1. Hilma af Klint, The Evolution, the WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series, Group VI, No.15, 1908. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation
Hilma and Piet: dialogue and resonances
Until tomorrow, the Tate Modern in London presents an exhibition and dialogue between Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian, or I must say a resonance around the forms and the life of the two artists, two academic painter, two figurative painter who became aware of their talent of creating abstract pictures in Europe, at the turn of the 20th century.
The life of the two artists.
Short biographies and similarities.
2. (Left) Piet Mondrian, Red Amaryllis with blue background, 1909-1910, Private Collection
3. (Right) Hilma af Klint, Botanical Drawing, c.1890. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation
Piet Mondrian or Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan was born on March 7, 1872, and died on February 1, 1944. As a Dutch painter who studied at the Rijksacademie, he started his career painting rural scenes and landscapes influences by numerous art courant of the time such as Post-impressionism, Luminism and Cubism.
In 1917, just before the end of the First World War, Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Huszár, Van Der Leck, Vantongerloo, Hoff, Pieter Out, Wils and Kok decided to create the movement "De Stijl". For the group, Stijl present a "neoplasticism" art which doesn't look at the existing world with its shapes and colors but rather to the limitation of shapes and the colors used in the works: red, yellow, blue, black and white.
Until the start of the Second World War, Mondrian painted using those colors and limitations, sometimes creating deeply abstract works. But as he left Europe due to the pressure of the war, he arrived in New York City and he felt inspired by the music and most precisely Jazz. Thus, he created works by using small squares and rectangles that coalesced into a flow of colourful vertical and horizontal lines.
On the other hand, Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862 and died in 1944. While she studied at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and graduated with honours in 1887. She established herself as a respected artist in Stockholm creating landscapes paintings and serving briefly as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists.
Beside her studies, she was interested in spiritualism, theosophy and anthroposophy. At the time, those engagements were quite popular across Europe, especially in artistic and literary circles.
But, as her figurative and most appreciated works we're profitable, she became a full-time painter and decided to have two careers, the figurative works and her "great work" (her abstract works).
With this group of abstract painting, she created a group of openminded women called "The Five" with Klint best-friend Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson, all of whom had been members of the Edelweiss Society, a Stockholm association that combined Christian ideas, theosophical teachings and spiritualism.
From 1896 and 1908, the group recorded messages from higher spirits referred to as "The High Masters", and in one of them, Klint was indicated to be the leader of the group. From this point on Klint focused entirely on the great commission known as "The Paintings for the Temple", her most important body of works.
The layout of the exhibition
While the exhibition is titled "Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: forms of life", the exhibition consist, more or less as a juxtaposition of works by Piet Mondrian compared to the works of Hilma af Klint, thus, it's fair to say that the Tate and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag (the two organisers of the exhibition) intention were to shed light on this artist in a new way. The exhibition is designed in a way that artists are sometime in dialogue, and sometimes all by themselves.
R1 - The first room of the exhibition is dedicated to the academic works of the two artists, thus showcasing landscapes. Like I stated before, both artists had an academic training, Klint did her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1882 to 1887, and Mondrian between 1892 and 1897 at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, thus both artists we're appreciated for their classical art, and at the time sold quite well.
Sadly, the road to education for Klint was not that easy, she was one of the first women who got accepted at the academy in 1864 and often faced barriers to their careers, thus, she decided at the end of her career to join the Swedish Society of Women Artists to help all of her community of female artists in her home country.
On the other hand, the studied of Mondrian we're quite normal for a male painter of the time, he studied and joints the "Hague School" of realist painters, before shifting is interest into more experimental works.
R2 - The second room of the exhibition is another dialogue between the two artists. Titled "Evolution", the room present on one wall a group of works by the Swedish artist titled "WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series, Group VI, The Evolution" (which is part of the series of works she produced for "The Paintings for the Temple").
The group of works, all of them created in 1908 present the works commissioned by her spiritual guide, Amaliel. Amaliel was one of the "High Masters" thought to exist on a higher plane of consciousness, who communicated with Klint and her spiritual collective. In this particular series of works, Klint depicted her higher spiritual state with dolled colours, writings and geometrical forms. She also uses symbols such as spirals or snails to represent evolution.
In dialogue, Piet Mondrian present works he produced on the island of Walcheren in the Dutch province of Zeeland, where he became part of an artists community, which practice focus on the landscape and the quality of light, he thus experimented with bold colours styles and techniques before creating one of his most important work of the time, the "Evolution Triptych" which represents humanity’s progress from the physical towards the spiritual using symbolism from Theosophy.
R3 - The third room of the exhibition is still a dialogue between the two artists because they showcase the botanical studies of the two painters. Thus, the depictions of flowers in this room demonstrate the close observation of nature and its biodiversity.
Before he's studied, Piet Mondrian was mostly drawing, painting and exhibiting single flowers. By doing so, he was looking at the biological process of blooming and growing flowers (such as cultivated flowers, like lilies and chrysanthemums) in the world.
On the other side, Klint focus on the stages of the life of a flower, in the spring and the summer and it's link to the environment because she depicted wild flowers such as cornflower and sea thrift. Beside this practice, it was one of the few professional artistic activities open to women, and many, like af Klint, became skilled in this area. But both artists were interested in the structure of those flowers, the shapes, the evolution, etc.
4. Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge, the W Series, No.1, 1913. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation
R4 - Another common theme in their works are the trees. Mondrian painted a series of trees between 1908 and 1911, and af Klint spent two years working on "The Tree of Knowledge" from 1913.
On one side, the trees of Klint draws on a concept common to many mythological and religious traditions, the "axis mundi". This concept is described as the "world tree", is a form that connects every part of the universe, from microcosm to macrocosm. In this series, Klint combined the precision of botanical and scientific diagrams with ornamentation inspired by art nouveau.
On the other hand, Mondrian's depiction of the trees is inspired by his trip to Paris in 1911 and his encounter to Cubism. At the time, Cubism was a radical approach of breaking up objects and figures into two-dimensional surfaces on the canvas.
All in all, the subject itself, the tree is for many cultures and thought systems, connected to mystical forces beyond the visible world.
R5 - The fifth room of the exhibition is titled "Dynamic Color" and it focus on the relation between forms, colours and shapes in their works.
In the works of Mondrian, we see him experimenting with a recurring motif, the towers and the seascape of the city of Domburg. During this trip, the artist refined his depictions of the towers and sea views until they dissolved into complete abstraction, between the verticals lines define as the "male" principle (representing the spiritual) and the horizontal as expressing the "female", the material principle.
On the other hand, Klint's "The Eros Series" from 1907 present a series of canvas made out of pastel colours and elegant lines accompanied by letters and text. While keeping in mind the term of balance and opposing "male" and "female" forces, the artist uses blue and yellow, the letters AO (alpha and omega), and the Swedish words Asket (ascetic) and Vestal.
R6 - "World Religions" present works around the religious beliefs. On one side, the sketchbooks of Mondrian wrote: "All religions have the same fundamental content; they differ only in form. The form is the external manifestation of this content and is thus an indispensable vehicle for the expression of primary principles".
Thus, this phrase resonance with the "Series 2" created by Klint in 1902. This work presents different religions with a reduced abstract language of segmented circles, each circle being at a particular point in their development.
R7 - "New Old Geometrie"s present the infamous series of Swan made by the Swedish artist in 1914. At the time the artist was still living in Stockholm and much of the world was consumed by the First World War, due to all of those disruption, she was no longer directed by her spiritual guided, but rather by the shift between figurative imagery and abstract forms.
Those two swans are engaged in a conflict, a conflict between the figuration and the abstraction, between the black and the white, between the two sides of the canvas, and a change for the creative evolution of the artist, which will marked a development from organic tendrils, spirals and symbolic forms to increasingly geometric shapes and planes of solid colour.
But like other works of the artist, there is always a link to the fourth dimension, theosophy and the work of a philosopher, Rudolf Steiner. In his theory, the swan was a popular occult symbol of unity, which was discussed in Steiner's books and in Helena Blavatsky book "The Secret Doctrine", which Klint owned.
R8 - The use of space and rhythm was deeply important for both artists, especially Mondrian since with the movement De Stijl, he created numerous chairs and pictures linked to space. In his own studio he had panels of colors, black and grey tones which he would move every week.
Just after the war, he developed his theory of "neo-plasticism", which is a visual language of "pure relationships" between colours and geometric shapes. After the 1920s, his picture only became irregular grids of colours influences by "jazz rhythms". With this work, he set out to reduce painting to its basic principles, removing individual aspects (which he called "tragic") to express the "universal".
R9 - The following room also present Klint works which might be influences by the Opera of Richard Wagner "Parsifal". But each work of this series have individuals tiled used by leaders of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater. In their books, "Thought Forms" and "Occult Chemistry", they refer to unseen forces that can only be accessed by gaining higher consciousness.
R10 - The last room present "The Ten Largest", which are part of the series of "The Paintings for The Temple", which af Klint thought was commissioned by her spiritual advisers. They depict various stages of life, ranging from childhood to old age.
This cycle is animated by organic patterns and abstract geometries. The snail, for example, is reflected in the logarithmic spiral, a form profoundly associated with growth and evolution processes. As the vision progresses from microscopic to cosmic, botanical forms give way to abstract ones.
Af Klint envisioned a spiral-shaped temple where her paintings might be put together as a "beautiful wall covering." Ascending through the temple represented attaining a higher level of existence. Despite their great scale, af Klint worked rapidly in 1907 to complete The Ten Largest in a few months. She was utterly defying modern artmaking conventions in terms of scale, colour, and form.
The rarity of the works
All in all, the exhibition is quite an overwhelming experience, between the juxtaposition of the works of Piet Mondrian and Hilma af Klint, and the rarity of the loan for the works of Hilma af Klint, which 99.9% of her works are held by the foundation of the artist, one question remain, is this exhibition highlighting one artist? The two artists? ? What's the link to their works and the themes and the title of the show and how does a visitor who only knows Piet Mondrian or Hilma af Klint can discover new links to both artists?
Maybe it's all of those respond that I want, of course, like generations of artists before her and after her, Hilma af Klint was exhaled from the history of art. And while she made great works, which most of them survived until today due to her foundation, Hilma was a woman who, instead of creating portraits and landscapes for her whole life, create a large body of works, a lot of the time on a large scale. At the end of her life, and for decades, she decided that her works was not ready to be exhibited, and she put a 20-years embargo on her works.
Now, the light shine on her like a star of modern painting, at the same level as numerous artists like Kandinsky, Mondrian, Braque, Picasso, etc. But all in all, I get the fact that Mondrian and Hilma ad a radical view on painting, and sometimes they've done the same things such as their botanical studies, their trees, their studies as a landscape painter, but other then that, what's the point? Mondrian works around theology are a fraction of his works, compared to Hilma who dedicated her whole life to it. I just wish more explanations we're made about Theology, the context of the time and the paintings that we're created at the time in Sweden and in the Netherlands at the start of the career.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Tate Modern
Date: 20.04.2023 - 3.09.2023
Curators: Frances Morris, Nabila Abdel Nabi, Briony Fer, Laura Stamps, Amrita Dhallu and Genevieve Barton.
Ticket: Available online OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7887 8888
Mail: information@tate.org.uk