{"id":671215,"date":"2026-10-31T21:52:23","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T21:52:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/671215\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T21:52:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T21:52:23","slug":"mind-blowing-the-national-gallery-of-irelands-hilma-af-klint-exhibition-is-a-revelation-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/671215\/","title":{"rendered":"Mind-blowing: The National Gallery of Ireland\u2019s Hilma af Klint exhibition is a revelation \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the National Gallery of Ireland<\/a>\u2019s mind-blowing exhibition on the Swedish<\/a> artist Hilma af Klint<\/a>, the first thing you see is a series of delicate charcoal and graphite sketches. <\/p>\n

There is a trio: a jug, a lamp and a spiral staircase. After that, a study of a male nude, in which the artist has, in places, gone right under the skin. There is hair, a straggly beard, a well-toned arm; but there is also raw sinew and bone. All were made in the 1880s. <\/p>\n

Beyond are some gentle portraits and landscapes, two paintings of veiled women, one of whom is fully shrouded. There is a pair of larger canvases, Serenity of the Evening and Sunrise, of which Whistler or Turner would have been proud.<\/p>\n

Chosen from a wide array of works \u2013 when she died, in 1944, af Klint left about 1,300 paintings, plus 124 notebooks and reams of writing, to her nephew \u2013 these drawings feature some clever symbolism: the vessel, the light, the ascension, the allusion to what lies beneath. <\/p>\n

But all you are likely to think at first is what beautiful drawings these are. The lamp, in particular, glows in a way that is almost transcendent. <\/p>\n

Still, that\u2019s not the mind-blowing part. Even if you\u2019re familiar with af Klint\u2019s astonishing works you\u2019re likely to be unprepared for the revelation of the next phase of this cleverly paced exhibition. Around the corner, then the revelation: abstraction, symbolism, surrealism, spiritualism, divinity, bold colour blocks and such a punch of power that it feels, to me at least, as if the air in the space has a different charge. <\/p>\n

There are the indigo blues, sage greens and golds of two Primordial Chaos paintings from the WU\/Rose Series \u2013 af Klint made this branch of her work in series with sequences numbers \u2013 and the starker blacks, whites and pinks that follow.<\/p>\n

\"HilmaHilma af Klint: Serenity of the Evening, 1907. Photograph: Moderna Museet, Stockholm\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation \"HilmaHilma af Klint: The Swan, the SUW Series, Group IX, No 1, 1915. Photograph: Moderna Museet, Stockholm\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation \"ArtistArtist and Visionary: Altarbild, by Hilma af Klint, from 1915, on show at the National Gallery of Ireland. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne <\/p>\n

It is not all abstraction. Muscular figures that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in an etching by William Blake, that earlier visionary artist and writer, stand with crosses or in cruciform poses. There are circles and spirals, shell shapes, a chalice, eternal arcs.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Was William Blake, one of England\u2019s greatest poets, actually Irish?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In one of the Evolution paintings, from 1908, a black dog lounges against the bottom left of the canvas, like a debauched wino, as red lines radiate across and up to a much more saintly white version, striding to a brighter future. <\/p>\n

There is also a whole library of symbolism, elucidated in the excellent catalogue notes and exhibition texts, but you don\u2019t need to be fluent in them to experience the onslaught of the complex, ordered yet wild and esoteric energy these works contain.<\/p>\n

Going back to that first gallery, if only to experience the energy shift again, I note that those two paintings, Serenity and Sunrise, were made in 1907, at the same time as af Klint was working on The WU\/Rose Series. This was not an artist who suddenly discovered, or progressed to, abstraction. She had two quite separate practices \u2013 and, like so many of us, a polite veneer and a wild inner life. So what exactly was going on?<\/p>\n

\"HilmaHilma af Klint: The Evolution. Photograph: Moderna Museet, Stockholm\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation <\/p>\n

I first heard of Hilma af Klint in the early 2000s. She was an artist, it was said, whose work was so powerful she had requested it be hidden for 50 years after her death. <\/p>\n

She had lived on an isolated Swedish island, completely separated from the art world, and invented abstract art long before anyone else. She had painted a monochrome square, years before Kazimir Malevich<\/a> had shocked the world with his own. <\/p>\n

And, to crown all this wonderful strangeness, she was told what to paint by spirit guides. <\/p>\n

\"HilmaHilma af Klint at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, in Stockholm, in 1885. Photograph: Heritage via Getty\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation <\/p>\n

I loved the idea of a trove of incendiary art, hidden away, biding its time. And if spirit guides were into abstract art, who knew where exhibitions might lead us next?<\/p>\n

Very little of this account turned out to be true, yet the myths persist. <\/p>\n

We tend to detach her so much from reality, but she was a normal lady: she took the tram, she had her breakfast \u2026<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Janet McLean<\/p>\n

Hilma af Klint was born at the Karlberg Palace, just outside Stockholm, in 1862. Her father had been a director of the Swedish military academy \u2013 hence the palatial birthplace \u2013 and her grandfather a naval cartographer. Summers were spent at the family country estate. <\/p>\n

She went to drawing class and, in 1882, enrolled at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, which had become the first state institution in Europe to open art training to women, including allowing them to attend life-drawing class.<\/p>\n

After graduation she found a shared studio and was commissioned to make drawings for Stockholm\u2019s veterinary institute, studying the cadavers of dead horses, just as George Stubbs and Mary Spencer had done in London a century before. <\/p>\n

She continued to take commissions and exhibit throughout her life, holding exhibitions of both strands of her work, albeit separately. <\/p>\n

\"ArtistArtist and Visionary: Hilma af Klint\u2019s The Swan, from the SUW Series, Group IX, No 17, 1915. Photograph: Moderna Museet, Stockholm\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation <\/p>\n

That\u2019s the outsider-artist fiction laid to rest, at least.<\/p>\n

Neither did af Klint refuse to allow anyone to see her work for 50 years after her death, as the exhibition\u2019s curator Janet McLean explains. \u201cShe had made a little note: she had added a symbol in 1932 to say that certain notebooks shouldn\u2019t be seen for 20 years.\u201d <\/p>\n

Af Klint had also made miniature copies of some of her paintings in watercolour in the little books, \u201clike travelling copies, so she could talk about her work and show it to people\u201d, McLean says. \u201cShe\u2019d marked the notebooks including the Paintings for the Temple with the symbol, so it\u2019s often thought to imply she didn\u2019t want those paintings to be seen.<\/p>\n

\"HilmaHilma af Klint: Nasturtium, watercolour and ink on paper. Photograph: Moderna Museet, Stockholm\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s unusual she did that. A lot of the writing in the notebooks is quite personal. Apart from that, she did this in 1932, and she died in 1944. She didn\u2019t go back to revise it: think what was happening in the world at that time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe tend to detach her so much from reality, but she was a normal lady: she took the tram, she had her breakfast \u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

In fact, as McLean notes, af Klint \u201chad hoped that a dedicated building would be constructed to display the Paintings for the Temple in a continuous spiralling sequence\u201d.<\/p>\n

The idea that she invented abstract art was another fabrication. Beyond Europe and the post-Columbian Americas, cultures have had, and continue to have, non-representational art at the core of their making. <\/p>\n

In Ireland, Newgrange and the Lough Crew Cairns, in Co Meath, include abstract patterns carved into the rock about 5,000 years ago. Malevich painted his Black Square, which he described as part of his \u201cdesperate struggle to free art from the ballast of the objective world\u201d, in 1915. Af Klint made her own square colour-block series, Statement of the Physical Plan, from 1916 on.<\/p>\n

\"HilmaHilma af Klint: On the viewing of flowers and trees, 1922. Photograph: Moderna Museet, Stockholm\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation \"HilmaHilma af Klint: Primordial Chaos. Photograph: Moderna Museet, Stockholm\/courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation <\/p>\n

Malevich and af Klint probably weren\u2019t aware of one another. Instead, they, alongside their contemporaries Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in art, and WB Yeats and George Bernard Shaw in literature, were all drawing from the well of influences that coalesced in the latter half of the 19th century. <\/p>\n

Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, which had been published shortly before af Klint\u2019s birth, alongside the social changes brought in by the industrial revolution, and scientific advances such as the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity, irrevocably altered many people\u2019s understanding of humanity\u2019s place in both society and eternity. <\/p>\n

Spiritualism added the occult to Christianity through mediums, seances and spirit guides. And in 1857 the Theosophical Society, led by Helena Blavatsky, drew in elements of eastern philosophies, Kabbalah and Hermeticism \u2013 a heady mix of beliefs from which Rudolf Steiner eventually split to establish his Anthroposophical Society, which af Klint joined in 1920. <\/p>\n

For visual arts, perhaps one of the most influential texts to come out of this melting pot was Annie Besant and Charles W Leadbeater\u2019s Thought-Forms, which appeared from the Theosophical Publishing House in 1901. In it they apply physical, spiritual and emotional values to colours, and outline how the auras of thoughts, feelings and objects can be not just represented but captured in visual form. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Ireland\u2019s museum and gallery staff reveal their favourite exhibits: \u2018This is the best job I have ever had\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

All this is eruditely unpacked in the exhibition catalogue, by P\u00e1draic E Moore. You can also see it in the final space of the exhibition, where af Klint, following Steiner\u2019s art instructions, made a series of watercolours, On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees. <\/p>\n

After staring at a flower or a grain, she would close her eyes to see the after-image, then paint this in watercolour on wet paper. Give them time, as they are mesmerising, especially shown alongside the very beautiful and \u201ccorrect\u201d botanical paintings af Klint also made throughout her life.<\/p>\n

The strangest of all the af Klint rumours is the one that turns out to be true. She did claim spirit guides, saying she received her first spirit message in 1891. She formed a group, the Five (de Fem), with four other women for the purpose of meditating to induce trancelike states for automatic writing. <\/p>\n

According to af Klint, in 1906 one spirit guide, Amaliel, instructed the group to begin a great work \u2013 which became the Paintings for the Temple. Initially, af Klint had said the paintings were made through her but not by her, although she changed her position as time went on. <\/p>\n

This was the reason the curator Leah Dickerman used to exclude af Klint from the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s exhibition Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, which ran at the New York institution in 2012 and 2013, saying, as Jennifer Higgie noted in Frieze Magazine at the time, that she \u201cwas not convinced that af Klint saw her paintings as art\u201d.<\/p>\n

The whiff of sexism is hard to ignore: male writers and artists have claimed divine inspiration and dream influence throughout the history of art without a tarnishing of their reputations. And what is art if not a way of exploring what we apprehend without necessarily comprehending? (For a wider view on the work of af Klint in context with other women artists, read Higgie\u2019s book The Other Side<\/a>, which was published in 2024.)<\/p>\n

I first saw af Klint\u2019s work in 2004 at the Douglas Hyde\u2019s Gallery 2, when John Hutchinson curated a tiny selection as part of his Paradise series. A small publication, Hilma af Klint: The Greatness of Things, followed in 2005, in which Hutchinson wrote that he believed \u201cthe true significance of Hilma\u2019s visionary art has yet to be fully recognised\u201d. <\/p>\n

He was both right and prescient, and the exhibition and book stayed with me, although it would be a number of years before I saw af Klint\u2019s work again, when it caused a sensation at Massimiliano Gioni\u2019s The Encyclopaedic Palace, the central exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 2013.<\/p>\n

One of the most moving sets of paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland\u2019s exhibition is Series 1, made in 1919, between Christmas Day and New Year\u2019s Eve, when the first World War was still heavy in memory. Through seven small white canvases, a line emerges, then shapes and, finally, what you could perhap describe as a geometrical diagram of hope. <\/p>\n

Exactly 100 years later, one of af Klint\u2019s wishes was realised, although not perhaps as she might have imagined it, when the Guggenheim museum installed her work spiralling up its curving rotunda for the blockbuster Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. <\/p>\n

The Hilma af Klint Foundation has requests from all over the world, says McLean, who has been working on the Dublin exhibition since 2021. \u201cNow, I think a lot of the paintings are going to be resting for a while.\u201d <\/p>\n

Given the energy they emit, I\u2019m not surprised.<\/p>\n

Hilma af Klint: Artist and Visionary is at the National Gallery of Ireland<\/a> until February 7th, 2027<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the National Gallery of Ireland\u2019s mind-blowing exhibition on the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, the first thing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[216815,93,102922,226990,61,60,17633,106892,102923],"class_list":["post-671215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-charles-darwin","tag-entertainment","tag-george-bernard-shaw","tag-hilma-af-klint","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-national-gallery-of-ireland","tag-newgrange","tag-wb-yeats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}