Beyond the visible: Hilma af Klint Review: What did she see and when?

The entire career exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s work which toured the world a few years ago, including a stay at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, has overturned the conventional narrative of the history of modern Art. It is hardly an academic question. As Roberta Smith wrote in her review of the Guggenheim show, the Af Klints paintings definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project, a revolution that would have started with Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in the years before the First War world and carried to the heroic fruit by tastes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock after the Second World War.

But af Klint, as Smith said, arrived first. Born in 1862 into a Swedish aristocratic family and raised in part on the grounds of the military academy where her father was an instructor, she trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, mastering the traditional genres of portraiture, still life and landscape. In the late 1880s, his notebooks and paintings began to incorporate forms that, while sometimes evoking natural phenomena (such as snail shells, flower petals and insect wings), did not looked like nothing in the visible world. His work, which continued to evolve until his death in 1944, uses geometric patterns and curved lines and gestures to suggest esoteric meanings. Sometimes the images look like maps of a world that exists right after the horizon of rational consciousness.

Beyond the visible: Hilma af Klint, a documentary by Halina Dyrschka, provides a thoughtful overview of her subject. Its enriched by the dazzling charisma of its art and limited by the scarcity of biographical material. The chronology of her life is presented, and her voice is evoked by passages from her voluminous notebooks, but the fact that she lived and worked so far from the centers of the art world means that some of the usual supports in a film as it is lacking. No one who remembers her well is still there. There are a handful of photographs of af Klint at different stages of his life, but no moving images, an absence that Dyrschka addresses with discreet reconstructions that show af Klint in his studio.

The thin background information is the result of the negligence of this prolific and inventive artist for over a century. Beyond the Visible is a chapter in the comprehensive review of the critical and historical record that only started recently, and it uses a passionate and knowledgeable cadre of curators, academics, scientists and artists to promote the argument of the importance of Klints. The paintings themselves are the best proof even through the mediation of a welcome screen, their dynamism, their spirit and their formal order are fascinating but the intellectual and cultural context is also fascinating.

Experts link Klints’ explorations to contemporary scientific discoveries, such as radio waves and X-rays, which pointed to the invisible dimensions of reality, but also to the mystical movements of his time. She was drawn to the Theosophy of Hélène Blavatsky and the teachings of the Austrian spiritualist Rudolf Steiner, with whom she corresponded. His visionary interests, far from suggesting eccentricity, place it squarely in the mainstream of modernism, which many exhibitors in various arts (including Kandinsky) found inspiration in esotericism.

Beyond the visible inherits the excitement of discovery and also the impatience that recognition has taken so long. It refreshes the eyes and the mind.

Beyond the visible: Hilma af Klint

Unclassified. In Swedish, English and German, with subtitles. Duration: 1 hour 34 minutes. Monitor Kino Marquee.