#Hilma af Klint - Svanen (1914)

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Hilma af Klint - Svanen (1914)

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‘Svanen’ by Hilma af Klint, c. 1914.

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Descubriendo el místico arte de Hilma af Klint

Group IX/SUV, The Swan, 1915

Esta artista es parte de la larga lista de creadores de los que me he enamorado durante el último año por el hecho de que su obra toca una parte de mí que siempre he tenido el interés de empezar a explorar.

Muchísimos nombres han brillado durante los últimos siglos, artistas cuyas historias son tan misteriosas como sus obras. Uno de estos nombres es el de Hilma af Klint, una artista sueca nacida en 1862, cuyas obras cargadas de misticismo se consideran las primeras obras del movimiento abstracto en la historia del arte.

Una buena cantidad de sus trabajos existe incluso antes de las composiciones de Kandinsky, Malevich y Mondrian.

También perteneció a un grupo llamado Las Cinco, un círculo de mujeres inspiradas en la teosofía, que compartían la creencia de la importancia de intentar contectar con los llamados "Altos Maestros", generalmente a través de sesiones de espiritismo. Sus pinturas, que a veces parecen diagramas, eran una representación visual de complejas ideas espirituales.

Las pinturas convencionales de la artista se convirtieron en su fuente de ingresos económicos, pero lo que para ella era el "Gran Trabajo", realizado durante su vida, siguió siendo una actividad separada. Sólo las audiencias espiritualmente interesadas tenían algún conocimiento de este conjunto de obras y no fueron exhibidas al público hasta muchos años después de su muerte. Los comentarios en sus cuadernos indican que sentía que el mundo no estaba del todo preparado para el mensaje que pretendían comunicar.

En el año 1880, murió su hermana menor Hermina y fue en ese momento cuando empezó a desarrollarse su conexión con lo esprititual.

Para el año 1887, se graduó con honores de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Estocolmo y se estableció allí como una artista respetada, expuso pinturas figurativas y se desempeñó brevemente como secretaria de la Asociación de Mujeres Artistas Suecas.

Su interés por la abstracción y el simbolismo surgió de la implicación de Hilma af Klint en el espiritismo, muy en boga a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX. Sus experimentos en investigación espiritual comenzaron en 1879. Ya desde muy joven se involucró en el espiritismo. Posteriormente le siguió un gran interés por las ideas del rosacrucismo, la teosofía y la antroposofía.

Svanen (El cisne), 1914-1915

Algo muy interesante de su trabajo con el grupo "las Cinco", fue que ella experimentaba mucho con una técnica llamada dibujo automático, lo que la llevó a crear un lenguaje geométrico capaz de conceptualziar fuerzas invisibles.

Mediante este trabajo exploró las religiones del mundo, átomos y el mundo vegetal.

Del contacto con los Grandes Maestros surge una serie de obras llamadas "Pinturas para el templo" (algunas presentes en este post); sin embargo, ella nunca entendió a qué se refería este "Templo". Estas obras fueron realizadas entre 1906 y 1915, llevadas a cabo en dos fases con una interrupción entre 1908 y 1912. Cuando Af Klint descubrió su nueva forma de expresión visual, desarrolló un nuevo lenguaje artístico. Su pintura se volvió más autónoma y más intencional. Lo espiritual seguiría siendo la principal fuente de creatividad durante el resto de su vida.

Luego de finalizar las obras del templo, terminó la guía espiritual pero siguió su trabajo como pintora abstracta, independiente de influencias externas.

A lo largo de su vida, Hilma af Klint buscaría comprender los misterios con los que había entrado en contacto a través de su trabajo. Produjo más de 150 cuadernos con sus pensamientos y estudios.

Aquí otra serie de obras de la artista:

Grupo IX/SUW, El cisne, n.º 7 , 1915

The Swan, No. 18, Group IX/SUW, 1914-1915

Lo que un ser humano es, 1915

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‘Svanen’ by Hilma af Klint, c. 1914

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Hilma af Klint. "Svanen," 1914

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Hilma af Klint - Svanen (1914)

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Svanen, 1914, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944).

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Svanen (The Swan) No. 17, Group IX, Series SUW,1914-1915by Hilma Af Klint

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Episode 40: Hilma AF Klint

1. Hilma af Klint at the Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm, 1885.

2. Hilma af Klint, The Swan No. 1, 1915.

3. Hilma af Klint, Parsifal Series No. 1, 1916. 

4. Hilma af Klint, Altarpiece, No. 1, Group X, 1907.

5. Hilma af Klint, Svanen (The Swan) No. 17, Group IX:SUW, The SUW:UW Series, 1914-1915.

6. Hilma af Klint, Group IV, No. 3. The Ten Largest, Youth, 1907.

Listen to Full Episode Here

Subscribe on iTunes

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Hilma af Klint, Svanen (The Swan) No. 17, Group IX/SUW, The SUW/UW Series, 1914-1915. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

  https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-first-abstract-artwork

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Svanen (The Swan) Hilma af Klint 1914/15

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Hilma af Klint (1862-1944, Stockholm)

Svanen (The Swan) No. 17, Group IX/SUW, The SUW/UW Series, 1914-1915.

via: Artsy

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Svanen

Hilma af Klint

1914

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Svanen (The Swan) No. 17, Group IX/SUW - Hilma af Klint

 1914-1915

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What Was the First Abstract Artwork?

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Who made the first Western abstract painting? That was the question that Wassily Kandinsky’s widow, accompanied by a team of researchers, set out to answer in 1946. Her late husband, a Russian painter who was among the pioneers of abstraction in the early 1910s, had himself been personally invested in the answer.

In 1935, Kandinsky had penned a letter to his gallerist in New York to insist on his preeminence. “Indeed,” he wrote of a 1911 work, “it’s the world’s first ever abstract picture, because back then not one single painter was painting in an abstract style. A ‘historic painting’, in other words.”

Kandinsky wasn’t the only artist interested in preserving his legacy. He and several early abstract painters—including Robert Delaunay, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich—backdated their works, in some cases several years before they were actually completed.

This artistic jostling reflects a focus on invention as an individual act, notes curator Leah Dickerman in an essay for MoMA’s 2012 show “Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1025: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art.” But, as she goes on to say, that approach is in some ways misguided. Rather than the work of a solitary genius, abstraction “was an invention with multiple first steps, multiple creators, multiple heralds, and multiple rationales.”

At the turn of the 20th century, the world was becoming increasingly connected. Steamships, cars, and trains facilitated international travel, while telephones, telegraphs, and radios allowed for conversations between people on opposite ends of the globe.

Within the art world specifically, journals sprang up in droves; in Paris alone, some 200 reviews of art and culture appeared in the decade leading up to World War I. Subscribers were scattered across Europe and America, allowing a wide swath of creatives to stay abreast of the latest developments in art. And this period also saw the beginning of a traveling exhibition culture, led by the Italian Futurists.

“Historians talk about ‘conditions of possibility,’” Masha Chlenova, a curator who worked with Dickerman on “Inventing Abstraction,” told Artsy. “For example, photography was also invented by three people at the same time. Daguerre just happened to be the best at marketing and patenting.”

Similarly, while Kandinsky is today hailed as the father of abstract painting, he was by no means the only player in the development of non-representational painting. His work Komposition V did, admittedly, jumpstart public interest in abstract painting. Exhibited in Munich in December 1911, this monumental work was just barely representational.

It was the first such work to be put on display, and “for some artists and intellectuals, abstraction not only began to seem plausible, but also took on the character of an imperative,” Dickerman writes.

Kandinsky had been thinking about abstract art for years beforehand. His manifesto On the Spiritual in Art, which appeared as a draft in 1909 and was published the same month as Komposition V went on display, laid out the tenets of abstraction. But it would still be several years before Kandinsky would finally break free from recognizable forms in his art. As Chlenova put it, “he theorized abstraction before he made painting.”

František Kupka, Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors, 1912. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, NY. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

František Kupka Study for Amorpha, Warm Chromatic and for Fugue in two colors; Study for The Fugue, 1910–11. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Dickerman references Czech-born artist František Kupka as the first to display works that were a complete break from representational painting. His compositions Amorpha, Chromatique chaude and Amorpha, Fugue à deux couleurs were shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in October 1912, filmed for the newsreels, and then broadcast across Europe and America.

Dickerman believes that Kupka’s willingness to publicly defy convention was related to his personal history. Although he grew up in Prague and Vienna and started out as a Symbolist, he later moved to Paris and developed close ties with the city’s avant-garde—which, as Dickerman notes, granted “him an insider/outsider status that seems particularly fertile for paradigm-shifting thought.”

But further complicating the question of “first” is that it can be difficult to determine the threshold of abstraction. When, precisely, does a work go from “abstracted” to “abstraction”?

French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia, for example, is sometimes credited with the first abstract painting. His watercolor Caoutchouc (Rubber) was completed in 1909, which would predate even Kandinsky’s theories on abstraction. But other academics have pushed back, noting that the work still retains some semblance of form, reminiscent of a bouquet of flowers.

For “Inventing Abstraction,” Chlenova said she and Dickerman began by establishing clear criteria for what they considered abstract work. “Our main criterion was the artist’s own position and their statements that they’re doing something abstract,” she said. “The terminology is a slightly different question because the word ‘abstract’ would not necessarily be used. But there was a very clear awareness from the artists that were sensitive to what was happening.”

Hilma af Klint, The Large Figure Paintings, No. 5, Group III, 1907. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Hilma af Klint, Svanen (The Swan) No. 17, Group IX/SUW, The SUW/UW Series, 1914-1915. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

This is why, she explained, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was not represented in the MoMA exhibition. Since 2013, when Moderna Museet held the first-ever retrospective of her work, af Klint’s oeuvre has received renewed attention from the public. Known in her lifetime as a landscape painter and portraitist, it was revealed decades after her death that she had also been experimenting with abstraction. As early as 1906, af Klint had been painting colorful works full of organic shapes, spirals, and curlicues.

This date places her several years before Kandinsky even theorized abstraction, let alone acted on his ideas. But af Klint’s works sprang from her interest in the occult—during the 1890s, she started organizing seances with four artist friends where they practiced automatic drawing and writing.

Later, when she began her largest body of non-representational paintings, she claimed that spiritual forces were directing her hand. And for an artist to be included in “Inventing Abstraction,” Chlenova explained, they had to “formulate their practice as a conscious rejection of any reference to the outside world.”

Others disagreed with this reading, arguing that a mystical approach should not negate her contribution to developing abstraction. “‘Spiritual’ is still a very dirty word in the art world,” curator Maurice Tuchman told the New York Times in 2013. “When the prejudice against the idea of the spiritual life in af Klint’s work is overcome, which will require scholarship, then perhaps she will really take hold in the broader conversation.”

But there’s no disagreement that the invention of abstraction revolutionized art production in the 20th century. “One can treat abstraction a little bit more abstractly, if you will,” Chlenova laughed, “without ultimately being too concerned about who was first.”

—Abigail Cain

from Artsy News