Spiritual Alphabetisation. Hilma af Klint

My paper rethinks Hilma af Klint's esoteric or mediumistic art practice in terms of scientifically wellknown academic systems of organizing knowledge around 1900, the most important ones among them grammars and diagrams. The artist has thus been able to translate the "higher powers'" dictates into ornamental forms and scriptings. Her mediumistic art practice has by no means been a weak one as some art historian would argue. On the contrary, it critically reflects the hegemonic effectivity of an operating system and its explicit and implicit hierarchical orders through the use of a given language and representational forms. Most importantly, the artist made use of her botanical expertise only to experiment with abstract graphical ways to express processes and transformations in contrast to displaying an object's properties.

My thesis will attempt a preliminary examination of the factors that were formative in shaping Hilma af Klint’s unique early abstract vision, especially with regard to her unorthodox use of automatic writings, séances, and spirit guides as the initiating processes of her creative production. My assessment and interpretations are, of necessity, based on a close analysis of a few of her paintings known through reproductions. Considerations of the familial, spiritual, and scientific aspects of her life have been studied for factors that could have affected her artistic processes. I have attempted to contextualize her paintings within the spiritual influences of her relationship with Rudolph Steiner and the teachings of Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky. The first chapter contains information on Hilma af Klint’s personal, historical, and academic background in order to establish the most basic influences on her main body of work. Even though her works at the academy were perfect examples of her beautiful naturalistic style and technical expertise, they will not be discussed in detail and are not included in the paintings used in my analysis. The second chapter focuses on the occult and religious influences on her methodology and iconography. Theosophy and Anthroposophy, as well as Hilma’s own occult practices, are complex and difficult to understand, therefore a basic familiarity with each of these areas is important to comprehending the imagery. The third chapter is an iconographic analysis of three of her paintings. Her pictures are multifaceted and rife with multiple symbolic meanings that an attempt to interpret even one of her series in its entirety is daunting. Hilma af Klint’s esoteric abstract works were meticulously organized into series, each image was numbered, and each individual painting was meant to be interpreted along with its series companions. It is impossible to assign the full meaning of a work outside of that context. However, due to the sheer quantity in conjunction with the fact that each series rarely has less than ten paintings, it seemed more feasible to select three separate works to examine in detail. I have chosen an early painting that originated from an automatic De Fem sketch, one from a sub-series of The Paintings for the Temple, and a later “scientifically” based drawing.

Bowdoin Journal of Art, 2020

Born in 1862, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint has contemporaneously been heralded by many as the forgotten mother of abstraction. Between 1906 and 1915 af Klint created 193 works for her series Paintings for the Temple, all of which she requested in her will not be shown publicly until 20 years after her death. Since the discovery of her spiritualist paintings in the mid 1960s, the meaning of their visual elements have been scrutinized by art historians and compared to the likes of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and other early modern abstractionists. This paper focuses on the life and works of Hilma af Klint and aims to deconstruct and disregard the notion that af Klint created paintings that are abstract in the formalist, canonical sense of the word. Rather, her oeuvre consists of spiritualist paintings that were intended to be viewed by a primarily spiritualist audience. Through an in depth discussion of af Klint’s biography, early 20th century esotericism, and the artist’s many detailed notebooks, I create a framework for the interpretation of three groups of af Klint’s paintings from her series Paintings for the Temple: Primordial Chaos, The Ten Largest and Altarpieces.

The Figurativeness of the Language of Mystical Experience, 2021

The main aim of this paper is to study the mysticism of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) in relation to her religious experience and her searching for existential answers through contact with divine entities. Although the identity of these figures is not clear, we are aware of their familiarity with Christian beliefs. Thus, in this paper we attempt to approach Af Klint's Christian, metaphysical and anthroposophical message by analysing her notebooks. Particularly, we focus on the symbolic aspect of one of them made between 1919 and 1920, entitled Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens.

The Idea of North: Myth-Making and Identities, 2019

This paper considers two series of paintings by a Swedish modernist artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944): Swan (1914-15) and Atom (1917) series. I claim that af Klint developed a diagrammatic form whose abstracted stylistics is borrowed from scientific contexts in order both to chart and resist sexual and gender inequalities in early twentieth-century Swedish society. Af Klint’s art, although deeply invested in an esoteric world view, also offers an image of the meeting of modernist discourses. Nordic mythical traditions, combined with scientific knowledge of the physical structure of space and the atom – which are transformed into spiritual questions via theosophical spiritualism – become modernist, transnational and gendered abstraction in af Klint’s painting.

Ritið 1, 2017

This article was published in Icelandic in 2017. This is the English original. Feel free to read and use it, but please, be professional and acknowledge the work i (and others) have put in, and always cite the source. The original publication details below. ‘Að sjá og sýna hið ósýnilega. Um nútímalist og andleg verk Hilmu af Klint’ [‘Seeing and Depicting the Invisible. On Hilma af Klint’s Modern Art and Spiritual Paintings’], trans. Eva Dagbjört Óladóttir. Ritið 1/2017: 187-224. PS my bio and contact details in this pdf are very much *out of date*. Find more about me on www [dot] tesselbauduin [dot] nl When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) died, she left an immense oeuvre of over 1,000 paintings and drawings and hundreds of notebooks. To all but a few of the artist's closest relations it had been unknown that she had even created such a substantial body of work. Moreover, af Klint's will stipulated that her work was to remain private for at least another twenty years after her death. Only in 1986 would some paintings be shown publicly, at the exhibition The Spiritual in Art in Los Angeles and The Hague. Af Klint's works suited this show very well. Kept secret from public eyes, considered sacred by the artist and her immediate circle, intended for a temple, and painted mediumistically under spiritual guidance, both the spirituality in her works and that inspiring their creation aligned with The Spiritual in Art.

This symposium, which took place at Solomon R Guggenheim on the 12th of October 2018, discussed the impact of theosophical and occult ideas upon the beginning of abstract art in the USA and Europe, with particular interest in how these played out in the pioneering and visionary work of Hilma af Klint both then and today. It was the last of a series of seminars and meetings focusing on Hilma af Klint and organised by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation since 2013. They were part of the Foundation’s ongoing effort to further the dissemination of scholarly knowledge within the Humanities ans Social Sciences.

Religious Studies Review, 2021

In architecture, the notion of “total work of art” is based on the assumption that a building should be the expression of an “Idea” conceived by the architect, who is also responsible for designing every element of the building, so that all of them express the original “Idea”. This notion that an architect should be the one and only “creator” of a building is actually quite recent. Many pre-modern masterpieces, such as most Christian cathedrals, were built by hundreds of people, who worked on them for hundreds of years. Thus, if there was an “Idea” behind it, it was not necessarily the product of one single mind. However, many of these buildings have an unarguably strong unity. Such a building seems to express something that was somehow shared by all the people who worked on it along the centuries. According to Zygmunt Bauman, “the modern project promised to free the individual from inherited identity”, but “It only transformed the identity from a matter of ascription into one of achievement, thus making it an individual task”. Thus, the idea of the “total work of art” appears as an individual attempt to create order, while pre-modern artists sought only to express an order that was somehow “given” to them. Thus, “traditional” Architecture was not conceived as an expression of an “Idea”, but rather as a symbol of how the architects/builders experienced and understood reality as a whole. This led traditionalist philosopher Titus Burckhardt to state that “It is impossible to be engaged in architecture without becoming implicitly engaged in cosmology”. This paper aims at comparing the concept of the “total work of art” with the role of Art in traditional, pre-modern societies, looking for common points that can hopefully help us to identify and express our apparently ungraspable Zeitgeist.

I visited the NSW Art Gallery in June this year (2021) for an exhibition of Hilma af Klint's visionary art. I was looking for that glimpse of a world that she had devoted her life to. Af Klint said she had no idea what she was painting, she just received a “commission from Amaliel” and let it come through. Apparently the invisible wants to manifest through the artist to us, giving us these glimpses. Surely, I wondered, af Klint’s enticing emanations are an invitation to us, out of love, not to copy her, but to feel the invitation strongly enough to find our own way to the threshold where the connection can take place…