My first encounter with the artwork of Hilma af Klint was an unintentional one. 5 years earlier than the 2018–19 Guggenheim Museum present that made her an artwork world sensation, in one of many weirdest museum pairings I can keep in mind, an af Klint survey was concurrent with a Martin Kippenberger retrospective on the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Wandering from one present to the opposite felt like shifting between two worlds, the recognized and unknown — actually, as a result of af Klint was then nonetheless unknown to me and plenty of others, and symbolically, as museum-goers traversed the brink from Kippenberger’s postmodern performativity to af Klint’s towering esoteric abstracts.
Since then, af Klint has turn out to be a cult determine for her radiant non-figurative work created within the service of her spiritualism and for the revelation {that a} girl was pioneering summary artwork earlier than the canonical (male) modernists.
What Stands Behind the Flowers on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA) is strictly af Klint’s artwork, but it surely jogged my memory of the Hamburger Bahnhof expertise in the best way that it strikes between the mundane and the ethereal. The present is centered on her Nature Research, a portfolio of 46 botanical drawings courting from 1919 to 1920, which MoMA acquired in 2022. Earlier than she started her celebrated spiritualist work in 1906, the artist studied botanical drawings in class after which labored as an illustrator. A few of these early items are on view, together with supplementary supplies, together with af Klint’s notebooks and different plant guides, and a 1922 collection of unfastened, wet-on-wet watercolors that evoke watery reflections of their pure topics (On the Viewing of Flowers and Bushes).
Hilma af Klint, “Group VII” from The US Collection (1908), watercolor and pencil on paper
The Nature Research drawings are distinctive as a bridge between the opposite works and different worlds; every pairs a plant or crops with summary diagrams. In a single, a fragile rendering of a marigold hovers within the high two-thirds of the paper, its vast orange bloom a sunburst improbably hooked up to a spindly thread of a stem. Beneath it’s a sq. divided in half, with a cryptic form meandering down its heart. Virtually equally curious is that the underside third of the paper is totally clean, as if one thing is lacking. In different works, the crops fill the pictorial house, resembling a horse chestnut blossom whose leaves encompass it like a peacock’s plume. It floats above two symbols: a triangle and a sq. divided right into a pinwheel formation. In others nonetheless, as an illustration, a drawing of a Wych elm, the plant’s composition is nearly balletic.
The exhibition’s title comes from the artist’s writings in regards to the relationship, in her phrases, “between the plant world and the world of the soul.” Her notebooks on view present keys to the diagrams, which articulate the religious traits of the botanicals.
Hilma af Klint, “Ferns” (undated), watercolor and ink on paper
Af Klint’s gossamer contact alone elevates the Nature Research past the utilitarian attraction of standard botanical drawings, however it may’t absolutely account for the enthusiastic crowds analyzing the works with MoMA’s magnifying glasses. Her best-known items, ostensibly guided by religious entities, encourage intrigue with their numinous magnificence and backstory. The portfolio drawings appear to exert the same fascination, sufficient to make me marvel — to paraphrase the exhibition’s title — what stands behind them.
Stroll by way of a park — or MoMA’s sculpture backyard — and also you may discover a number of the Nature Research crops. From this angle, they join af Klint’s spirit realm not solely along with her earthly one, however with our personal lives. They attest to the persistence of nature within the face of local weather change, warfare, and humanity’s growing disconnection from the Earth. On the identical time, they invoke the promise of one thing higher, a direct line from the fabric world to the summary religious expertise that artwork is presumed to supply. Whether or not or not we share af Klint’s perception system, the Nature Research map a path to the next airplane of being alongside a tangible path. It could be that they illuminate some semblance of utopianism that’s nonetheless obtainable to humankind, a high quality as elusive because the world of the soul.
Hilma af Klint, “Aesculus hippocastanum (Horse Chestnut),” sheet 12 from the portfolio Nature Research (June 12, 1919)
Hilma af Klint, “Calendula officinalis (Pot Marigold),” sheet 26 from the portfolio Nature Research (August 16, 1919)
Hilma af Klint, “Ear of Grain” from the collection On the Viewing of Flowers and Bushes (1922), watercolor on paper
Hilma af Klint, “Thistle” (undated), watercolor and ink on paper
Pressed flowers collected by Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint, “Ulmus glabra (Wych Elm),” sheet 31 from the portfolio Nature Research (April 21, 1920)
Hilma af Klint, “Nos. 1–9b” from the collection Group 3 (March 12–22, 1919), watercolor and pencil on paper
Hilma af Klint’s notebooks comparable to her Nature Research drawing collection
Hilma af Klint, “No. 7d” from Collection VII (March 6, 1920), oil and pencil on canvas
Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers continues on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (11 West 53rd Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan) by way of September 27. The exhibition was organized by Jodi Hauptman with Kolleen Ku and Laura Neufeld, and realized with the participation of the Hilma af Klint Basis, Stockholm.
