Beyond the Vis­i­ble: Hilma af Klint

When I first saw the title for Hali­na Dyrschka’s superb art­world doc­u­men­tary Beyond the Vis­i­ble: Hilma af Klint, I thought that ​“Hilma af Klint” was a Scan­di­na­vian trans­la­tion of the title’s Eng­lish-lan­guage ver­sion. That mis­take is the rea­son why this film has been made, because Hilma af Klint was, in fact, one of the key pro­po­nents of abstract art in the West and may have been one of the first work­ing abstract artists, beat­ing cur­rent belt-hold­er Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky to the punch by some two decades.

An aver­sion to self pro­mo­tion, plus a ded­i­ca­tion to the monas­tic, fru­gal, intent­ly-focused life of a career painter in the Swedish island vil­lage of Mun­sö, meant that the act of exclud­ing af Klint from the canon of mod­ern art was a fair­ly easy one, even though the bread­crumb trail of her exis­tence remained clear to any­one want­i­ng to fol­low it.

The film’s var­i­ous talk­ing heads – his­to­ri­ans, gal­lerists, nov­el­ists, jour­nal­ists – con­vinc­ing­ly frame af Klint as the vic­tim of an avari­cious cre­ative domain that has been choked with male tal­ent at the expense of women break­ing through to star­dom. And it’s an issue that still exists today. One thing that is notable about this con­ven­tion­al­ly-con­struct­ed doc­u­men­tary is that many of those offer­ing their two cents seem vis­i­bly angered about af Klint’s erasure.

And yet Dyrschka’s film is no sim­ple cor­rec­tive, opt­ing instead for a cel­e­bra­tion of the work on its own terms and a telling af Klint’s sto­ry out­side of the deaf­en­ing echo cham­ber of offi­cial his­to­ry. Her work often com­bined sim­ple shapes and bold colour schemes, but always seemed to retain a cer­tain earth­i­ness and con­nec­tion to the nat­ur­al world, whether that’s through the use of spi­ral shell pat­terns, or plant-like ten­drils, or often flower petal formations.

Along­side the images, the film takes great pains to try to under­stand and respect her per­son­al phi­los­o­phy. The term ​“respect” is key because she was a spir­i­tu­al­ist and theosophist and it’s thought that her adher­ence to these modes of think­ing may have been one of the rea­sons she was not tak­en seri­ous­ly (despite the fact that many male con­tem­po­raries believed in things that were just as way­ward). When she sought guid­ance and encour­age­ment from one of Europe’s most promi­nent spir­i­tu­al­ists, Rudolph Stein­er, he dis­missed her abstract work entire­ly, caus­ing her to go on enforced hiatus.

It goes with­out say­ing that, know­ing an artist’s inten­tions behind a work, or per­haps being made aware of the head­space they were in while cre­at­ing it, helps to unlock, or at least clar­i­fy its mean­ing. Yet with af Klint, her paint­ings, por­traits and sketch­es were all illus­tra­tions of her thoughts, feel­ings and the­o­ries about the world, about physics, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a place beyond exis­tence. It’s not that her life lacked dra­ma, it’s more that she appeared to reject it in the search of more ful­fill­ing intel­lec­tu­al pursuits.

The film sells her as a lost mas­ter, but still no one is buy­ing, as that would involve the hal­lowed insti­tu­tions of the art­world hav­ing to admit they were wrong, and that major ret­ro­spec­tive exhi­bi­tions from the past were pre­sent­ing a pur­pose­ful­ly maligned ver­sion of his­to­ry. Hope­ful­ly this film helps to cement af Klint’s rep­u­ta­tion as a lynch­pin of the expres­sion­ist art movement.