hilma af klint: a biography
Feb. 21st, 2024 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
before reading this book, i knew nothing about hilma af klint. i missed the show at the guggenheim, and while i hungrily looked at images from afar, i never sat down and searched for information about her personally. i'm glad now that i didn't, because it meant that i went into julia voss's biography of her (translated by anne posten) (affiliate link) completely blind. because i have a degree in art history, i have at least some small background in most major artists. and as much as i love learning about a person by whom very little art remains, it was exciting to learn about someone entirely new who left SO MUCH art.

i really appreciated both the author and translator's notes at the beginning of the book, because they highlighted 1) what a monumental undertaking this book was, and 2) how scholarship about af klint is still very much a developing field. voss went into the project with assumptions based on how years of historians had interpreted af klint's life: as very isolated, her work primarily inspired by this one esotericist. after accessing af klint's archive, voss quickly realized that wasn't the case at all and started over from zero. "I learned Swedish and made this biography my primary occupation," she says laconically. posten notes that in the time between the biography being released in german and the publishing of the english translation, new information has emerged, which she and voss collaborated on incorporating into the book. if you're the sort of person who finds research exciting, all of this will be very thrilling for you.
hilma af klint left behind a copious archive, which you would think would be a researcher's dream. but her aim was not to provide illuminating information about her life--it was to give as much context as possible to her paintings, and the forces which inspired them (she also suspected that it would take the world some time to catch up with her--she marked most of the archive with "+X" indicating they should only be looked at 20 years after her death). she left behind tens of thousands of handwritten notebook pages relating to her mediumship and the paintings as tools of spiritual instruction, but no personal papers or journals. voss's accomplishment in publishing this book is huge. she uses any tool she can access to piece together af klint's life, from explanations of the state of unmarried women's lives in sweden at the turn of the 20th century, to newspaper archives, to the correspondence and papers of other people in af klint's environment--people she knew as well as people who simply lived when and where she did. no clue was too small to be considered. she's careful to ensure that the reader understands when she is directly pulling from af klint or drawing likely conclusions based on other sources, which i appreciated.
importantly for af klint specifically, this is an extremely sympathetic biography. it would be easy to view af klint's beliefs cynically, to fall back on the popular explanation of the spiritualism in the late 19th century as a way for women to borrow authority which wasn't accessible to them from dead men, but voss never does. she offers no personal explanation for what af klint believed--it's enough that she believed it. she treats her queerness in a similar fashion, referring to the various women in her life as "friends," as af klint did. only at the very end does voss refer to thomasine anderson, the woman with whom af klint spent the last decades of her life, and beside whom she requested that she be buried, as a partner.
there were a few exciting revelations for me in this book. the first was how af klint viewed gender. she subscribed to the view that all humans are a combination of the masculine and feminine, and she herself seemed to tend more toward the masculine. she had a few alter egos which she referred to in her paintings and notebooks, all of them male. it struck me a bit like trans and non-binary people who play dnd and repeatedly create characters which are a different gender from them. she executed at least one work which shows a naked man and a woman, the woman seating on the man's lap, and which she described as herself as the man and her companion at the time as the woman. it's difficult to tell from this point in history, especially lacking as we do any personal writing, but her tone about gender was cheerfully matter-of-fact, delightful in any person but especially one born in 1862.
another revelation was the ideological connection between af klint and the solomon r. guggenheim museum, which would eventually put on the blockbuster exhibition that rocketed her into public consciousness. the guggenheim's original name was the museum of non-objective art and its first director was hilla von rebay, who had encouraged guggenheim first to collect non-objective art, and eventually to establish the museum. maybe everyone else knows all of this--it's all on the wiki--but it was brand new to me, as was the ideological dissonance between those like rebay who focused on the spiritual aspect of non-objective art and alfred barr, jr., the founding director of the moma, who viewed abstract art as the inevitable endpoint of the formalist progression of art (seen below, on the cover of a 1936 exhibition at the moma). this became the prevailing theory of abstract art.

hilma af klint only saw her abstract paintings exhibited once in her lifetime, but she designed a home for them. it would be a temple, a curving ziggurat topped with a lighthouse. she cannot claim to have foreseen frank lloyd wright's plan for the guggenheim, but it's worth noting that hilla von rebay explicitly intended for the museum to be a temple to non-objective art. af klint and rebay would have agreed on the purpose of and reason for exhibiting af klint's works, a meeting of mind's af klint rarely experienced. the similarities of temple design are a delightful coincidence.


i really appreciated both the author and translator's notes at the beginning of the book, because they highlighted 1) what a monumental undertaking this book was, and 2) how scholarship about af klint is still very much a developing field. voss went into the project with assumptions based on how years of historians had interpreted af klint's life: as very isolated, her work primarily inspired by this one esotericist. after accessing af klint's archive, voss quickly realized that wasn't the case at all and started over from zero. "I learned Swedish and made this biography my primary occupation," she says laconically. posten notes that in the time between the biography being released in german and the publishing of the english translation, new information has emerged, which she and voss collaborated on incorporating into the book. if you're the sort of person who finds research exciting, all of this will be very thrilling for you.
hilma af klint left behind a copious archive, which you would think would be a researcher's dream. but her aim was not to provide illuminating information about her life--it was to give as much context as possible to her paintings, and the forces which inspired them (she also suspected that it would take the world some time to catch up with her--she marked most of the archive with "+X" indicating they should only be looked at 20 years after her death). she left behind tens of thousands of handwritten notebook pages relating to her mediumship and the paintings as tools of spiritual instruction, but no personal papers or journals. voss's accomplishment in publishing this book is huge. she uses any tool she can access to piece together af klint's life, from explanations of the state of unmarried women's lives in sweden at the turn of the 20th century, to newspaper archives, to the correspondence and papers of other people in af klint's environment--people she knew as well as people who simply lived when and where she did. no clue was too small to be considered. she's careful to ensure that the reader understands when she is directly pulling from af klint or drawing likely conclusions based on other sources, which i appreciated.
importantly for af klint specifically, this is an extremely sympathetic biography. it would be easy to view af klint's beliefs cynically, to fall back on the popular explanation of the spiritualism in the late 19th century as a way for women to borrow authority which wasn't accessible to them from dead men, but voss never does. she offers no personal explanation for what af klint believed--it's enough that she believed it. she treats her queerness in a similar fashion, referring to the various women in her life as "friends," as af klint did. only at the very end does voss refer to thomasine anderson, the woman with whom af klint spent the last decades of her life, and beside whom she requested that she be buried, as a partner.
there were a few exciting revelations for me in this book. the first was how af klint viewed gender. she subscribed to the view that all humans are a combination of the masculine and feminine, and she herself seemed to tend more toward the masculine. she had a few alter egos which she referred to in her paintings and notebooks, all of them male. it struck me a bit like trans and non-binary people who play dnd and repeatedly create characters which are a different gender from them. she executed at least one work which shows a naked man and a woman, the woman seating on the man's lap, and which she described as herself as the man and her companion at the time as the woman. it's difficult to tell from this point in history, especially lacking as we do any personal writing, but her tone about gender was cheerfully matter-of-fact, delightful in any person but especially one born in 1862.
another revelation was the ideological connection between af klint and the solomon r. guggenheim museum, which would eventually put on the blockbuster exhibition that rocketed her into public consciousness. the guggenheim's original name was the museum of non-objective art and its first director was hilla von rebay, who had encouraged guggenheim first to collect non-objective art, and eventually to establish the museum. maybe everyone else knows all of this--it's all on the wiki--but it was brand new to me, as was the ideological dissonance between those like rebay who focused on the spiritual aspect of non-objective art and alfred barr, jr., the founding director of the moma, who viewed abstract art as the inevitable endpoint of the formalist progression of art (seen below, on the cover of a 1936 exhibition at the moma). this became the prevailing theory of abstract art.
hilma af klint only saw her abstract paintings exhibited once in her lifetime, but she designed a home for them. it would be a temple, a curving ziggurat topped with a lighthouse. she cannot claim to have foreseen frank lloyd wright's plan for the guggenheim, but it's worth noting that hilla von rebay explicitly intended for the museum to be a temple to non-objective art. af klint and rebay would have agreed on the purpose of and reason for exhibiting af klint's works, a meeting of mind's af klint rarely experienced. the similarities of temple design are a delightful coincidence.

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