Paintings for the Future/Spirituality and Identity

The work of Hilma af Klint in the exhibition ‘Paintings for the Future’ at the Guggenheim Museum is spiritual. Klint was the first to be apart of the abstract movement. Klint’s work involved with communicating with the spirit realm. She did not do this alone. One of the readings it mentioned that she knew her artwork was not the right time to be showcased during her time of era and it would not be appreciated because she was a woman. It is very disappointing during her time era that women who have done art was not admirable, it was looked as a joke. Her artwork had to wait for years to be appreciated. In one of the readings it mentioned, “...she devoted the rest of her life to making sense of it: annotating, editing and adding vast indices that could decode this new language delivered by the divine…”, Klint spent her entire life to understand these messages the other side has offered. This tells me that right away she did not know what these spirits were talking about. She had to study it in order to understand what they mean. It also mentioned how some of her works valued feminism. This brought females in a spiritual way. I feel that Klint does speak to us in the present because she does value women are capable of creating such things and it should be appreciated especially how hard it was for her during her time. A group of women helped Klint to create these paintings by communicating with the other realm and she had motive to make this happen and learning to decode the language.


This explores of the idea communicating with the dead. Since Klint has put herself into these spiritual or paranormal ideologies. This brings up a time where a woman named, Helena Blavatsky, someone who has put herself in these beliefs. This is a woman who has decided to leave everything behind, including her husband, to travel around the world. She was someone who did not have an education and she has learned things that others would not know unless they did go to school. Blavatsky had the ability to speak with others spirits and started a business to help others to communicate with their loved ones. There’s a YouTube video that talked about her life story. It stated, “It concluded that her seances were rigged, writings didn’t magically come from beyond the grave. There was spring loaded device above her chamber that allowed someone to put a letter in the device and have it dropped down between the floor boards and materials in her hands.”, this makes me question if this whole time Blavatsky did this all for attention? Or did she actually believe communicating with the dead is possible? They claim that she was very intellectual on these religious subjects but was it way to make these ideas be more spread out and aware of the outside world? I think so, she brought this idea to be more familiarized. I feel spirituality does not play a role in my life because I rather not put myself in a situation where I have to speak with the dead and I do not let it influence me or my work.