Hilma af Klint

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Hilma af Klint, 1901

Hilma af Klint (born October 26, 1862 at Karlberg Castle in Solna , † October 21, 1944 in Djursholm ) was a Swedish painter . She is a pioneer of abstract painting and is considered one of the outstanding painters of the early 20th century. She never exhibited her large oeuvre , which was inspired by theosophical occultism , and decreed that it should not be exhibited until 20 years after her death at the earliest. It was not until the 1980s that her works became internationally known and recognized.

life and work

Childhood, school and education

Self-portrait , undated

Hilma af Klint was born as the fourth child of Mathilda Sonntag († 1920) and Victor af Klint († 1898) at Karlberg Castle . The father was an officer in the Swedish Navy and the family was wealthy. In 1872 the von Karlberg family moved to Nortullsgatan in Stockholm ; at Riddargatan she attended a girls' school.

Eftersommar ( late summer ), an early naturalistic picture, painted in 1903

From 1880 to 1882 she also learned portrait painting from Kerstin Cardon at the Swedish Art School . She was among the first painters who at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm 1882-1887 painting studied after this institution from 1864 also women in the arts had granted access. Her teachers there were among others Georg von Rosen and August Malmström .

After graduating from the art academy in 1887, Hilma af Klint painted in her own studio. At first she created naturalistic landscapes and portraits according to her academic training and often to order. Hilma af Klint remained unmarried and childless.

Occult Influences, Spiritual Search

The ten greatest, No. 2, Childhood, Group IV , 1907, oil and tempera on paper, mounted on cardboard, 328 × 240 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
The Swan, No. 17 , SUW series, October 1914 to March 1915, oil on canvas, 155 × 152 cm, Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk, Stockholm
Altarpiece No. 1, Group X , 1915, tempera on paper, 185 × 152 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Buddha's point of view on earth, Series II, No. 3a , 1920, oil on canvas, 36 × 27 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

The early death of her sister Hermione increased her interest in religion and spiritism . As early as 1879, at the age of seventeen, Hilma af Klint took part in séances . Like many artists and intellectuals of her generation, she was interested in theosophy and in 1888 she joined the Theosophical Society (TG) and in 1895, after the split, followed the Theosophical Society Adyar (Adyar-TG). In Edvard Munch , who had an exhibition in the immediate vicinity of her studio in 1894, she was interested in how he expressed mental states through painting. Painting beyond naturalistic expression was the result for them. In search of a spiritual dimension, also in art, from 1886 she regularly took part with four other women in meetings of the group “De Fem” (“The Five”); in this community she herself functioned as a medium . The group documented their experiences in notebooks and practiced long before the Surrealists , the automatic drawing and writing .

From 1900 to 1901 she was employed as a draftsman and painter at the "Veterinärinstitutet" (University of Veterinary Medicine). In November 1906, earlier than the artists generally considered to be pioneers of abstract painting, she painted the first series of small-format abstract pictures. It marks the beginning of a creative period that later culminated in the large-format series Paintings for the Temple , a project that ultimately comprised 193 paintings, most of them abstract, her central oeuvre.

Anthroposophy

In 1908 Hilma af Klint met Rudolf Steiner for the first time , at that time still General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society , who was visiting Sweden. She hoped for interpretations of her paintings from him. Steiner visited her studio, did not interpret or analyze her works and was critical of the nature of her media inspiration. As a result, she completely stopped painting for four years, with the exception of one portrait in 1910.

When she worked on the temple series in 1912 , Hilma af Klint was less dependent on media influences. Her compositions seem increasingly strict: the organic structures of earlier years gave way to geometric shapes. She turned more and more to Steiner's anthroposophy and in 1920 she joined the Anthroposophical Society . After the death of her almost blind mother, who had looked after her for years, she had more time to travel and visited the first Goetheanum in Dornach , where she met Steiner again. In the following decades she stayed at the Goetheanum several times for months. After turning to anthroposophy, she developed a style influenced by it in the 1920s.

During her lifetime, Hilma af Klint prohibited any exhibition of her abstract works and decreed in her will that they could not be shown publicly until 20 years after her death. A large number of the works were not known to the public for a long time and were stored with her nephew and heir Erik af Klint. At the beginning of the 1980s, this made the collection accessible to a few art historians and theologians. Ultimately, her complete oeuvre of more than a thousand works and 125 notebooks came into the care of the Hilma af Klints Verk in Stockholm, which has Template: future / in 5 yearsmanaged and published it to this day (as of 2020) . According to the painter's will, a precisely defined central bundle of her works may never be sold.

reception

It was the Swedish art historian Åke Fant who made Hilma af Klint known in the international art world in the 1980s. He presented Hilma af Klint in 1984 at a Nordic conference in Helsinki. Two years later, in 1986, some of her works were shown side by side with pioneers of abstract art such as Kandinsky , Malevich , Mondrian and Picabia in The Spiritual in Art exhibition set up by Maurice Tuchman in Los Angeles, Chicago and The Hague Fant wrote the article in the catalog. In the German-speaking area, af Klint was first introduced to the public interested in art at the large exhibition Occultism and Avant-garde 1995 in Frankfurt.

Extensive catalogs were published for the major retrospective in 2013 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which was then shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Museo Picasso in Málaga and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art , Humlebæk, Denmark. Many works were shown in this traveling exhibition for the first time around 100 years after their creation. Also in 2013 some works by Hilma af Klint were exhibited at the Venice Biennale .

In 2018 the Guggenheim in New York City showed a retrospective of the artist. In 2018 the documentary film Beyond the Visible by director Halina Dyrschka about the life and work of the painter was made.

As art-historical evidence for her entire work, it is cited that part of the visual language of abstract art was influenced by occult art. Hilma af Klint is regarded as a pioneer of both abstract and mystical art.

literature

Exhibitions

Participation in exhibitions during his lifetime

  • Konst- och industriutställning, Norrköping, 1906
  • Konst- och industriutställning, Lund, 1907
  • Svenska konstnärinnor , Konstakademien, Stockholm, 1911
  • Baltiska utställningen, Malmö, 1914
  • Konstföreningen för södra Sverige och Konstnärernas förening, 1914

Solo exhibitions posthumously (selection)

  • Hilma af Klints hemliga pictures , Nordiskt Konstcentrum, Helsinki, Finland; PS 1 , New York; Listasafn National Gallery, Reykjavík, Iceland; Galleri F 15, Moss, Norway
  • Ockult målarinna och abstract pionjär , Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Göteborgs Konsthall, Göteborg; Fyns Art Museum, 1989–1991
  • The secret signs of Hilma af Klint. Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem. March to May 2010 (59 paintings)
  • Beyond Color . inside lake! Color! - Four solo exhibitions at the Kulturforum Järna, Sweden with James Turrell , Rudolf Steiner May to October 2011
  • Hilma af Klint - Abstract pioneering. Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February 16 to May 26, 2013;
  • Hilma af Klint. Pioneer of abstraction. Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart , June 15 to October 6, 2013 afterwards: Museo Picasso , Málaga, Spain; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art , Humlebæck, Denmark, 2013–2014.
  • Cosa mental , Center Pompidou, Metz October 28, 2015 to March 28, 2016
  • Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen , Serpentine Gallery , London, March 3 - May 15, 2016
  • Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future , Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , New York, USA. October 12, 2018 to January 27, 2019

Exhibition participation posthumously (selection)

Movies

Web links

Commons : Hilma af Klint  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes and individual references

  1. ↑ a b Roberta Smith: 'Hilma Who?' No More - Spiritual sparks helped inspire the radical and visionary art of Hilma af Klint, the new (old) name to know. Her work is on view at the Guggenheim. In: New York Times . October 11, 2018, accessed March 4, 2020 .
  2. ^ Kathleen Hall: Theosophy and the Society in the Public Eye - Hilma af Klint. In: Theosophy Forward. March 17, 2014, accessed March 4, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b Iris Müller-Westermann (Ed.): Hilma af Klint. A pioneer of abstraction. Catalog for the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2013. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2013, ISBN 978-3-7757-3489-9 , p. 278.
  4. ↑ About Hilma af Klint. Hilma af Klint Foundation, accessed March 4, 2020 (English, Swedish).
  5. ↑ Åke Fant: Secret Pictures by Hilma Klint . Ed .: Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk, Stockholm. 1988, ISBN 951-96051-6-9 , pp. 3.2–3.3 (Swedish, Finnish, English: Hilma af Klint's Hemliga pictures .).
  6. ↑ Hilma af Klint. A pioneer of abstraction - Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin. Friends of the National Gallery, accessed on March 4, 2020 (for the exhibition from June 15, 2013 - October 6, 2013).
  7. ↑ Hilma af Klint till Venice Biennale 2013. Moderna Museet Stockholm, May 23, 2013, accessed on March 4, 2020 (Swedish, reference to the exhibition at the 2013 Biennale).
  8. ↑ Hannes Klug: Drop the form. In: Junge Welt . March 9, 2020, p. 10 , accessed March 9, 2020 .
  9. ^ Sixten Ringbom: Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract Pionieers. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985. Los Angeles, New York, 1986
  10. ↑ Åke Fant: Secret Pictures by Hilma Klint . Ed .: Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk, Stockholm. 1988, ISBN 951-96051-6-9 , pp. 3,4 (Swedish, Finnish, English: Hilma af Klint's Hemliga pictures .).
  11. ↑ Till Briegleb: Higher beings command! art-magazin.de, 4/2013
  12. ^ Hilma af Klint - A pioneer of abstraction. Moderna Museet Stockholm, archived from the original on October 14, 2012 ; accessed on January 8, 2013 (English, description).
  13. ^ Gerrit Gohlke: Exhibition "Hilma af Klint" - Big, Radical, Forgotten. In: The time . June 13, 2013, accessed March 4, 2020 .
  14. ↑ Hilma af Klint - A pioneer of abstraction. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin , accessed on March 4, 2020 (for the exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart , Berlin, June 15 to October 6, 2013).
  15. ^ Hilma af Klint - A Pioneer of Abstraction. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art , Denmark, accessed March 4, 2020 (English, for exhibition March 7 to July 6, 2014).
  16. ^ Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen. Serpentine Gallery , accessed on March 4, 2020 (English, for the exhibition from March 3 to May 15, 2016).
  17. ^ Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , accessed March 4, 2020 (English, exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 12, 2018 to January 27, 2019).
  18. ↑ The keeper. New Museum of Contemporary Art , accessed March 4, 2020 (exhibition July 20 - October 2, 2016).
  19. ↑ Beyond the Stars - Mystical Landscapes from Monet to Kandinsky, Musée d'Orsay ( Memento from January 21, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Klint, Hilma af
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish painter, spiritualist, theosophist and anthroposophist
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Solna , Sweden
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1944
Place of death Djursholm , Sweden