Getting the Message

John Haber
in New York City

Hilma af Klint, Spiritualism, and Wassily Kandinsky

Was Hilma af Klint the first modern artist—or the last to leave a tradition from medieval art to Symbolism behind? Either way, for her it meant listening to voices other than her own. Where others were observing nature and the nature of paint itself, she had her unseen messengers and her inward turn, to spiritualism. It offers a challenge to just what made art modern or a woman's. It also makes her an apt precursor to Wassily Kandinsky. Two years later, the Guggenheim finds much the same symbolism in his late work.

I promise never to rush through art, but one can hardly help it with Kandinsky. At the Blue Rider Museum in Munich, one can feel his own headlong rush toward abstraction, a rush that left his colleagues behind every step of the way. Now the museum has a novel way to slow things down: it hangs his work backward, in reverse chronological order—more than eighty works from its collection, so that nothing is left behind. They remain almost a year as well, just in case you missed anything, ascending three floors of the ramp. That leaves room for contemporary artists on the floors below.

A temple to art

It has taken more than a century, but Hilma af Klint has found at last her temple. From 1906 to 1915, she worked in private and in series. Few knew that she was creating what could well be the first abstract paintings ever. Yet she came to see the successive series as part of a single project, "The Paintings for the Temple." And she imagined it on display in a temple that no one could overlook—a multilevel spiral very much like the Guggenheim. Now that very museum has put that and more on display, with an assist from R. H. Quaytman, only it looks less like a temple than a museum of modern art.

af Klint had a public face as well. Educated at Sweden's Royal Academy, she had a reasonably successful career in portraiture and scientific illustration. In works on paper, flowers have an uncanny redness and precision. A dour landscape in oil has a formidable wall of grain, and the early sunset of her northern latitude leaves harvesters still at work but barely able to move. Edvard Munch would have understood. Still, she found a greater influence in the great beyond.

She held a séance as early as 1903 with other women, as the Five, with one assigned to record messages from the spirit world in art. As she took on that task, it grew, and the others peeled away. It left her with a vocabulary of circles, spirals, and seeming flora, in irregular patterns and flat but often stunning color. Not much changes as the series progress from Eros to Seven-Pointed Stars, but then unseen beings could communicate only so much. Still, they offer a bounty in a 1907 series called simply The Ten Largest. Hung closely together, in the tall gallery off the entrance ramp, in tempera on paper glued to canvas, the ten deliver on their name.

At ten feet tall and almost as wide, they sum up her vision, with abstract geometry but also what might be a woman's arms holding out a feast for the senses. Other series stick more closely to one motif at a time. Text can sneak in as well, although fragmentary and not obviously meaningful. One way or another, af Klint takes signs for wonders and wonders for signs. She breaks off for a few years to care for her aging mother only to return to the temple in 1912—but now less as a messenger than an interpreter. Backgrounds have deeper colors and softer brushwork, while foregrounds hold pyramids and prisms.

And then, the temple awaiting construction, she cut back. Late series have still closer variations on a theme, such as colored squares. Most are small and often on paper, as if to underscore af Klint's privacy. In 1932, turning seventy, she stipulated that the work remain unshown until twenty years after her death. She was off by twenty-five years. She died after a tram accident in 1944, but she had her first serious display in New York only in 1989—at P.S. 1, the alternative space in Long Island City.

One can see why. Had she broken out in 1964, like Ida Kohlmeyer with her own symbols, it would have been in the face of Pop Art and formalism, not eternal mysteries. Maybe if people had seen the late work, they would have recognized a precursor of Josef Albers and Homage to the Square or of another woman in early abstract art, Sophie Taeuber-Arp. If they had seen the paintings from 1907, they might have marveled that a woman was making abstract art while Pablo Picasso was still facing up to the women in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Then again, they might have distrusted the modernity of anything before Cubism. By 1989, in contrast, art had seen the eerie post-Minimalism of Eva Hesse, the biomorphic abstraction of Terry Winters and Anish Kapoor, and demands to pay due attention to women. Yet af Klint did not so much as appear in "Inventing Abstraction" as recently as 2013 at MoMA.

Matter into light

You may still be suspicious. You might shudder at talk of theosophy and Rosicrucianism, although Agnes Pelton bowed to the first and Edie Fake counts as an heir today. The curators, Tracey Bashkoff with David Horowitz, cite similar interests in Giacomo Balla, the Italian Futurist, and František Kupka, a traditional candidate for the inventor of abstraction. And af Klint's color wheels could easily have guided Kupka, as well as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, if only they had seen them. You may shudder, too, in a time of big money at a museum as temple—although Frank Lloyd Wright was happy enough to see the Guggenheim as a temple dedicated to art, urbanism on his terms, and himself. Even Albers took a break from his squares to visit ancient temples in Mexico.

You may have trouble as well reconciling the public and private sides of her art. It is startling to turn from the floral patterns in those ten huge paintings to the flowers in pencil and watercolor just outside. For af Klint, though, they went together, and so did science and the spiritual. She called one series Evolution, which could refer to either one. It just depends on whether you are evolving toward ecosystem diversity or the astral plane. Her Tree of Knowledge is still a tree.

I have my own abiding interest in art and science, and I resent as much as anyone taking science as a metaphor for consciousness or art. Even Edvard Munch can make me want to scream. Yet af Klint may have recognized the discomfort of others in refusing to go public. As a woman in art or a mystic, she may never have quite fit in either realm. She displayed just once, in 1928, at a conference on (oh, dear) Spiritual Science and Its Practical Applications, but she got a chilly reception from Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian with his own esoteric movement. He complained that she used too much black.

Her late work has its black disks regardless, and so does new work on the topmost ramp by R. H. Quaytman. Quaytman, it turns out, curated that 1989 retrospective at the future MoMA PS1. His paintings and screen prints alternate between geometry and panels close to white. He hangs many of them high on the wall, for more cryptic presences still. He also ditches the spiritual but keeps the symbolism in calling them + ×, Chapter 34. The middle character could be a multiplication sign or a sign of the times.

Quaytman insists on af Klint's relevance to the present. In a show called "Paintings for the Future," she manages both to anticipate much of Modernism and to belong to a time before or after Modernism's stricter demands. Even now, though, it can be hard to know what to make of her. Hers is an art of mystic contemplation, but you may move through it faster than the slow art of Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim two years before. The very same work at a given moment can seem magisterial or merely eccentric. It was a vision and a breakthrough all the same.

af Klint is at her best in the bounty of that first gallery and the collective presence of the whole. She also makes art from the contradictions—with an old symbol for contradictions at that. A white swan on a black field presses its beak to that of its mirror image below in a black swan on a white field, like an enormous tarot card. They are, of course, scientifically correct. And the very next series focuses on whiteness with a dove. She was, she said, turning matter into light.

Rushing to abstraction

Is the Guggenheim truly according due time for Wassily Kandinsky, or is it killing time till the pandemic is over—or relying on just a gimmick, to distinguish the display from a fuller retrospective at the museum in 2010? You may have your doubts. I myself have little to add to my review then, so I can only ask that you follow the link for a fuller picture. You can always start at the top anyway, just as years ago, when shows began at the top, I walked defiantly upward. I still appreciate the chance to see a show again by retracing my steps down to the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda on the way out, as you will, too. What better way to collect your thoughts and to slow you down?

Doubts aside, the Guggenheim has another motive, too—to shift the spotlight to the late work and, no doubt, its founder's tastes as well. It devotes two of three floors to Kandinsky's late style, whereas the break in his retrospective came about halfway through. It starts in Paris, where he moved after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in Munich in 1933. Not that he left his friends behind this time, not by any means. He still shares a vocabulary of lines and hard edges with Paul Klee. And those black lines can burst into color, with stains right out of André Masson.

Above all, he had circles, in a show called "Around the Circle." He might paint just a few, driven by what he called "inner necessity," whether theirs or his. A large circle against a black background has a bay in the rotunda to itself. And then, increasingly, they multiply and collide, as if of their own volition. His late compositions float within the space of the work, sometimes with a bit of sand for texture. Seen in light of the late work, the earlier headlong rush was about flight all along.

One can see that early progress as an effort to leave his own first efforts behind. A pastoral landscape looks like an altogether proper supper party outdoors. No one can match the barely restrained power of a horse for Franz Marc, like the blue horse in a show of Nazi-looted art along with lootings from the Edmund de Waal family at the Jewish Museum. Still, Kandinsky's riders, set against a blue mountain and still larger dappled red and yellow trees, are on the way to something else again. His late White Line recalls the thrust of white in one of his first fully abstract paintings—itself derived from the lance of Saint George in older art.

He got to know the landscape from years of travel with his companion and fellow painter, Gabrielle Münter—and, more briefly, a house together with no electricity but a fine view of the Alps. He found fellows in abstraction as well. World War I obliged him to return for several years to his birthplace in Moscow, where he caught up with Kazimir Malevich and early Soviet art, with its tilted squares floating all the more proudly in space. But what really drove him? The Guggenheim calls the early work apocalyptic and the late work a rejuvenating surrender to cosmic law. Kandinsky said that he took to circles for their "inner force, not geometric properties."

You may again have your doubts, and I am not giving up art history's preference for that first protracted mad rush any time soon. He wrote early on of his journey Toward the Spiritual in Art, but surely geometry and paint had an impulse all their own. (Hey, Georgia O'Keeffe denied caring much for flowers.) Just as much, you may have your doubt about the arbitrary late compositions—like one that he himself titled Capricious Forms. Still, the show makes the case for an alternative history of collecting abstraction, far from late Modernism's claims to rigor. One can connect his spiritualism and cryptic symbolism to Klint before him—and the sheer madness of painting today.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Hilma af Klint and R. H. Quaytman ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through April 23, 2019, Wassily Kandinsky through September 5, 2022. Etel Adnan, then Jennie C. Jones, and finally Cecilia Vicuña lead up to Kandinsky on the floors below. A related review looks at Kandinsky in retrospective.