Many artists live in fear of being misunderstood. They don’t, however, go to the lengths Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) went to in order to protect their work from a potentially hostile audience. The reclusive Swedish painter showed rarely during her lifetime and even stipulated at her death that her edgier work shouldn’t be shown for 20 years. She just didn’t think people would get it.
Looking at the big, beautiful paintings on show at the Serpentine, with their sunbursts, flower forms and prismatic colours, it’s hard to see why their creator was so guarded. Read a little about how the work came about, though, and you’ll soon start to understand her reticence. Turning her back on her training, Klint started to hold seances to commune with spirits via pictures and experiment with automatic writing: all good cranky, audience-pleasing stuff in 2016 but a turn-off in nineteenth-century Stockholm. Her biggest commission came not from a rich patron but from an ‘entity’ – which she called ‘Amaliel’ – for whom she made almost 200 paintings in total. A selection is on show here. Populated by words, numbers and vectors, they come across like diagrams of enigmatic ideas, primordial forces and evolutionary concepts.
If the work looks familiar, it’s not just that some of Klint’s images could easily grace the cover of a prog-rock album. Klint is widely heralded as the first truly abstract painter – an artist who distilled imagery down to geometric forms long before abstraction’s big boys such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich came along. If only she hadn’t hidden her cosmic light under a bushel.