Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint

 

 

A recent discovery in my growing self-awareness has been learning that within my broad love of cinema and art one of my favourite sub-genres is the art documentary. By that I mean documentaries about the art world, market, artists and practices rather than artists' films that are documentary in nature, although I'm partial to those too. The latter have often fuelled my research and teaching, but as a form of relaxation and more gentle learning, I do love a good doc telling me something about art and artists. It is a way of seeing that to which I typically do not have access because the works are hidden away in private collections or galleries I'll never get to visit. But far beyond mere interest and information, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, written and directed by Halina Dyrschka and available to view now via Modern Films, simply blew me away.

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist born in 1862 who made paintings substantial in size and sum and kept meticulous notebooks (25,000 pages' worth) detailing her workings out for the vast series she produced. The archives of her work held by her grandnephew, Johan af Klint, show that she was working in abstraction as early as 1906, well before Wassily Kandinsky claimed to have initiated the form in 1911. There is a sequence in the film, part of which can be seen in the trailer, of side-by-side comparisons of af Klint's work bearing striking similarities with later paintings and prints by the big (male) names of art history, including Piet Mondrian and Andy Warhol. 

What struck me most, though, was the colour. So vivid, so fresh, so joyful. Watching the paintings being shown in full, in close detail and the reenactments of the small form of af Klint working into the night on her vast works on the floor, I thought that in a way it was just as well I was seeing these on my small laptop screen; if they made my heart soar through that limitation, how could I cope with the sheer emotion of seeing them either on a cinema screen or, even better, in person? I wanted to be enveloped in her blues, yellows and pinks, and the shapes and forms through which she was conveying her sense and undertanding of the world at an atomic level - a level beyond human sight and perception.

These are aspects of af Klint's ways of working and her subject matter that the film's aesthetics reflect during sequences that use meticulously captured close-up shots from nature involving very delicate focus racks with carefully chosen lenses that zoom closely without flattening the depth. The camera team headed by directors of photography Alicja Pahl and Luana Knipfer found many inventive ways of creating painterly abstracts with the colours and usually unnoticed aspects of the natural world. The colour shapes accompanying voiceover readings of af Klint's writing slowly pull focus to reveal the moon's tiny reflection between wetland grass stalks, a lone spider weaving a web between tree twigs against a crisp twilight sky, or water gently lapping around a protruding stone - things that are alone but do not feel lonely, and like her, minutely doing their day's work as part of the universe's intricately networked operations.

The result of 5 years of research and confronting many obstacles regarding funding and a lack of interest from the gatekeepers of official art history - including museums such as the Guggenheim and MoMA - Beyond the Visible and its participants make a strong case for the dismantling of accepted elitist canons in which success is measured by how much money an artwork makes or at what price it is valued. af Klint's works were never sold and before exhibitions in recent years, as shown in the film, hadn't been seen for many years. They had been packaged up following her death in 1944 and stored away for 20 years before her grandnephew who inherited the archive was permitted by her instructions to look at them. It was not only this lack of interest in the commercial art market with a belief that the works belong to everyone that excluded af Klint from historical accounts. She was also discarded because she believed she was a medium and the work came through her from a higher power. As pointed out by experts in the film, such mysticism was no obstacle for the likes of William Blake's place in art history.

There is much more to the film and to Hilma af Klint's life and work than I will do justice to here. Her incredible creativity, productivity, devotion, determination, and self-actuation are things we can all learn from, as Dyrschka herself says she has in producing the documentary. af Klint's legacy will lie in the transformative, affirming feelings exuded by her paintings that may well bring humans of the future together in understanding that capitalism and binarism only stunt our growth. 

I urge you to see this special film, and do watch right to the end - it's worth it.

With huge thanks to Bertha DocHouse and Birds' Eye View Reclaim the Frame for giving me free access to view the film and live Q&A with Mia Bays and Halina Dyrschka on 7 October. The film is on general release in the UK from today.

 

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