Daniel Birnbaum. The Work of Hilma af Klint. 2016

her name is Hilma of Clint and she was a Swedish painter but she was also what one I think would refer to as a mystic and she belonged to esoteric circles but she was also the professional artist quite successful I mean one would even say if you translate today's world back into 1910 the kind of career artists she got stipends she had a studio in the middle of the capital of Sweden in the middle of Scone in a building where downstairs there was a gallery showing at batmunk and so she's not a kind of outsider person sometimes she's been involved in in in context where maybe you know wanted to show her work because it's fascinating but it can also be a little bit complex to show someone as if it would have been compatible or comparable to basically Clinic clinically ill people or something like that she had nothing to do with that she was a well-read member of Swedish nobility not wealthy her parents were high ranking C officers but had no money but the King gave the father the the title of which is like fun so she the families of Clint and she belonged to the first generation of women who were allowed to study art in Europe the first nation I believe was England the most progressive where I think already in 1860 women were allowed to study at the other art academies and Scandinavia was pretty quick and in 1866 at six I think women were allowed to study first in a separate kind of class for women but then it became normal that also women were allowed to study by the way Germany very late I think it was nineteen fifteen or twenty or something rather rather interesting to think about because this perspective of course is very you know key to trying to understand what was hill mob Clint and why was she not visible or why did she not to want to be visible she did study classical painting naturalistic the naturalistic paradigm that was taught all over Europe and she was skilled enough to as I said be invited to exhibitions get a bit of support and she made relatively conventional landscape paintings and portraits of important men in society they are not interesting they have been visible but they are there in it shows that she was a pretty normal artist also secretly she was doing other work and that work didn't become visible until the mid 1980s or rather 1986 not in Scandinavia no one knew about it only certain members of the anthroposophical society were interested in that and it had been shown maybe in schools and a little bit in you know without an audience basically the first outing the first moment it met a big audience was very confusing to many people some people dismiss this it's just strange in other people almost thought it was a kind of joke or some sort of you know something that someone had constructed to confuse everyone a painter who did non representational maybe one should say abstract we will come back to that concept in a few years before the people who are supposedly the fathers of abstractions such as Kandinsky Mondrian coca and others and so in 86 the work was shown for the first time hill mob Clint died in 1944 already and in her Testament she stated that her work should not be shown until 20 years after her death but of course in the 1960s no one knew about the work so it took much much longer it took until this exhibition at LACMA called the spiritual in art and and there it was shown together with the best known people that I just mentioned such as Mondrian and Malia which of course there's a Russian pioneer and the critical assessment of him of Clint has just begun Assessor influence on other artists this belated reception is an anomaly that creates complications for anyone trying to theorize her work in the art historical terms formulated in the 20th century on the one hand her break with the naturalistic paradigm of painting that was taught that art academies across Europe is in many ways parable to that made by the artists traditionally seen as the pioneers of abstraction such as as I mentioned Kandinsky and Mondrian on the other hand while her male contemporaries exhibited widely published manifestos crafted educational programs and combined combined their interest in the metaphysical with radical politics and the founding of institutions such as the Bauhaus and other such places of klint worked in near isolation saved for her exchange with a group of women who gathered in a northern Stockholm studio to commune with spirits she only had women friends it seems and they had a group called the femme meaning in Swedish the five the fan as a abbreviation often make think people think that it has something to with FEM as an in chemin ISM which is a kind of interesting misunderstanding and you know I'm sure there could be t-shirts with the femme because it's like I could tell very cool feminist group but it actually was a spiritual little group of women more interested in in theosophy and such things in other words her version of the non-figurative had no public dialogue so do the concepts with which we describe the innovations of the early avant-garde applied to an artist whose work seems to have invented its own language and belated reception well hardly and yet of Clint was working within the same social context she was not somewhere out in the forest or something she was in the middle of a European capital so the same social context and background as her well-known contemporaries and formulated an abstract language just as sex as unexpected and unprecedented as any artistic achievements created during this historical moment of progressive experimentation she was also as I said well a well-read person who was very interested in in scientific thought and in contemporary the Natural Sciences and she also wrote a lot there are actually thousands of pages and I didn't say that her over is enormous it's not like a few small painting somewhere you know in a secret archive it's over a thousand painting some of them are also mysteriously large you know the average painting by mantra and Kandinsky we all know they're kind of domestic she painted some you know two three four demented meter high paintings and one wanders a little bit if they were maybe seen almost like a some sort of architecture if they she was planning some sort of institutional context in which they should be shown I'll come back to that and she also left an enormous amount of of manuscripts some of which are actually oh there's me but the woman in the middle is Erie's miller Westerman who was the curator of a very large show that we did in Stockholm and that went then traveled to in many places all the nordic capitals actually but also to berlin to the hamburger bun off and to the Picasso Museum in in Spain and it's actually one of the most or probably the most attended exhibition that our institution has ever produced because it was attended by more than a million people and that we did a small version for London in a smaller condensed version for the serpentine and so here we are looking at all of these things I have should also say that hill mob Clint was not totally unknown I mean someone who has been working with art writing about art like many colleagues of mine and including myself we wrote things about this already in their early 90s but it's not until now that it's reached a kind of new level of awareness and we have reached a very large audience of course it was also in Massimiliano Jonas 19 2003 13 then is be another a series of Clint paintings and right now Massimiliano has curated a show which is at the new museum where he is the co-director where he also included he'll mouth clean so it's become a little bit more normal to show it it's it was more of a kind of marginal thing that people would know of and it was including inside included in some shows of course but maybe not that the big museums are not seen as something that one could talk about seriously next to someone like Kandinsky these are the well this is a notebook and the notebooks are very beautiful some of them include tiny versions of her paintings and and they are esoteric philosophical books often including very meticulous studies of nature but in nature there seems to be some sort of Aristotelian or other kind of the force you know it's it's it's often there's there's there all these sketches where one feels that you know the the naturalistic depiction of something is transformed into something more and more abstract and it's not like a totally different realm it's like as if these abstract forces were inside nature and that she was which it would distill them or something early on with this group the five she presented rather mysterious works that are often collectively signed or not signed at all and that can look like this this is hill mob cleaned herself this is the first series at first picture in a series called primordial chaos of Clint worked in series while the works within a series are necessarily homogenous her series themselves are all bound together through the repeated forms fluid interchanging abstraction with figuration and continued imagining of unseen worlds there's a central part of her Abra which is what she referred to at the past the paintings of the temple and what she meant with the temple we don't really know it was it a temple in the sense of as you know some sort of spiritual entity or did she actually think of building some sort of you see him like it may be the wrong word maybe more like Temple Church like building we will see certain structures recurring she loves the spiral and her whole world is very kind of organic and I've often thought that the ideal place where it should be shown it's the Guggenheim in New York because you know that was also that the founding mission of the Guggenheim was to be a temple by the way a temple fort for a first for the first spiritual endeavors in art and you know that the Guggenheim has one of the leading collections of Kandinsky and lots of non representational early work this would add something that is has been less known but we will see it would be the ideal place the year when she passed away Frank Lloyd Wright was drawing the spiral so it kind of fits quite well but we'll see and so the painting for the template the paintings for the temple were created between 1906 and 1905 teen following a decade in which of Clint attended spiritual gatherings with a collective of female friends who as I said called themselves the five in trance-like states the group believed they would could communicate with mystic beings named the high masters transcribing their messages via automatic writing and drawing these techniques allowed of Clint to be to begin crafting a new visual language moving away from her formal training and rooted in the realistic description depiction of nature however while abandoning conventional convention the resulting paintings have somehow they seem to have arrived from from nowhere of Clint understood the forces that dictated and and were depicted in her paintings as present in everything that is alive form is never distinct from life in her art I'll come back to this that often I mean this is a cliche of course but when we think about early abstraction we often think about you know of geometric abstraction as if it would all be you know some sort of platonic realm of mathematical geometrical shapes hovering somewhere in a in a transcendent thought or in Quran in in his case it's more to do with the abstractions of the Biot Sciences to civil use a modern word you know one can almost feel that she's anticipating the DNA spiral and and and it's all alive somehow and of klint other took the paintings for the temple as a commission from the from one of the high masters the work it works share motives with the transcription of the five and of Clint understood them and to be messages painted through her but her use of color permutation of geometrical form symbolic ciphers an atomic to cosmic scale cast cast the groundbreaking and unique over as undefinable today as a century ago there wasn't much writing about hill mob claimed actually there were the occasion of the journalistic articles and and some reviews and written by many people who I know and review from the early 90s by myself and and then there was one academic book and a few rather esoteric pieces of writing that somehow came out of the anthroposophical world so they were not really you know they were knowledgeable but they were Insider reports so to say that by believers it's not until now and it has to do with our exhibition because there were lots of conferences in different parts of the world that some of the better-known art historians have tried to come to grips with Wilhelm of Clint there's a British great great art historian called Brian affair who is an expert in he ever has son Gabriella Roscoe and and many other great artists contemporary artist who has written now a few great things from him are Clint and she describes of Clint's work as a self-generating occult symbol system but one also derived from nature religion language and science in addition to the supernatural of Clint's many notebooks which expound and elaborate on the sometimes enigmatic symbol this symbology of her work offer codex to this system logarithmic spirals and tendrils represent evolution the letter U stands for the spiritual world opposing W for matter the ancient vesica pitches which is the intersection of two overlapping discs as one can often see in you know in in color theory and so on and signifies its traditional theme of unity creation in the inviolability of geometry the color yellow and roses stand for masculinity the color color blue and lilies denote femininity this may seem a little bit you know superficial and mechanical to kind of decipher everything she's done in those terms but she did seem to have a very rigorous dualistic system everything is dark or light it's a little bit male or female earth and and and and heaven and she has built this kind of strange linguistic world with which one can two things recur so it's it's it's it's a good start one cannot just look at them and enjoy them without trying to understand a little bit how the different series actually fit together the temple or the paintings for the temple it's a complicated nuanced and illusive body of work within its nineteen hundreds 193 paintings categorized into serious groups and subgroups a didactic reading of this cycle is not straightforward the whole sequence can be better understood as of Clint's pursuit of an original oneness a basic unity that she believed it existed at the world's creation of Clint felt this integrity had since been lost giving way to a world of polarities good and evil women and man matter and spirit make macrocosmic and microcosm she saw these dichotomies as having become the principle of all life the series within the paintings for the temple individually tried to reconcile these divisions each in their own scale esthetic and theme while simultaneously revealing her many influences from the time in which she painted started in starting in 1906 the 26 small canvases of the primordial chaos group pre introduces the origin of the world and the birth of this polarized state the predominant colors of these works yellow for masculine blue for feminine green the unity of the to resonate with Goethe's theory of color Goethe placed yellow next to the light and blue next the darkness seeing the colors as complimentary this is primordial chaos these are very small paintings and they are not impressive when it comes to scale or anything but some of them are unbelievably beautiful a painting like this small work on canvas of course ask first questions this is nineteen six or nineteen seven ninety six actually is this a piece of abstract art I mean what else can we call it of course one can also say it's diagrammatical or it depicts higher realms and it's not really abstract in the in in in in you know in a more formal istic sense on the other hand i think we can say that most of the contemporaries that we are used to discussing such as Kandinsky who wrote the book spiritual in the art they were also similarly interested in the same kind of doctrines and you know when we now talk about theosophy and anthroposophy madame blavatsky and rudolf steiner and such people it may sound very kind of eccentric and you know pretty flake in weird but it was also the most fashionable of things these were the you know these were the great gurus of their of their moment I mean had the Rudolf Steiner been alive today I'm sure Chris but I've invited him and so you know if we try to reduce her to simply being some sort of spiritual esoteric kind of weirdo and one can do that and it has been done definitely and one can try the same thing with Kandinsky and Mondrian Mondrian famously wrote a letter to Rudolf Steiner that was never who never replied he would have been rather envious of knowing that he loved client had Rudolf Steiner in her studio in Stockholm discussing certain things in in in the art the central pieces pieces are called the ten largest they chart the stages of a human of human growth from childhood to old age and the paintings diverse forms of floral imagery germ cells blossom seeds they morph between a microscopic in a macroscopic range a little bit reminiscent of Ernst Haeckel's art forms in nature we would come to Anne's tectal he is this biologist who kind of took a step into art who believed he was the first German Darwinist I think one could say he translated Arvin and he was saying you know introduced evolutionary theory in Germany but he was also someone who did an unbelievably beautiful imagery and and he became an artist of sort well we'll come back to that and what we have here all of this is part of the early series done in the first decade of the 20th century evolution some of the some of the images which I sometimes find a little bit too heavy and too symbolic you know had some sort of link almost - you know - Ruben steel what do you say on the wall and it become very ornamental and very kind of heavy evolution there we come to the ten lodges after completing the serious evolution in 1908 of Clint met her mentor Rudolf Steiner finally a theosophist and later founder of another esoteric spiritual movement anthroposophy Steiners faith in an emphasis on introspection perhaps influenced or cleaned away from her previous automatic techniques many of these early works she said were you know she was simply medium they were produced through her and and with the collective production that she did together with these women friends it's almost reminiscent of what the Surrealists were doing it's like automatic drawing and you know very kind of experimental and collective and Steiner was opposed to that you know he somehow confirmed that what you're doing is okay it looks a little bit like this out there no I don't know what he said but but you know he was not a friend of this kind of giving up your own intentionality just like let it flow through you he believed in conscious where do you know you you you you have to be responsible for what you do you cannot let others you cannot just let the energies flow through you and so probably that influenced influenced him Oakland in her subsequent series for the paintings of the temple of Clint incorporated the iconography of the enchanted philosophies the twenty-four works in the swarm will come to this here we have the ten largest this is these are the most impressive paintings they are enormous there they are I think 340 or 360 or something and there are ten of them all of this is the 10 largest here comes the swarm and it so it consists of 24 works so in a way you know a lecture like this would be very long because if I would show all the you know I only show examples from all the series but there's never one individual work hardly they're usually like ten or twenty or thirty pieces and it's like some sort of transformative grammar in built into every every work and so sometimes people were a little bit the critical or question they were question they are our exhibition because we wanted to show a little bit of everything and and the idea is maybe that this has a lot to do with taxonomy and biological patterns and that one has to show all of them however then we would have to do many different shows and so in this one she she would integrate the bird a key symbol anatomy into her antecedent dichotomies of light and dark male and female before the works became purely abstract and referential of Goethe's diagrammatic color wheel and research into optics known to and studied by Steiner so actually this is the the swarm which ends with the painting like this one there is and you know there are many versions of abstraction one can say that you know the Mondrian version came through a lot of knowledge of you know his neoplastic idea had to do with the developments in French and European continental art he was very aware of cubism and things like that there's the Russian version with Malevich that has its own esoteric horizons he's writing sometimes sounds like a little bit high daguerreian almost without the concept of horizon and being being you know very prescient we have that's my leverage we have Kandinsky who really you know wrote the manifesto all of this seeing abstraction as a kind of labor liberation from from the naturalistic paradigm where one can you know have for its own sake and literature for its own sake and of course painting pure painting that it's not depicting anything and hilm of Clint is of course very different than it's not a you know of any interest for anyone to kind of squeeze her into things we already know the question is more does it help us to understand that these that there were many versions of abstraction and this one the one that we just looked at these are just the last I mean this is where it begins and this is a short version and it ends there it's almost like it's the process of abstraction it's like the depth the whole series is about how you reduce and purify and in the end you have pure geometrical shapes so I would say you know if people say this has nothing to do with the with the abstraction I would say well this series at least actually it's almost like a pedagogical version of what abstraction could mean and not only as a result but as a process M she did many other kinds of works and you know after this that she completed this series the temple with its 993 works she did many many smaller works often on paper and they are sometimes simply very very beautiful this is sorry I was too quick this is the these are the this is the last painting of the temple and and we have found it documents and we have found small sketches where you really get the sense that she was thinking of other some sort of spiral building that's why I'm a little bit obsessed with a good name but this would have been at the very center of things so these are called the altar pieces and of course they make us think of either of some sort of I don't know Pink Floyd album or you know some people it's been an enormous amount of attention for the London exhibition and people have been very excited and it was even like a four-minute the the you know where they 4-minute the contribution to the two to the two in use to BBC News where they kind of both our press release and pile and just read that she was the first abstract artist embody very very absurd but then there were also people you know who were a little bit the critical of the whole thing saying that this is also new age cage and of course its new age kids it's just that there was new no new age in nineteen six and and Kitsch I think was maybe not invented either as a concept but you know to us it looks like Pink Floyd or something like that or someone who's taking drugs but then they're also unbelievably beautiful things where you know if you just saw this little thing you could have couldn't you've thought it's from the 1940s or 60s or 70s or you know it could be now I don't know he ever has or or Louise Bourgeois or you know something it's very hard with her work to place it in a traditional narrative this is very small this is like this but it says up there that it should be produced ten times bigger so it's actually an instruction piece it's like Chi Chi Chi you know she in a way she anticipated dushawn Yoko Ono too because you know she invented the instruction piece like here it is but do it ten times bigger so it's it's it's it's a very strange thing and these are late they say late series from from 19 or 20 and I would say they are as reduced and kind of pristine as anything from the Russian constructivist movement and just simply unbelievably elegant I think so um we did this big exhibition and and and we've done a few conferences but then we also placed her in a little bit of a different context earlier this year Carsten Haller the the German artist who actually lives in Stockholm and has been quite active in the in our Museum he Co curated an exhibition on the notion of life and we introduced he'll mouth Clint surprisingly in in a very different kind of context involving science fiction artists who work today with high tech possibilities Tricia Donnelly Phillip Perry no er wig people interested in biological speculation and you know it was a little bit to liberate her from the strict esoteric context of early 20th century conversations and one of the starting points was actually if philip k dick short story the preserving machine a mechanism that was that is capable of processing musical scores into life forms this is a little you know maybe you know it's quite well known science fiction short story there are there's a Brahms insect and a vogner animal and many other people during organisms and and philippic ethics imaginary worlds are populated by fascinating forms of life that escape the categories with which we custom early attempt to grasp the realm of the living and as is usually the case with successful science fiction these eccentric entities are not only weird they also capture something that seemed essential to our relationship to the realm of living beings we don't really know what it is that animate them and we are not quite sure where to draw the line between that which is alive and that which is not and this uncertainty this uncertainty has perhaps increased and in our technologically altered environments we've been talking about such things today I think a little bit so impregnated with artificial components behaving as if they were given by nature it seems increasingly clear that when it to life itself nothing is entirely evident this uncertainty is the point of departure for what we did with this with this exhibition life itself and I think one can find many younger artists working with the you know in the in the realm where it's not so easy to say is this organic or this is non-organic is this alive is this not alive people very interested in that ambivalence and it's a recurrent desire in what seems to us some of the today's most pertinent works of art to penetrate the stuff that surrounds us revealing that perhaps living things aren't entirely living and dead things aren't quite so either and making us wonder about such distinctions in the first place no doubt similar motivations can be found in some of today's most the most visible and most loud theoretical approaches not least those new forms of materialism that attempt to rid our thinking of the obsession with that historically overemphasized relationship between the perceiving subject and a known object instead the argument often goes we should look into other equally exciting and productive relationships in the world consisting of so many human and non-human actors technological as well as biological digital devices and jellyfish say an intelligent flowers as you all know there's a kind of strange new movement out there in that that has roots in in in in the loose and in many other kind and in certain kinds of materialism and there there is a group of theorists that call themselves speculative realists very interested in the fact that the you know things can be have have agency although they're not you know fully conscious it's not only the subject the human subject that is a kind of produces that has agency we can ask and they they find a lot of inspiration in bruno de toulouse works where you know the world consists of actors not only of subjects and objects there are many things between and it seems a little bit that that listen I think I'm now speculating and it is kind of what I maybe want to ask you at the end of this talk why there has been so much interest in her work because there really has I mean we we do shows all the time and and nothing else has had this kind of result that this much interest of course her whole life is a little bit like some sort of Dan Brown story it's like it's just perfect it's it's it's like something that a PR company would invent to make it sound exciting a secret artist the mysterious first abstraction you know the woman who didn't want to show her work who had no lobby who would did everything alone and then suddenly finally comes to you know has her moment so I can understand I said that there's a kind of easy journalistic thing to write about but it's also been you know enormous amounts of writing now in art magazines and a little bit in Indian you know digital world of an art criticism that is more and more visible with blogs and whatnot and and trying to you know discuss her work a little bit in it some sort of biological paradigm and and this is you know what we also did to a certain extent with this exhibition and you know one can say perhaps that some some approaches that we can find in today's artists were perhaps a little bit anticipated by thinkers that have not been at the center of theoretical discourse for a long time and a case in point could be an Steckle who I mentioned this in speculative violet biologist and naturalist who coined the you know C key concepts and such such as film and ecology in the years of 1899 and and in 1904 actually a few years before he'll mop cleaned he started I mean he not only studied he he depicted forms of the art he would say in nature I mean microorganisms that he depicted very beautifully and made posters of and they became bestsellers they were in a they were sent out in in huge editions across Europe and they were journals basically called the art forms in nature kunst form and they're not who and in a way one could maybe say that Hector took you know a step from science to some sort of art when he did that it's as if you know he could not fully express what he wanted to do with his you know the evolutionary Darwinian thought in in writing for the books he wrote a few bestsellers actually he was a very famous guy but then he also became even better known through these yeah through these art posters I mean posters the word I think they were they were never shown in an art context they became very popular things that people would have in their in their homes and and it was of course science but it was illustrated science that's one of them and they are very small I mean the originals of tiny and they were a little bit bigger in this in these journals and they were all over Europe and maybe the u.s. too they became very popular this is pure speculation we have no idea we only know that hill mob claimed to actually read esoteric literature she was a member of the Theosophical Society she read those things but we think somehow that the biological sphere seems to have been on the whole world of of biology must have been very prescient and she was very interested in in botanics and she would make these perfect you know naturalistic drawings but then also turned them into small you know diagrammatic abstractions and somehow some of the big some of those ten largest paintings have a little bit of Haeckel in them but i don't know if this explains much but it's you know and it's the best comparison that we found there's nothing else that we can see it's similar there was no abstract art yet there was nothing that she could have seen and of course there were you know there were symbols and and diagrams in esoteric books we can find older things than 1900 we can think we can find things from from the Renaissance or from the Baroque era and we can find esoteric occult philosophers who would do diagrams or assume an abstract imagery but they're usually then there's small and in books she was a painter she was someone who could paint and who could and one can feel that in the in some of them that they're just fantastic as works of art no regardless of what they mean and well this is the art history that we actually know this is Alfred Barse diagram from MoMA this is modernist according to to the Museum of Modern Art and the question that of course people want to ask to answer and I cannot answer it but you know that's what the conversations have been apart I've been about it's a question that one can formulate very easily as with like is hill mob claimed the first modern abstract painter what we know is that in 1906 after a prolific period of automatic drawing she began a body of work that can arguably be considered as anticipating the later famous breakthroughs of abstract pioneers between 1910 and 1913 including well I've mentioned them already Kandinsky's first abstract watercolors Franta check coupe gusts first Orphic works and robot dallona's first target like disks Delanie is someone who did you know circular works that look very much like him or cleans and lasts the image of this one by the way that looks a lot like Jasper Johnson Damien Hirst too but that was 150 years later em however perhaps the most interesting issue is not how in of Clint can be made to fit into the standard narratives of European modernism but rather how her art breaks out of these accounts and how she if taken seriously as an artist challenged system I mean where would we put it a guest geometric abstraction somewhere he has an idea of some sort of there are places that one can can maybe a little bit open up for for Alfred bar to squeeze in him or plaintiff that's the if that's the ambition her art didn't really have an institutional support and needed us to say no lobby in the art market one tends to forget certain things I mean what is it that makes an artist successful and world famous of course the work has to be great otherwise we will lose interest but think of someone like Picasso I mean where would Picasso have been without his collectors where would because have been without all the proud museum directors all his mistresses and maybe not so much them but I mean all they're kind of editors of art magazines and know people being proud of being part of it it was an enormous lobby he was one of the wealthiest people in France during his lifetime and that is you know how art history is being written galleries collectors museums journalism books catalogues resumes all of that hill mob Clint is the kind of you know almost like a some sort of thought experiment can we think of an artist who didn't have any of anything I mean we don't need to go all the way to history books and and catalogues resumes she had nothing and she had no lobby of course she had her close little group of friends that's it and although she described herself as a pioneer she had no immediate followers or disciples and so never she never give gave rise to a school actually the big show that traveled in Europe was called abstract pioneer and that was a little bit to kind of provoke people to say that this is a kind of abstraction and she was some sort of pioneer because she had no she wasn't following anyone but of course both those concepts are very charged so some people thought that there was a bad title because it would be like trying to squeeze her into the idea of the pioneer in that male world that we can see here and also to call her abstract is maybe limiting it was not only abstracted so many other things as well and well she didn't give rise to school but if that were now to happen which no longer seems totally implausible it could it would occur with an unusual delay of a century there are actually tons of younger artists are now interested in him Oakland and you know some of them in the US Rebecca equipment a missile Minh I saw you know quotations of hill mob Clinton Dominican solace Forester there are lots of artists who find inspiration in in in her and it's maybe also that you know artists who have never been quite as visible who are not just the big masters that one can only kind of you know at the war one cannot do anything with it's not so easy to be inspired by Picasso or amethyst it's easier to find inspiration and things started a little bit strange and an unclear and not you know finished in the internet they're not the interpretation is hardly yet begun em so finally if we try to force her into the traditional concept of abstraction for what else can we call it it will not be without certain a certain amount of force and there's certainly no place in the formalists scheme created by Alfred H bar for the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s waiting to be filled by radiant imagery more interesting is the question of what happens to this scheme still so influential in the institutions of institutional and academic worlds if her artists given due weight and attention perhaps here lies an opportunity for of for of klint demands that we reinvent or at least reconsider the seemingly fixed trajectory of abstraction in art historical canon that that persists in defining the language and theory of the 20th century there was a show just recently a few years ago at MoMA called inventing abstraction they will well researched and and of course we were working with him up late and we were almost happy that him of link was not in there because it made you know her the mysterious quality of her work and the fact that she was a little known you know very visible and and it is really as if one would have invented her a some sort of a thought experiment because there was something interesting with the fact that he was not in that show because they had they were working with Columbia University creating a fantastically rich Network theory of you know how everyone knew someone in the European art world and the idea was that you should only be two steps away from you know Kandinsky or Mondrian or someone very much at the center and you would be in the show because they built this kind of interesting network and hilm of client of course was not part of anything because they again a little bit that's critical moment and you know they were not interested in the kind of a philosophical slightly esoteric world of day of Blavatsky or steiner because then she of course would have been you know not so far away the fact that Mondrian wrote a letter to Steiner would have me maybe been enough for since she actually met Steiner and that you know the network would have done been it would have brought her in but more mysteriously is that you know it's almost like she has invented herself in it's almost like she plays tricks with everyone because actually also even according to the MoMA idea she should have been in a now figured out because in 1914 there was a show called the Baltic show it was about all the states around the Baltic Sea so Russia Poland and it happened in the city of Malmo in the south of Sweden it was a kind of biennial almost they built pavilions most people have forgotten about this but it was a kind of quite grandiose endeavor to place the little city of Malmo on the map and in that show was Hill Markland but of course not with her esoteric abstract er you know the interesting work simply with some normal landscape paintings she was obviously well known enough to be in that show and in that show was also convinced key so you know it but it wasn't Hill McLean the abstract painter that we're talking about it was the same human being you know she was that too but not the secret one that we are now kind of rediscovering and thinking about thank you so much for the attention [Applause]

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Keywords: Philosophy (Field Of Study), University, Curriculum (Literature Subject), egs, European Graduate School (College/University), The European Graduate School, Saas Fee, Switzerland (Country), Malta, PhD (Degree), Master's Degree (Degree), Critical Theory (Field Of Study), EGS Malta, European Graduate School Malta, 2016, Daniel Birnbaum, Hilma af Klint, Museum of Modern Art, Moderna Museet, Wolfgang Tillmans, rudolf steiner, misticism, emma kunz

Id: CdC5OjRCp2Y

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 31 2016