Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian

Forms of Life

I’d never heard of the artist Hilma af Klint until I listened to the Great Women Artists podcast in which Katy Hessel interviews Tracey Bashkoff about her life and work.

Born in Sweden in 1862, she was a talented artist who was gifted enough to pursue it as a career. She made her living painting traditional landscapes and creating botanical drawings. More interestingly, she had another, secret life where she took her theosophist faith and her own communications with spirit, and alongside four other women, created a new language of spirit through her art. She believed that what she was painting was so far in advance of what humanity could understand that she hid these paintings away and asked that they not be shown until twenty years after her death.

What I heard was so intriguing that I knew I had to try and see some of her work in real life, so when Tate Modern announced they were putting on an exhibition of Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian I bagged tickets.

I can’t say I was thrilled by the inclusion of Mondrian, but beggars can’t be choosers.

As it turned out, I was surprised by my reaction to the exhibition. You never can tell what an artwork will say to you until you meet it in real life. So many factors come into play with regard to how you feel about it; your mood, your age, the length of time you get to look at it, how it’s hung, where it’s hung, who else is there, the size of it and the actual colour as opposed to how it is reproduced in a book.

The curators chose Mondrian to pair with af Klint because despite approaching the subject in different ways, they were both hugely influenced by spiritualism and symbolism and they both started life painting the natural world in a traditional way before moving on to far more esoteric works.

Given the huge body of work af Klint left behind, you also wonder whether curators were unsure as to whether a solo show would be as much as a draw and stuck her with someone instantly recognisable as an insurance policy. If so, that’s a real shame because I left feeling that the exhibition did af Klint dirty, although with a renewed respect for Mondrian.

I’d never warmed to Mondrian. It’s clear that his work is important in terms of art history, abstraction etc. His late paintings were so influential they were copied onto Yves Saint Laurent’s Sixties shift dresses as Laurent started to steal from high art and marry it to high fashion. His work has become iconic. I appreciate it historically and technically but not only does it leave me cold, it bores the tits off me.

What I did love though, were his early paintings, which I had never seen before. The landscapes are vibrant and exciting. They’re loose where the later paintings are tight, bold where the later paintings are more muted. The colours are intense and gorgeous.

I like to think that David Hockney looked at these paintings before he started his paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds. I can see similarities in colour and composition that made me very happy. At times I could also see similarities to the more formidable landscapes of Paul Nash. These are paintings I will gladly return to.

There was a fascinating section where the curators showed how Mondrian went from making more naturalistic paintings to thinning them down to their abstract essence. I enjoyed seeing how he did it. I didn’t much enjoy looking at anything after he sucked all the life out. He would argue that it was the life he left in. He thought that his late, line paintings were a complete embodiment of the purity of the human spirit. He said:

“Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man."

It might have value for man but it didn’t have a lot of value for this woman.

The more abstract the painting, the more sacred it became for Mondrian. Certainly we can see that in af Klint’s work too, although it feels very different. Af Klint’s abstraction retains some of the organic feeling that Mondrian dispenses with completely. Hers is a more intuitive abstraction, one she believed was channelled through her by spirit.

There is some evidence that she did attempt to show her esoteric works during her lifetime, but the majority of them were made in private and hidden away. At times, walking through some of her rooms feels like an intrusion into a private world. I found myself feeling deeply uncomfortable in places and didn’t really want to linger.

Unlike with the late Mondrian’s, with the af Klint paintings I could feel the energy emanating from them (those of you from a ‘non-woo’ background look away now). I would really liked to have read one like a Tarot card. I think it might turn my hair white.

On reflection, what bothered me most about this exhibition was that the af Klint works were cherry picked to suit the narrative of the exhibition (of course) and to give viewers a whistle stop tour of what was actually a huge body of work. It did feel rushed and incomplete, which was a shame. Obviously, it would be virtually impossible to show all her work together, but I would love to see her work in a solo exhibition with more space to show the paintings in the groups she planned.

Af Klint took her work very seriously. She filled over a hundred notebooks with diagrams, drawings and notes about the work she was making. She created an entire belief system, including plans for a temple in which her works would be hung. She was precise and thoughtful. All her private works had meaning. They were painted in groups to be hung together and taking one or two from a group isn’t going to give you the experience or the knowledge that af Klint hoped we as a society might be ready to accept by now.

It seems not.

The show is on at Tate Modern until 3rd of September.