Taking “Woo Woo” to a Higher Spiritual Level with Pioneer of Abstraction, Hilma af Klint
Paintings for the Future by Hilma af Klint at Guggenheim Museum in New York
In 2019, the Guggenheim Museum in New York produced the first major solo exhibit in the United States entitled Paintings for the Future for Swedish painter, Hilma af Klint. To date, it is the most viewed show in the museum’s history.
Many of you who follow art trends have heard of Klint, but for those who have not, here is a little backstory.
Klint was a classically-trained painter before reaching her mature style of abstraction. Many art scholars still seem to casually brush over this part, calling her a mystic, as if she seeped in the popular esotericism of the 19th century, and her radically large abstract paintings were just happenstance.
Klint’s abstract style happened five years before Kadinsky, Malevich and Mondrian went down in history books as inventors of the abstraction movement in 1910. This oversight is not surprising, since many important women artists have been left out of the art history narrative that we are now just discovering were making work all along.
In her will, Klint stipulated the paintings not be shown until she had been dead for at least 20 years.
Klint felt the world was not ready.
Are we ready now?
I believe yes and no.
The work of Klint went beyond symbols, shapes, lines and color that define emotion in abstract work. The yare filled with complex diagrams of ideas beyond organized religion. Her influences came from nature, science and the occult, and just now they are touching a nerve.
She had conviction that reality was not confined to the physical world.
Her large works command space into cohesive spiritual significance that gives our lives deeper meaning with patterns and connections to each other and our omnipotent universe.
She believed everything is united and connected to higher realms.
Her narrative gifts us a collective consciousness of our time, and a mystical receptivity for the viewer to behold.
I believe humanity craves this receptivity.
Our culture craves the authentic and a connection to the divine.
An example of this can be found in our current cultural trend in the resurgence of hallucinogenics. Particularly “magic mushrooms” and ayahuasca (a popular drink used for spiritual and religious purposes by ancient Amazonian tribes) that is now sought after by Western culture.
Contemporaries explore hallucinogens for a connection to higher vision, but ultimately, it’s a connection with ourselves and spiritual growth we seek.
Where did her inspiration come from?
Hilma was both a painter and mystic. She took her training seriously, studying altered states of consciousness and Theosophy, a blend of wisdom from Buddhism and Hinduism with an aim of pursuit of higher knowledge. She was a seeker- and a seriously critical one, at that.
After eight years of esoteric training, in 1906 during a séance, Hilma was asked through a series of downloads with a High Master, Amaliel, to take on an ambitious project to be entitled “Paintings For the Temple.” She foresaw it as a series of paintings specifically designed as a spiral temple that would facilitate spiritual meditation on transcendent reality beyond the physical world.
She said, “I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict. Nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”
She said of her work; “The experiments I have conducted were meant to awaken humanity”.
This is where it gets interesting…
Eventually, these 193 works made from 1906 to 1915 did end up in a circular temple- a museum designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943.
Wright had no idea who Hilma af Klint was; he built the circular museum with this in mind:
"It's a space of walking through and being relieved from the normal conditions of the world, because there's no horizon line, there is no straight path, there's no verticals, there's no horizontals. So everything is different from 'the real world.'
Much like Klint however, his belief in the unity of all things drove his vision for the museum’s design. The winding spiral does not have a single focal point, but rather a series of them that are connected to a greater whole.
Hilma af Klint as Visionary
Visionaries are often overlooked or ridiculed against the backdrop of popular culture.
Many of Klint’s contemporaries, including Rudolph Steiner, esotericist founder of the Waldorf schools and anthroposophy spiritual expert of his time, did just that.
He rejected her.
He did not understand where the imagery was coming from and what she was trying to portray.
Ouch. No wonder she tucked them away for the future.
Klint had a willingness to embark on the ultimate heroine's journey: to go against the grain.
She had the willingness to dive into an imagined underworld and come out of it with will and fortitude that I would personally love to rub against, and like fairy dust transport the vibe into my own paintings.
Being a visionary can be exactly this;
An outsider. Ahead of your time. A little weird. With strong visions of what the world could be- maybe later, maybe never. That’s up to us.
I like to think the message of her time is upon us now.
What are your thoughts on the paintings of Hilma af Klint?
I would love to read them in the comment section.
Check out the trailer of Hilma af Klint’s documentary here:
Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
Thanks for reading,
