: Paintings for the Future exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was inspiring, and it inspires me to involve more of my spiritualism into my own artwork. This semester I am breaking through a creative barrier of mine and interpreting my dreams as it relates to my everyday life into my series for the Senior Studio Show. However, after taking a look at af Klint’s work I am motivated to break out of my comfort zone to create more beautiful abstract work.