Brain Food #374
Correcting art history
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Thoughts of the day
A dear reader not-so-recently introduced me to the work of Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint. If you have never heard of her, you are not alone.
Klint started making abstract paintings in 1906, in a radical departure from realism. Her work was misunderstood, overlooked. Her first major solo US exhibition only took place less than two years ago.
She was the outsider of the art world, painting not what people could see, but what they dared to imagine.
In fact, her first series of paintings, called The Paintings for the Temple, were made to be fit inside a spiral temple. This never happened, potentially because the temple did not exist.
Little remains of what she said, but this statement about her art:
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, 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 brush stroke.”
It takes courage to be yourself, and it takes courage to do something that is not immediately relevant, that does not receive the reassurance of extrinsic recognition. Did she see the future? Probably not. But she found a new way to understand the present.
And her belated recognition sends this hopeful message about history: though it cannot be rewritten, it can certainly be corrected.
One of her cryptic, mystic works: Group IX/UW, No. 25, The Dove, No. 1.
