Mothers of Invention, Part 2: Hilma af Klint

Part 1: Carmen Herrera 

Part 3: Agnes Martin

Part 4: Alma Thomas

Panorama of the paintings of Hilma at Klint, shown in The Keeper exhibition at The New Museum, New York City, in summer/fall 2016. (Sculptures by Carol Bove and Carlo Scarpa)

Hilma af Klint was an art school-trained painter and member of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm who tapped into her visions for inspiration. She lived and died in Sweden (1862-1944). The paintings you see in the panorama, as well individually below, were painted in 1914-15, but they were not seen publicly until the mid-Eighties. 

In part her invisibility was of her own choosing; she stipulated that her paintings not be seen until 20 years after her death. Later in the 20th Century I suspect there might have been a bit of an, er, problem with the paintings, since her abstraction predated so much of the iconic imagery of the hard-edge painting of the Sixties. Perhaps I'm projecting my political views on the issue, but I'm guessing that Hermann A. Klint would have had a very different trajectory. I'd like to know what you think.

 

This painting and the three below are from The Swan series, 1915 . . .

. . .  Despite the visions, Klint assumed control of her process and imagery. The idea that the spirits guided her apparently diminished the value of the work in the eyes of her more academic counterparts

No one realize how ahead of their time these paintings were until we saw hard-edge paintings from the Sixties (see end of post)

The details of the paintings are fascinating, and some elements emerge repeatedly. The propeller/mandala detail appears in the painting above as well as in the one below

Now we swing around to the far wall in the panorama that opens this post. The paintings here and on the far left wall, which you'll see as you scroll down, are from the The Dove series. In the curator's audio commentary (link at end of post) we learn that the dove derives from Christian symbolism--the dove is a the representation of the Holy Spirit--whereas the swan suggests something unworldly but not iconographic of a particular spiritual practice.

Below: closer view of the two paintings in foregrounds of this wall shot

A Swan painting and its detail, below

The geometry seems to have been ececuted freehand, Klint's brushwork painterly but light

This is one of several paintings with a bisected field

We continue down that far wall to the corner. The two farthest paintings, one of which is shown below, focus on the depiction of dimensional space . . .

Here on the left wall, selections from the Dove paintings. I am less enamored of the hearts-and-rainbow paintings than the more reductive works

So mysterious, with the depiction of space within the cube

That little circle in the center of this planetary shape?

It depicts two angels. An audio commentary (links at end of post) tells us that in Klint's world view--or would that be celestial view?--yellow and blue depicted female and male. Perhaps she was thinking specifically about gender, although in Buddhism, for instance, yin and yang is simply the union of opposites, like light and dark

Detail below

We learn from James Kalm's narrated video coverage of The Keepers exhibition (link at end of post) that this white ground was once silver

If Klint was the first to practice modern abstraction, and it appears she was, this painting also offers us a look back. How can we not see a connection to the 1445 masterpiece by Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise? 

You can see The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise in the Lehman Collection at the Met

. . . . . .

20th Century Echoes of Hilma af Klint

Alfred Jensen, 1975; note the occult markings in the corners

Kazimir Malevich, 1920; Kenneth Noland, 1962;  Jasper Johns, 1955

More on Hilma af Klint:
. Curator's commentary of the work in The Keepers
. James Kalm video of the exhibition
. Hyperallergic review by John Yau
. Serpentine Gallery, Painting the Unseen, Spring 2016
. Moderna Museet, A Pioneer of Abstraction, Spring 2013
. 3 X Abstraction at the Drawing Center, 2005

Mothers of Invention, Part 1: Carmen Herrera

Part 2: Hilma af Klint
Part 3: Agnes Martin

Part 4: Alma Thomas   

Before there was Ellsworth Kelly, there was Carmen Herrera (born 1915) who developed a particularly powerful form of reductive abstraction. And before there was abstraction, there was Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), who painted large geometric canvases inspired by her visions. 

Hilma af Klint, The Swan, No. 17, 1915, oil on canvas, shown at The Keeper exhibition at the New Museum this past summer

Carmen Herrera, installation view of three tondos from 1958-1965 at the Whitney, up now

Havana-born Carmen Herrera is 101 years old. Though she has been painting for eight decades and has been included in numerous group shows, her first museum solo, Lines of Sight, is at the Whitney Museum of American Art now. "I waited a long time," says Herrera, who still works most days in her New York City studio. 

Stockholm-born Klint, who lived from 1862 to 1944, was painting visionary geometric abstraction in the early 1900s. It would be logical to begin with Klint, but I’m starting with Herrera because her Whitney solo is up through January 9 . You still have a chance to see it—or see it again. Lines of Sight focuses on 30 years of Herrera’s career, 1948 to 1978, a period in which we can see how her involvement with geometric abstraction let to a signature minimalist style. 

“She continued to paint circles around the men, even when she was painting squares,” wrote Karen Rosenberg in her review of Hererra's show in the New YorkTimes in September. Though identified as a Latin American artist, Herrera has lived most of her life in New York City, with time spent in Paris in the late Forties and early Fifties among other international painters. 

We start with Green and Orange, 1958, acrylic on canvas, which hits you like a bolt when you step off the elevator. Photo from the Whitney Museum website

Here, a panorama of the eighth-floor Whitney galleries where the exhibition is installed.

At far left: Days-of-the-week paintings, mostly 1978, acrylic on canvas; center: Green and Orange; right: Blue Monday, 1958, and Saturday, 1978, both acrylic on canvas. We're going to begun our tour in the galleries in the far distance

All photos Joanne Mattera except the image noted

In the early work, shown here, we get a sense of the artist feeling her way within geometric abstraction, as her contemporaries Leon Polk Smith, Barnett Newman, and Frank Stella did. The painting shown below is on the left wall above, barely visible in the oblique angle

Untitled, 1948, acrylic on burlap

Detail below

We're still in the same large gallery but on the other side of the wall that bisects the space.
At left, the three tondos that opened this post.  On the far wall is the painting you see below

Shocking Pink, 1949, acrylic on canvas

Herrera likely made this work in Paris, as the date would have placed her there. A Parisian contemporary, whether they knew each other or not, was the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, whose signature color was shocking pink. I wonder if there was a connection, as the color seems so far out of Herrera's regular working palette

As we move to the right around the gallery, we see two black and white works

 Untitled, 1952, acrylic on canvas with painted frame

 Black and White, 1952, acrylic on canvas with painted frame

 As she painted, Herrera distilled her expression, culminating in Blanco y Verde (White and Green), a 14-year series begun in 1959. Knife-sharp slivers pierce the field of each work to create such exquisite tension that they seem to bend the paintings out of rectilinearity

Green and White, 1956, acrylic on canvas with painted frame

Irlanda, 1965, acrylic on canvas with painted frame
Note the idiosyncratic frame, below:

 

 I love this panorama of the Blanco y Verde gallery because it is bracketed by the earlier work, left, and the newer red, yellow and blue paintings and sculpture that came later

Sight line like the ones above and below make me want to kiss the curator, who shows us how Herrera made the leap from flat painting, to painting as object, to sculpture itself

 Blanco y Verde, 1966-67, acrylic on canvas, left, leads us to more sculptural incarnations, estructuras, of the same visual thinking. My favorite is Amarillo "Dos," 1971, acrylic on wood--that's the yellow estructura you see in this group of photos

 Panorama of the estructuras. The wall text for this grouping of works carried this quote from Herrera: "I wouldn't paint the way I do if I hadn't gone to architecture school. That's where I learned to think abstractly and to draw like an architect."

Conversation between the freestanding works and those on the wall

 Above and below: Niche of works on paper in relation to the works inspired by them

This wall, with Blue Monday and Saturday, is on the other side of the niche where the sketches are.  We have thus made a complete tour of the exhibition.

More on Carmen Herrera:

. The Whitney Museum website includes a short video 

. David Carrier's review on artcritical

. Eileen Kinsella's review on Artnet

. Karen Michel's NPR interview on the occasional of Herrera's solo show at the Lisson Gallery in Chelsea this past summer

New Year, New Blog

If you follow my blog, you know I've been remiss (really remiss) in posting this past year. Sometimes life gets in the way. I promise to do better in 2017. There's still plenty of great stuff on the original blog, including Marketing Mondays and an internal search engine on the sidebar that will help you find what you're looking for. Give me a few days to make the transition and then I'll be back here with the first of a multi-part post on Mothers of Invention.