6 Something Beyond Art
When Hilma af Klint’s: Paintings for the Future opened in 2018 at the Guggenheim, many of the museum goers had never heard of her. Between October 2018 when the exhibit opened until April 2019, over 600,000 people attended the exhibit. It was the most visited exhibit in the museum’s history.
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More than seventy years after her death, her work was finally been seen, exhibited and recognized.
“It’s pretty extraordinary to imagine this rather small woman, 157 centimeters tall or so, doing these huge paintings,” said Iris Müller-Westermann, curator of the first-ever retrospective of the Swedish painter in 2013.
“She was doing something that was not on the retina of people at her time, in terms of size, color, composition and, of course, the abstraction — she was very much a pioneer… This was really an artist who dared to think beyond her time, to step out of what was commonly accepted,” she said. “She had visions about bigger contexts where it was not about making money or being very famous, but about doing something much more humble: trying to understand the world and who we are in it.”
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“These pictures, oils and tempera on paper, are more than 10 feet tall: free-wheeling, psychedelic, animated with fat snail shells, perky inverted commas, unspooling threads, against orange, rose and dusky blue. Man’s evolution is their sober subject, but their gaiety recalls Matisse (Af Klint predates him too).” Kate Kellaway: A Painter Possessed
Hilma af Klint: a painter possessed. It is a cold afternoon in February and I am about to catch a plane to Stockholm in pursuit of a Swedish artist whom most…www.theguardian.com
Here are some of the reactions of people who attended the exhibit in 2018–19 at the Guggenheim:
“The paintings radiate a powerful spiritual energy and it would be hard, I think, to remain unaffected by them. Many people were weeping, for no reason they knew, other viewers stood before the paintings, staring in dumbfounded wonder at their effect, while still others were just dazzled by the mystery staring back at them.” (JJ Flowers)
“I saw the Guggenheim show twice. There was an energy about the work that I haven’t experienced at any other exhibit, ever. On the second visit, it was interesting to watch others interact with the work — particularly young children. They got it. Hilma af Klint was channeling from somewhere else for sure. She understood the world was not ready for her work — thus, the specifications about when the it could be made public. Simply spectacular.” (Paul Smith New York Oct. 25, 2019)
“I visited the Guggenheim in February to see Hilma’s work. I can definitely relate to the weeping visitors described by the curator. Those gigantic canvases have a way of drawing you in. I shed a few tears as well…Truly a memorable experience.” (Mayra San Juan Oct. 25, 2019)
Lulu, a commentator from Philadelphia wrote in the comment section of the New York Times:
“As a young female artist, I wish I had her to guide me. I loved and love Kandinsky and his work has guided me. There were so few females, in that era, to look to as an example and inspiration. She is not in the art history books. Here’s to seeing this change and learn about the truly revolutionary female artists who were up against so much.”
Filmmaker and director Halina Dyrschka, the Berlin-based filmmaker who saw an exhibit of the The Ten Largest in 2013 said that the images in the paintings transported her so vividly, she lost the ability to describe them:
“When I saw her paintings, I thought ‘it cannot be’,” says Dyrschka…“Standing in front of The Ten Largest, I was speechless. And then I was angry. I thought ‘it can’t be that I’ve never heard of her before. Even if you don’t like the paintings, you can’t forget them….They are something beyond art, I would say.”
'They called her a crazy witch': did medium Hilma af Klint invent abstract art?n 1971, the art critic Linda Nochlin wrote an essay called Why have there been no great women artists? The question may…www.theguardian.com
In this world where we are bombarded with images, where everything is news and nothing is meaningful for very long, something in her work spoke to me. Apparently, it made a deep impression on other viewers as well.
It’s not easy to describe her work or the deep way in which it affected me. I began to study and read everything I could about her and also to study her paintings, to discover what about them I found so moving, and not just in the moment I saw them.
I could feel the images, the energy of the colors resonate.
The symbols in her paintings were like messages from another dimension radiating messages that could be felt, even if they could not fully be understood.
Her paintings were portals that revealed secrets eager for us to discover. If only I had the key to to unlock the meanings of these once hidden secrets.