They never met. They never saw nor even knew of each other’s work. One was a Swedish visionary, taking directions (she claimed) from angels, the other an ascetically high-minded Dutch modernist. Yet they are paired together in Tate Modern’s immense and enthralling show with the startlingly counterintuitive aim of discovering their commonality.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a new age artist born before her time. That she seemed to know it herself is at least part of the legend. At her death, in some obscurity, Af Klint left instructions that her prodigious output not be shown in public for another 20 years. Audiences of the future, she believed, might be more receptive to her highly esoteric paintings, with their vocabulary of petals and sepals, suns, seeds and planets, radiant triangles, tendrils and discs. She was proved right, more than seven decades later, when the Guggenheim’s 2018 retrospective became the biggest hit in the museum’s history.
What she shares with Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), master of the grid, is more than just a fascination with spiritualism (he too was drawn to mystical theosophy). It is rather, to quote the curators’ premise, that each is developing the possibilities of abstract painting. Visitors to this show, which is profoundly considered and often exceptionally beautiful, will have to make up their own minds about what seems to me a controversial comparison. But the experience opens at least with convergence.
Hanging in the opening gallery is a sequence of small 19th-century landscapes. The last flicker of pink-tinged twilight spreads across autumnal fields, occasionally reflected in low-lying water. The mood is elegiac. It is not immediately obvious which artist painted which. Both are young (this is before Af Klint became a medium or Mondrian fell for Disney, jazz and cityscapes) and both appear to be thinking about art through nature.
These juxtapositions are tactful, never competitive. The painters scarcely ever share a wall hereafter. Af Klint’s botanical studies are grouped alone in all their delicate and prolific detail. She notices the crepe-paper flutter of poppies, the glossy sheen of nasturtiums, the waxiness of pale hellebores. She praises the individuality of every plant as if it were a person, and it is worth remembering that she continued to produce illustrated studies of flowers.
Mondrian notes the folds of a rose, the unfurling structure of a calla lily, every single filament of a white chrysanthemum picked out in blue light. He paints the same apple tree, over and again, with an almost Japanese devotion. It turns red, flaming in the evening sun; it becomes a lattice of inscrutable marks, so that one has the sense of being nose-deep in its mysterious shadows.
Mondrian’s magnificent Dune is painted in oil on card on the spot, its pink and marigold sands as opalescent as the wild sky above. A tree splinters into pointillist strokes. Sunset turns the sea dark, waves breaking into shivering lines. You see the origins of the rectilinear abstractions to come.
But the next point of coincidence, involving their mystical beliefs, introduces some abysmal works by both painters. Mondrian’s triptych of blue nudes with triangular nipples and crotches – up for the spiritual realm, down for the earthly – is just sci-fi hokum, deservedly undisplayed for many years. And Af Klint’s The WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series, Group VI, The Evolution, with their complex arrangements of dogs, angels, snails, biomorphic forms and cryptic utterances, are nearly impossible to decipher, except perhaps by the invisible spirit guide Amaliel, who apparently commissioned them in the first place.
Af Klint’s world religions series comes, as it should, as a shock. These black and white paintings are all based on circles: segmented, bisected, intersecting, divided. Made in 1920, they are coruscatingly bright and precise, elegant minimalism avant la lettre. Or so it might seem. But can you really deduce the principles of Judaism, Islam or Buddhism, for instance, from the fine distinctions between one variation and the next? For that is her entire purpose: to interpret world religions through the principles of design. It is not obvious that these are abstract paintings at all, so much as theological diagrams. Whereas a magnificent Mondrian checkerboard of ochre, pink, blue and slate-grey squares, in complex permutations no reproduction can convey, exceeds its own geometry in every way, appearing to twinkle – just as he hoped – like a star-filled sky.
Most of the time, the painters are rigorously segregated. A room of scintillating Mondrian grids – flashing up all kinds of climates, lights and seasons, quietly receding, or tilting theatrically forwards – alternates with a room of Af Klint’s spirals, curves and handwritten annotations carefully pencilled across the canvas. But an inner sanctuary alas brings them together.
A Mondrian hangs above: the yellow lines at its edges seeming to breathe and expand, and to pressurise the whiteness upon which they lie. Below is a series of coloured watercolour squares by Af Klint. No amount of interpretation can bring them, visually or spiritually, to life.
Hilma af Klint is an artist for our times: lesbian, feminist, anti-establishment, a restless radical involved in women’s cooperatives, fiercely industrious, supremely self-reliant. But her art appears inseparable from her beliefs, in clairvoyancy, seances, reincarnation, ethereal advisers, the occultism of Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky.
And while this show does not stoop to the old quiz question of who produced the first abstract painting (Kandinsky or Af Klint) it nonetheless presents her in such terms. As if paintings that resemble Jasper Johns targets or 60s op-art abstractions are not in fact concentrated spiritual messages.
The central gallery at Tate Modern is a kernel of knowledge. Atoms, photography, industrialisation, science, war: historic documents offer revelatory context, especially for Af Klint. The botanical illustrations of her fellow Swede Carl Linnaeus, Goethe’s colour charts, Steiner’s chalkboard drawings: you soon see the evolution of her visual sources. Most striking is the exquisite stitching on a silk bonnet worn at the women’s commune where she spent many summers. The sight of it (and an essay in the outstanding catalogue) draw attention to the nearly exact transcription of the embroidery on the tangerine bonnet and the curlicues of a tangerine–coloured canvas, one of the so-called Ten Largest paintings that conclude this show.
These radiant designs incorporate shells, bubbles, dots, seedpods, flowers and more, looped together in a swirling calligraphy against lilacs, pinks, pastel blues and yellows. Surely Orla Kiely must have seen them. They are uplift without affect, tune without music: charming to look at, but what else?
Their ultimate meaning to Hilma af Klint may be beyond debate (she wrote a lot about them). But was she making abstract art – or even art at all, as opposed to the public expression of inner meditation? Her painting is strangely inert, and almost always annotated: like diagrams upon a page.
Slow, meticulous, deeply absorbing: the show at Tate Modern resembles the work it presents. But the distinction ends there. With Hilma af Klint, you are constantly trying to understand the systems of belief. With Piet Mondrian, you are witnessing the evolution of art.
