The Spiritual Painting of 'Medium' Hilma Af Klint Astonishes at the Guggenheim

Due to her peculiar character, her work would today be on par with those of Kandinsky, Malevich, or Mondrian. However, Hilma Af Klint's (Stockholm, 1862–1944) painting has until recently been a 'delicacy' enjoyed only by a few connoisseurs. Now, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, following the lead of its New York counterpart that unveiled her in 2018, presents nearly 170 works by this unique and secretive artist considered a medium whose work emerged from her profound spiritual and esoteric experiences.

A forerunner and pioneer of abstraction, the Swedish painter abandoned her training in traditional painting to focus on an innovative abstract art that has only been discovered and appreciated more than a century later. Af Klint herself stated in her last will that her works should not be exhibited until at least 20 years after her death. During her lifetime, she rarely exhibited her most innovative pieces, which deprived her of the recognition that has grown over the last decade.

She went unnoticed in her time not due to a lack of success, but because of her belief that the public was not "ready" to understand her innovative and colorful language, full of geometric figures, organic forms, signs, and symbols drawn from a multitude of sources.

"Her painting is fresh and new despite being almost a century old," says Lucia Agirre, curator of an exhibition as surprising as it is spectacular, sponsored by Iberdrola and on display until February 2. The Bilbao museum curator has worked on the exhibition alongside Tracey R. Bashkoff, director of collections at the New York Guggenheim and the mastermind behind the exhibition that rescued the Swedish artist from obscurity.

The exhibition offers a comprehensive journey through the prolific creator's career, from her early works of traditional themes and style to her automatic drawings and her most notable and unique series, such as 'Paintings for the Temple', 'Perceval', or the one dedicated to the atom, to her late watercolors.

"Hilma af Klint was ahead of her time with powerful images. The rare strength of her compositions, the boldness of her colors, and the complex symbolism of her paintings are as innovative in the visual as in the conceptual," say the curators. Interested in philosophical, spiritual, esoteric, and scientific matters, Af Klint "captures in her creations currents and energies imperceptible to the human eye, trying to grasp reality from a new perspective that brings us closer to the supreme truth."

Her astonishing iconography "constitutes a universe in itself," with codes as complex and groundbreaking as they are fascinating "whose interpretation could not be realized until recent decades," say the experts. "What we know is just the tip of a great iceberg," Agirre points out, highlighting the "radical modernity" of Af Klint's work. "Her life and work allow us to rewrite the history of modern painting," notes Tracey R. Bashkoff.

During her lifetime, she only exhibited her figurative paintings and, very occasionally, her abstract ones, which she never presented in the context of the conventional art world. She sought to share them with like-minded spiritual communities, although she failed to find an enthusiastic audience. Aware that the world was not yet ready to accept her work, she preserved and classified it so that it would reach future generations in an articulated manner.

In 1906, she began her most important and innovative project, to which she dedicated almost a decade. Her 'Paintings for the Temple' comprise 193 works, including large-format oils and drawings, in which she dispenses with everything learned to focus on a new, non-objective art that stems from her relationship with spiritualism and systems of thought, such as Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, or Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy. She devoted almost a decade to this "radical endeavor to find visual expression for a spiritual and transcendent reality beyond the observable world."

Conceived to be installed in a helical temple that was never completed, they were paradoxically shown at the spiral Guggenheim that Frank Lloyd Wright created in New York. It was the 2018 exhibition that attracted nearly a million people and was the most viewed of the season.

Born into a noble family with a military background, her father was an admiral in the Swedish navy, an instructor of astronomy, navigation, and mathematics. Belonging to a lineage of cartographers was crucial for Af Klint's formation "whose spiritual paintings and drawings are maps based on her knowledge of the language of cartography and other sciences," according to Agirre.

Her paternal learning was complemented by traditional artistic training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, one of the first institutions to allow women to draw human models.

In 1896, Hilma Af Klint founded with Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman, and Mathilda Nilsson the group of The Five (De Fem). These women regularly held spiritualism sessions to contact the beyond and channel their experiences through writing and automatic drawings present in the exhibition.

Af Klint died at the age of 82 after a fall while getting off a tram, on October 21, 1944, the same year as Russian Vasili Kandinsky and Dutch Piet Mondrian, both recognized as giants of abstraction. Secrecy surrounded Klint's work for decades by her own will. Single and childless, she bequeathed to her nephew Erik af Klint 1,300 paintings, a hundred notebooks with drawings, and 26,000 pages with notes, asking him to keep the collection united and hidden "until the world was ready to understand it."

Part of her work was seen at the Picasso Museum in Malaga in 2013, but the Guggenheim has managed to gather all her major series, signed between 1906 and 1920, when she tackled her large-format works filled with color and geometric shapes that anticipated abstraction.