The Mysterious Hilma af Klint

Click pictures for full image.

Mama Sheep with two Lambs

Sylvazalmanson.wixsite.com

Primordial Chaos, 1906-7

Hilma af Klint

Untitled, 1911

Wassily Kandinsky

Occasionally, I like to run a painting of my own through Google Lens just to see what the algorithm turns up by way of similarity or kinship.  The other day I searched this small painting of sheep in a misty field and was gratified that the Lens did at least recognize the subjects as sheep. 

Offering about a dozen hand-rendered images (no photos), several were quite unlike my own because of differences in style or composition.  Two of these that I admired the most were the sensitive naturalistic paintings below.  But the most intriguing image Google uncovered was the painting of a single sheep by Hilma af Klint. I was taken by the expressionistic coloring and brushwork and overall Blakean quality of the image.  Note the wispy, ethereal figures that hover close to the figure of the sheep.

Af Klint, born 1862 in Sweden, was unknown to me but I was soon to learn  she is recently all the rage in international art circles.

A brief internet search revealed that, although she was barely acknowledged in the twentieth century, she had produced a huge body of some 1200 abstract paintings between the years 1906 and her death in 1944.  Her non-objective paintings predate anything produced by Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malevich who are considered the fathers of pure abstraction.  Kandinsky has traditionally been accorded the honor of painting the very first purely abstract piece in 1911 but, in 1906 Klint gave us this painting and a number of other abstracts when she began the series Primordial Chaos. 

I couldn’t determine when in her career the sheep painting was produced but I suspect it marks the closing of her early naturalistic period and her beginning forays into abstract work.* Af Klint was trained at Stockholm’s most prestigious academy and supported herself comfortably  for  twenty years painting conventional landscapes and portraits before heeding the call that took her away from representation of the material world.  This sheep definitely does not meet the academy standard for realism.  Rather, its hues and brushwork and unearthly figures hint at the invisible reality which she had been pursuing throughout her career with friends in Theosophy and Spiritualism.

It is said that af Klint stipulated in her will that her work remain hidden from the public for 20 years after her death because indifference had shown her that the world was not yet ready to receive it.  She left her  nephew, Erik af Klint, in charge of her entire oeuvre and he kept it in storage until the 1970’s when he donated it all to a foundation in Sweden that bears her name.