Of Paintings Unseen: An Artist and the Alchemy of an After Life
Hilma Af Klint created a hidden world at the beginning of the 20th century that only she and a select few were at favour to be a part of. Over 100 years on, the 'Paintings of the Temple' are on show for all to see at the Serpentine Gallery until 15 May. 193 paintings were created involving the psychedelic and duality of themes, making her an individual in an era of Post Impressionism. Af Klint was part of 'The Five' a séance group made up of four women who joined together with the spiritual world and would create drawings in their private notebooks. As strange to the modern ear as this may sound, the line between the natural and spiritual world was far more blurred, séances being seen as more exploratory and even social. Their popularity was rising immensely in America and Canada at the turn of the century. Curator Melissa Blanchflower elaborates, "to understand Hilma, you have to understand the world she was mediating in. Darwin's 'Theory of Evolution' was published in 1856 and still was being fiercely debated. You had a much more open discussion about the connections between science and the spiritual back then, whereas nowadays it is far more clear cut." From these séances with 'The Five' Af Klint received an individual calling in 1906, where she said she heard she was to act as a medium for the spiritual world and produce artwork; a conduit between the spiritual and mortal. The artwork produced jointly embodied evolution, the sexes, colour and soul combined, an open discussion on how we are all connected and intertwined through one force. These first works, 'Primordial Chaos' [1906-1907] began the variation and mixture of themes in Af Klint's work. The paintings are a mix of blue, yellow and green, blue representing the male, yellow the female and green the coming together of them both. Here her themes of symmetry begin in the artwork, reflecting the depth in joining science and the mathematical with nature. This is also reminded to the viewer in the cell like quality of the shapes created, as if her paintings are a microscopic analysis of how there is a prevalence of science within spirituality. After the creation of 'Primordial Chaos' came 'The Ten Largest' in 1907. These are a collection of ten large paintings split into four categories: childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. The Serpentine has eight of these ten paintings, all of which show the influence of Af Klint's botanist knowledge through the inclusion of flowers and growth. The colours would make one assume these were produced in the psychedelic era of the 1960's, Af Klint ahead of Warhol by half a century. Her next series 'Evolution' was as Melissa Blanchflower explains, "a move on from her other work. Here she includes the figurative with the abstract which is something the abstract artists further on in the century stayed away from. She focuses again on the theme of duality between men and women, light and dark, the celestial and earth and yet everything is evolved from the same thing. It's like she's taken a microscope and zoomed right out of the whole universe." The depth and surprisingly surreal and modern use of colour continues throughout the exhibition, especially 'The Dove' series painted in 1915 where she creates a spiral that duplicates that of a DNA helix. The biblical implication of the dove combined with the colour spectrum placed at the bottom all reiterates the kaleidoscope of theories and philosophies we all exist under.
Af Klint never showed a collection of work in her lifetime, continuing her double life as a landscape artist while her beliefs in theosophy reigned strong in her private world. As a woman, producing such strange an unworldly paintings could invite the possibility of Af Klint being seen as mentally unstable, and being unmarried would have made her more vulnerable to such accusations. The production of the vast notebooks she produced alongside her paintings can even be seen as a protection for them, and when she died she created an embargo on them that they should not be shown until 20 years until after her death. Melissa Blanchflower said, "Women only gained the vote in Stockholm in 1919, so they still were quite powerless. Although the Academy of the Arts in Stockholm was the second to admit women after the academy in London, art was very much still seen as a man's space. Men were the creators, the creationists, women could only copy or facilitate." It is resonant to how society has viewed the relationship between men and women for a long time, men will lead and women will follow. The startlingly refreshing message in Af Klint's work is that everything is equal, not only the sexes but the momentous philosophies behind science and spirituality and that we all co-exist under one force.
Lucy Palfreeman
Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen runs until May 15, 2016 at the Serpentine Gallery, London. http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/
