Remembering Hilma af Klint: Her Art, Legacy, and Desire for Privacy

Surveillance. Hiding from it takes effort, risk. Danger, it’s close to the tip of my tongue every time I choose to walk down an alleyway, rather than a brightly-lit boulevard. The clench of fear that arrives, with every successive step that this time, I could be trapped. I know I like to do this, to walk in the dark. Unobserved, so I’ve learned the right kind of stride. Jacket. Speed I have to make sure I maintain, especially when I’m in an area where I’m particularly unfamiliar. As Walter Benjamin notes in the first chapter of Berlin Childhood Around 1900, “Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires schooling.” When in the midst of learning how to go from a bed to a decimated concrete building, the kind I like to wander through while listening to Caroline Polachek, the first few tracings of the path from Point B to Point C can’t be approached casually, without thinking. That’s for later, the freedom I’ll taste once I know every nook and cranny, every possible hole to hide, between bed and Caroline. Marking out its terrain is like rollerblading on ice, initially, and I can’t quite identify the events that precipitate when I finally decide to walk with music blasting in my ears, signal on my phone turned off. Maybe an inordinate sense of confidence? What I do know is that it takes many, many failed attempts, first. And most importantly, these experiments must also be undertaken entirely alone, without the feeling that I’m being watched. 

Elena Ferrante writes in Frantumaglia that “Vigere, burgeon or expand—a verb that indicates the spread of life—is in the root of vigile, watchful or vigilant, of veglia, wakefulness, and, it seems to me, illuminates the meaning of ‘surveillance.’” To be watched implies that I know what it feels like to not be seen, not be observed. How eyes painted in eyeliner gloss over me, standing with my feet in the sand at four years old, waiting to be lifted into a babysitter’s arms that never arrive. How it feels to wait at the back of a gym at 13, pimples popping, curves stretching in directions I never realized I could with feet in shoes already too tight, even though they’re barely scuffed. In each of those moments, I was wanting to be seen as something more than what the person looking at me valued, and my body clearly wasn’t enough. 

Surveillance, however, is the reversal of that feeling. 

When I’m not asking to be watched, the hairs on my arms seem to stand at attention, as if to defend me against an unknown enemy I haven’t sought out an introduction for. My body becomes an oversized sweatshirt, waving itself over a misshapen figure with holes. I know where they are, and the fabric barely conceals the entrances to potential penetration. For those of us who grew up in households with rage hidden behind every chipped door frame, the cloak of it hovering over the memories of our parents, or its genetic code embedded in the palm of our grandfather’s thick hand; or alternatively, one where once we stepped outside its door, the world beyond refused to bend to the shape of our bodies, whether because of race, language, accent, or the number of zeros in our family’s bank account. The occasional stares accumulated like layers in a jenga tower, day after day after day until our skin turned plastic from its weight. Focusing on each look, each coat, each click of heels on pavement, we now anticipate the disappointment. If it doesn’t arrive, the relief is less a victory and more a reminder of the length of time it took to tie our armor together.

My hypervigilance towards possible invasions of violence, breakages of boundaries, it emerges from something to the left of innocence. Those protected under its membrane don’t understand the difficulty in trying to stitch its curvature back together, to some distant silhouette of a time our backs weren’t curved, our eyes weren’t always looking over our shoulders, knees weren’t bent slightly in case we needed to run. The thing we’ve gained from fear is an expansion of our bodies beyond the boundaries of our skin. This sensation, we know when it arrives. No matter how much we learn to live in a safe place, far away from where we were trained to believe we could never leave, the residue of this partition remains and so, we need to learn how to hide. How to build security for our hearts, so they can beat to a rhythm distant from terror. 

The Necessity of Privacy

When asked why an artist whose genius we can now so clearly recognize chose to never share their work during their lifetime, I’ve heard so many people so casually ask: “why?” As if the possibility for seclusion isn’t in of itself a luxury, as if an artist is always convinced of their own worth. It seems to me rather careless to assume that art, the kind that ricochets against the ideologies of the ruling class of its time, might want to be protected by the person who conceived of it. Reasons to do with safety, both physical and emotional, seem to me entirely sufficient at explaining the choice. 

Art isn’t always made by people who wish to be seen in a literal sense. The manipulation of their corporeality isn’t always the means by which they seek out a new form for how they witness the world. 

It’s not always validation they seek but instead, a sense of recognition. 

Hilma af Klint’s Upbringing, and Her Mask

Hilma af Klint was born in Solna, Sweden on October 26, 1862. Spending summers on her father’s manor on the island of Adelsö, she grew up among nature and luxury. Before her family moved to Stockholm, she showed an interest in mathematics and botany; once they moved to the capital, she began training in portraiture and landscape painting. One of the first women admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts when she was twenty years old, she graduated with honors. During her lifetime she became known for painting relatively traditional landscape scenes, botanical drawings, illustrations, and portraits. 

A photograph taken of her in 1885, two years before her graduation, shows her holding a palette in her left hand, a vase of flowers behind her, a plant to her right. On the wall hangs a landscape painting or perhaps a photograph, above her a parasol—as if to shield her from a too-bright light. 

Nothing in this image suggests that this artist might become the inventor of modern abstract art. 

The Difference Between Validation and Recognition

Validation means “proving the accuracy of something,” while recognition is the acknowledgement of the existence of something. The decision undertaken by many artists to closely guard their work within the privacy of their home or studio, it verifies to us, those living in their future, that for them art was the refraction of themselves, their inner world, to themselves. In other words, art is the acknowledgement of the truth of their own existence, on their own terms. If no one else seems able to help them define it, who else can they turn to but objects made by their imagination?

For those who are hypervigilant, whether because of an intense upbringing, or a revelatory encounter with the spiritual world, or institutional barriers, or an act of violence that rendered them unmoored by an abuser, a former friend, a boss, a mentor, locating the feeling of security where identity can be expressed without fear of retaliation, judgment, or shame—it can be near impossible. And, once it’s realized, maintaining its consistency also takes effort, patience, kindness, time. A delicate balance to conceive, fractured at any moment by an invasion. 

Even for artists who may not be hypervigilant, what they make, what they share, who they share it with, what they express in public, there might still be a necessity for some extra care. None of us choose, when we’re born, if we want to be hegemonic or not. None of us take an exam called So You Think You Can Be A Good Person? None of us choose, when we’re born, if we’re sensitive to criticism, to shame, to ridicule, to an overabundance of violence. None of us choose, when we’re born, whether we want our noses to replicate the shape of our grandmother’s, whether our voice is pitched higher, or lower, than our classmates in school, whether we stutter, whether we don’t care about videogames or maybe we love videogames so much more than our friends; our idiosyncrasies, by definition, aren’t preselected for a life of ease. Or, for a life as an artist with a calling to make art that stretches the boundaries of our inherited reality.

Af Klint’s Spiritualism and Its Aftermath

In 1896, Hilma af Klint, with women artists Anna Cassel, Sigrid Hedman, and sisters Mathilda Nilsson and Cornelia Cederberg, formed what they called “The Five,” who together conducted séances for 10 years. 

An era when artists were experimenting with the boundaries of their own realities, spiritualism was in fashion. Electromagnetic waves had been discovered only 10 years previously, the x-ray the year before. Biologists had identified patterns in nature, previously unseen. Microscopes found abstract forms in microorganisms, flowers, leaves, crystals, soil. Psychologists studied the impact of colors on the human mind, suggesting possible links between composition, color, and political consciousness. Nihilism emerged as a counterpoint to Christian-dominated Europe and many turned towards Buddhism, Hinduism, theosophy, and anthroposophy instead. This was around the time The Five met for their weekly meetings. 

Claiming to receive messages from “High Masters,” these five artists believed they were hearing from specific individuals through metaphysical channels. In trance-like states, these women transcribed their encounters with these beings, who were identified as Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor. These automatic writings and drawings formed the basis of af Klint’s shift from her more formal training towards that of abstraction. Though she continued to paint more conventional work throughout the rest of her life, she identified her life’s work as this: visual art based on occult abstraction, sustained by prolonged engagement with geometry, color theory, and with the Anthroposophical Society, which she joined in 1920. 

The Five dissolved after af Klint proposed that she should become its leader, rather than remain part of a five-person collective with each participant holding equal power. The rest of the members rejected her proposal but the next year in September, she noted a vision that foretold that “ten paradisiacally beautiful paintings” should be executed that would “give the world a glimpse” of the stages of life. In October, she began working on The Ten Largest, a cycle of 10 monumental paintings that represent the four stages of human development: childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. References to botany, to light, to geometry appear in all of the paintings, linking humanity’s connection to the natural, as well as theoretical, worlds. Each composition took her only four days to paint. She enlisted the help of the main medium of the group, Cornelia Cederbeg, to help her articulate the visual images she wanted to carve onto her canvases. The paintings were massive; she intended them as part of a series, hung together in a spiral temple to create a “beautiful wall covering.”

The year The Five dissolved, she also began working on Paintings for the Temple, which became a series of 193 paintings (of which The Ten Largest is a part), created between the years 1906 and 1915. af Klint described this total work in a range of ways. She said of one of the series from 1907: “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawing and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke.” Yet, she also gave conflicting accounts of the creative process, claiming that “It was not the case that I was to blindly obey the High Lords of the Mysteries but that I was to imagine that they were always standing by my side.” 

When her mother became ill in 1908, she paused the project for four years, to take care of her. When she returned in 1912, her remarks on the process changed. Rather than declaring herself a passive conduit through which spirits were actualizing their visions, she claimed to be an interpreter of their messages instead. By 1917, she stopped producing art through spirits and claimed to be the author, the person with the sole control over the design of her work. Following the completion of Paintings for the Temple, she shifted stylistically away from techniques related to channeling spirits, instead turning towards more Christian iconography and rigid geometric forms; her life ended with a passionate love for watercolor. She insisted in her will that her work, a total of 1,200 paintings, 100 texts, and 26,000 pages of notes, should not be shown until 20 years after her death. 

Her existence as an artist was not widely known until a show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called The Spiritual in Art featured her work, in 1986. Although other shows followed, the exhibition in 2013, called Pioneer of Abstraction at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, marked her rise to public fame. That show (the most popular show the museum ever held) was followed by an exhibit at London’s Serpentine Gallery entitled Painting the Unseen, in 2016. Three years later, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City hosted Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, which attracted more than 600,000 visitors, also making it that museum’s most popular show in its history. Now, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao will present Hilma af Klint, a comprehensive survey of her oeuvre. Including her early works on traditional themes, her automatic drawings, as well as some work from Paintings for the Temple, Parsifal, the Atom Series, as well as the watercolor paintings of her final years, the exhibition will open on October 18, 2024.

An Artist’s Role in Making a World

An answer to that question “why?” asked by those who wonder why an artist whose genius we can so clearly recognize chose to never share their work during their lifetime, I often hear this answer: “the world wasn’t ready for them.” Brushing aside its arrogance, it seems to me rather careless to attribute to the past an ignorance of what we know today. It also seems dismissive of the reality that art like af Klint’s helps to make our current world. The world is not a conscious body, hypervigilant to contributions by artists seeking to morph its shape into one more nuanced, rigorous, fluid, and open to accepting those who challenge its hegemony. Rather, to me an answer that seems more accurate is that “the world chose to look away, refused to change, until a number of people forced it to.” This answer refuses to let “the world” and those who claim to be an authority on its interests off the hook by placing the blame solely on them; as opposed to the artist whose point of view was invisibilized, unseen, unrecognized. The world is always ready to change, it is always changing; both in terms of its age, but also its biology, its weight, its excesses, its residue, its history. 

It is up to all of us to pay attention. 

A Careful Approach and a Lasting Legacy

Within Kate Kellaway’s fantastic essay, published in The Guardian in anticipation of the London exhibition in 2016, of af Klint she writes that: 

Sometimes depression struck. In 1908, after making 111 paintings, she collapsed: “She had completed a painting every third day – including the 10 huge ones. She was exhausted.” And there was further reason for despond. That same year, Steiner was lecturing in Stockholm. She invited this charismatic man to see her paintings (Mondrian petitioned Steiner too, but always in vain). She had hoped he would interpret the work. Instead he advised: “No one must see this for 50 years.” For four years after this verdict she gave up painting and looked after her sightless mother. Johan shows me a photograph of Hilma at Hanmora, looking down with tenderness, a hand on her mother’s shoulder – the more sympathetic of clues to her character.

This event prompted that four-year break during her creation of Paintings of the Temple. Clearly sensitive to the opinions of others, af Klint took Steiner’s disdain for her paintings personally. Rejection, for some, can be bearable. After all, if everyone on Earth likes you, you’re probably somewhat dishonest—when considering that point of view, it can be easier to stomach repudiation. But af Klint believed that Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, would be one of the only people who might recognize in her work her ambitions, what she was attempting to express about her vision.

Kellaway, earlier in her piece, shares an oft-quoted statement by af Klint, used as evidence of her artistic determination: “Life is a farce if a person does not serve truth.” Perhaps, in order for af Klint to follow through on her impulses, on her convictions, on her craft, she understood that only she could surveil herself. As Ferrante also writes, when it’s conducted in earnest, “Surveillance is, if well understood, more an emotional tendency of the whole body, an expansion and an inflorescence on and around it.” Perhaps, for af Klint’s mind to be free, she required a partition between her work and the eyes of others.

The decision undertaken by many artists to closely guard their work within the privacy of their home or studio, it verifies to us, those living in their future, that for them art was the refraction of themselves, their inner world, to themselves. In other words, art was the acknowledgement of the truth of their own existence, on their own terms. If no one else helps them to define it, much less someone who could be an expert on it, who else can they turn to but their own imagination? Locating the feeling of security where identity can be expressed without fear of retaliation, judgment, or shame—it can be near impossible. A delicate balance to conceive, fractured at any moment by an invasion. And, once it’s realized, maintaining its consistency also takes effort, patience, kindness, time. 

Featured image:
Hilma af Klint.
The Swan, The SUW/UW Series, Group IX/SUW, No. 13, 1915.
Oil on canvas, 148.5 × 151 cm.
Courtesy The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm, HaK 161.
©The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Bilbao 2024.