Te Hīkoi Toi: Hilma af Klint

This review of Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings at City Gallery Wellington was originally published in the Dominion Post.

Wellington’s fantastic Verb Readers & Writers Festival in November was full of hauntings and spells, of literary witches.

The theme of this year’s festival was “coven” – the programme capturing the energy generated when women gather and use writing as a way to uncover feminine agency.

The festival is one of many examples of how witches and witchcraft have been taken up by contemporary feminism as symbols of female power and knowledge, and as figures who operate outside of, and disrupt, patriarchal structures and systems.

Connecting paths can be followed across Pōneke from the occult feminist collectivity of the Verb Festival to City Gallery’s summer exhibition, Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings. Af Klint spent her life searching for, and having, a palpable connection with spiritual realms, and the show teems with her close, incisive observations of the natural world, and its opposite: sensations and ideas that are beyond the hard matter of everyday life.

In The Secret Paintings, these two approaches – science and spiritualism – are inseparable. The show opens with two small botanical watercolours from the 1890s, from which point it billows outwards into her spirit-guided painting sequences: Primordial Chaos, The Dove, The Swan, Altarpieces, and The Ten Largest.

Throughout the show af Klint is rarely working on her own. She welcomed collaborators – in this world, and the next. She gathered with female friends in a group called “The Five”, who together conducted meditation, readings of the bible, and séances.

It was at one of The Five’s regular meetings where af Klint documented assiduously in her multitude of notebooks that she received instruction from a spirit guide, Amaliel, who directed her to paint the series, Paintings for The Temple.

Taking up this vast commission in 1906, af Klint, directed by Amaliel, began an extraordinary body of work – 193 paintings, produced over 10 years, depicting the spiritual realm.

The Ten Largest are on the upper level of City Gallery, where they have the benefit of being hung together in a full line. Their collective scale hits you when you walk in. They tower. Botanical forms overlap with geometric abstraction. Their palette is both unified and eccentric; black sits with pink; orange with blue. Tiny word-like symbols nestle among circles.

Against a society that actively repressed both the physical strength and intellect of women, the fact of these paintings is extraordinary. Imagine it, af Klint in her studio, massive pieces of paper spread across the floor, Amaliel speaking, within and around her, and guiding af Klint’s hand into these beautiful and baffling works.

At Verb, the festival’s founder and director, Claire Mabey, interviewed Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose recent book A Ghost in the Throat attempts to uncover the lost details of the life of 18th Century Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Mabey asked, “What female texts are haunting you?” I can’t recall Ní Ghríofa’s reply, but I wrote down this question and it lingered with me for days.

To be “haunted” struck me as an incisive word for feminine influence, because the creative life of women in the Western world has been relegated to the margins of society. Anyone who has researched women in written records will know how tissue-thin the information is, how fleeting, how buried under the activities and voices of men.

Art historians write about “influence” – such-and-such artist is influenced by another. But haunting is influence of another order. To be haunted by something means it guides you, pushes you, but it is partial and ephemeral, on the edge of your vision.

Af Klint was haunted. And she, in turn, haunts. In doing so she messes with the art historical convention that maps chronological lines of influence, as well as many other aspects of our understanding of Western painting. And so much the better.

There is a danger, I think, in reducing her to the tagline of the “first abstract painter” – that this will reinscribe the plodding Western modernist agenda of being the first, the “major innovator”. How boring. What af Klint’s spiralling, striving, and questioning paintings propose is that there are multiple and overlapping versions of abstraction, of knowledge, and ways to lead a collaborative creative life.

It’s no small miracle that af Klint’s paintings have materialised at City Gallery this summer. Christmas presents purchased online are trapped in ports. Events are cancelled and restaurants are empty. People can’t fly home. Yet somehow, across seas, and across the 77 years since af Klint died and her paintings were rolled and stored in the dark of her nephew’s attic in Sweden, they are here, towering, glowing in Pōneke.

And they are astounding. Get a ticket. Gather friends. Go and see them.