Hilma af Klint by Julia Voss

Author:Julia Voss [Voss, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General, BIO001000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers, ART015100 ART / History / Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), ART015030 ART / European
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

36. No. 1, Group I, The Parsifal Series, 1916, watercolor and pencil on paper, 24.8 cm x 26.1 cm, Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk, HaK 202.

Was Hilma aware of the recent fuss that had been made over Kandinsky? Had she seen the catalogue from Gummeson’s? The simple answer is we don’t know, but she may well have been too busy to pay close attention. She was painting so much that she was running out of space, both in the studio and in her apartment, even when she rolled the paintings, stacked them, leaned them against the walls, and shoved them under the bed. Paintings seemed to be everywhere, getting in the way of new pieces that were in progress. At the same time, in the past she had taken pains to seek out kindred spirits—for example in the Women’s Association or when she exhibited with the Theosophical Society in 1913—suggesting that she might have pricked up her ears when an artist who shared her interests in a “spiritual art” exhibited in Stockholm. Plus, the Gummeson Gallery was centrally located on the harbor promenade. The artist and her friends would have had to cover their eyes to miss the arrival of the newest avant-gardes from Berlin and Munich.

She would have agreed with much that Kandinsky had to say about art. “According to us,” he wrote, “only those artists who have within themselves the calling to create new spiritual values are necessary for art.” Such works “have no practical use and are therefore of no material value.”9 But viewers could travel through them to a “world previously unknown,” to “the land of new spirit.”10 Hilma held the same opinion.

And then? Would she have wished for her own exhibition at Gummeson’s? The similarities between her work and Kandinsky’s did not alter the fact that the gallery wasn’t an option for her—for several reasons. For one, only a fraction of her paintings would have fit in the cramped storefront. The Ten Largest would immediately have been excluded because of the low ceilings.11 For another, she had no interest in selling the works she produced. It would have been paradoxical to create paintings for a temple, including the recent altarpieces, and at the same time hope they would hang in a living room above a collector’s sofa.

Kandinsky would have understood. Working in exile, he felt the show at Gummeson’s did not contribute to his long-term goals: he wanted more than to sell paintings. Like Hilma, he dreamed of a permanent home for his work so that it could remain together and be shown together, in a space of his own design. This was “my old dream,” Kandinsky wrote sorrowfully in a later letter from Weimar, when once again he had failed to realize his dream at the Bauhaus. Kandinsky expected “of every art a further, more powerful, not yet present inner development, a deepening of the human spirit—which is only beginning to approach the world spirit—completely and utterly freed from external purpose.”12 But when he exhibited at Gummeson’s in Stockholm, such absolutist goals were distant.

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