The fundamental role of art historians and exhibition curators is to write the new pages of the History of the discipline that concerns them and, in the same way, include those that are absent and mend those that are becoming obsolete due to new findings. But we must recognize that sometimes it is the artists themselves who do not always make it easy. This is the case of Hilma af Klint (Stockholm, 1862-1944), in which her ‘occultation’ (a term that almost acquires other connotations for someone so close to theosophy, esotericism and spiritualism), subscribes to her condition. of a woman gives rise to a very reductionist view of a much more complex situation. Related News standard Yes The Guggenheim vindicates the painter Hilma af Klint The ‘inventor’ of abstraction who took the secret to the grave Nativity Polishing standard Yes When Germany became the epicenter of the European avant-garde Natividad PulidoEspecially for someone with an economic position that allowed her to study art (women, in Sweden and according to another historian, achieved this right at the end of the 19th century, but, unlike ‘them’ ‘, they had to pay to access the classroom), who reached certain knowledge and circles thanks to his father’s profession (naval commander and astronomy instructor), or who had all of his work photographed (with the fortune that this entailed at the time). to show it in what she called her ‘Blue Notebooks’, of which the Guggenheim-Bilbao Museum citation shows up to three. It is time to reformulate some origins Despite all this, it is time to reformulate the origins of abstraction: Hilma caressed her fingers with her ‘ invention’ years before Kandinsky usurped the milestone –and in writing– in his ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ (2011). But therein lies the crux of the matter: accessibility to the work. Hilma almost never moved through artistic circles, but was more interested in scientific and parapsychological circles. In fact, those ‘Blue Notebooks’ were never accessible to the general public, but rather she showed them to whoever she considered appropriate. In short, he thought that the society of his time was not prepared to face his work and he went so far as to leave in writing that a good bulk of it would not see the light of day until 20 years after his death. They are the works with an ‘x’ in the ‘Notebooks’. This happened in 1944 (and Hilma worked, as Bilbao records, until the end of her days), so it was not until 1964 that her relatives tried to give visibility to an artist at a time when more pop and minimalist than theirs, so the ‘revival’ would have to wait. The same Moderna Museet that rejected a legacy that survived the fire would be the one that would do it justice with an exhibition in 2013, after the collective exhibition held in Los Angeles in the 80s and in which it was a member passed without pain or glory. And it’s not like she helped. Hilma af Klint generated a grammar, a symbolic vocabulary so special, a way of working so particular (especially in the beginning, in spiritualist sessions – a field to which the death of a sister drags her – alone or in company: let us remember the group of Las Cinco in which it was assigned), which not only hinders the attributions of the work, but also its meaning. Hallucinations. From top to bottom, ‘Summer Landscape (Sommarlandskap)’, 1888; ‘Untitled, From the observation of flowers and trees’ (1922); and ‘The Tree of Knowledge, Series W. Number 1’ (1913) ABCI’ll give you one piece of information: the great exhibition that the Basque capital is now organizing is largely based on the one that its New York counterpart dedicated to it in 2018. It was ‘Paintings for the Future’, his most visited event to date. And some of the conclusions of its commissioner (Tracey R. Bashkoff, who in the Spanish version is accompanied by Lucía Agirre) are obsolete. That, as Agirre herself points out, makes the work as exciting as it is intertwined, to the point of turning this exhibition into a solid but perhaps unstable essay – as those responsible assume – rewritten in a few years or decades when new discoveries occur. Until So, let’s delight ourselves with an exhibition that, let’s say it already, is wonderful. Her corpus is basically the reconstruction of the great life project – the paintings for ‘The Temple’, a commission that the authors of the group of The Five (Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson) received from the spirits, but that only she finally carried out between 1906 and 1915, with a break in between in 1908 – of this enigmatic creator, medium and visionary, esoteric and advanced of her time. A proposal that would transcend the physical to capture the intangible and that would overcome objective thinking in pursuit of spiritually rooted convictions. Although New York gave a better idea of the proposal due to the similarity of Lloyd Wright’s building with that mystical and helical space in which these pieces would be inscribed and which was never built, the Bilbao event allows a greater number of pieces to be shown in series, some complete (a systematic work that was basic for the Swedish creator) or to include others that were not seen in the city of skyscrapers, like the very powerful group of ‘The Ten Greatest’, about the ages of the human being, which are worth the visit in themselves. Until you reach this room, proposals that transform the Guggenheim into a true temple of art; from the figurative origins of the painter, together with her actions shared with ‘The Five’, to her endings, around watercolor, where the reduction of formats could produce a downturn in the viewer, faced until now with monumental works, but it is tempered by verifying the abstraction, and yes, in its pure, most pure state. Thus, after his timid entry in ‘Women of Abstraction’ (2021) with seven works, and to refresh that 2013 quote that discovered it for us in Spain at the Picasso-Málaga Museum, the Guggenheim now gives Af Klint the opportunity to defend herself.Hilma af Klint Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao. Avda. Abandoibarra, 2. Commissioners: Lucía Agirre and Tracey R. Bashkoff. Collaborator: Hilma af Klint Foundation. Sponsor: Iberdrola. Until February 2. Five starsAn author who may seem eccentric, a visionary who had visions, but who defended tooth and nail the union of the spiritual and the physical, of science with the exoteric (thus there is a series dedicated to the atom and another to the Arthurian legend . She identified herself with Saint George, the one with the dragon); of the feminine and the masculine, of the animate and the inanimate; who fought for suffragism in her country and completed vegan diets for her sessions. And he took many secrets to the grave. There is no author more current than her, although her messages must reach us from beyond.
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