I think she was a very good painter, but the clickbait title is overdoing it. Af Klint has been celebrated[0] for quite a while now, and if we are supposed to start caring about the Venn diagram of “mysticism” and the visual arts, well… first, it was in the air at that time and second, if you want your artists to not be into crazy shit I think you’re going to have boring artists.
I think it would be much more interesting to talk about the intersection of wealth[1] and large-format painting.
I don’t see the click bait there, and the article makes a reasonable case that she preempted the pioneers of abstract art (though I agree she’s also a less swirly mystical artist). From the article:
> Interest in her work grew after a 2016 show at the Serpentine gallery in London, which transferred to the Guggenheim museum in New York, where it broke attendance records with some 600,000 visitors.
This is about a forthcoming study, biography, and film.
I don't see the click-bait, but I do agree on "I think it would be much more interesting to talk about the intersection of wealth[1] and large-format painting."
I went to the Guggenheim exhibit. It really made me want to design a programming language for doing wacky generative geometric art. It was really fun thinking through what geometric construction tools were used for some of the shapes etc
Hilma was brilliant, but I feel like so much of the attention to her as of late has been around her "mysticism" and not the sheer breadth of her artistic work. Obviously one influences the other, but for me at least, I'm happily fixated on the visuals.
She’s become quite famous recently. It’s very possible that a collector has hired a PR company to blast this stuff through the media as well. PR companies are surprisingly effective.
The dictionary is clear (*): being clairvoyant means having the faculty. The journalist either didn't want to write that she only claimed it, or believes in it. Neither should pass fact checking.
(*) not that that should matter. If we read "It was the best-attended show in the history of that institution", should we assume it wasn't, but someone had been saying that for private reasons? Does "Born in Stockholm in 1862" mean that she might have been born in Malmö in 1920?
This is misrepresenting the article, which is clearly relaying the artist’s self-belief and identity, not trying to claim that the artist objectively had supernatural powers.
Hence “As a clairvoyant and mystic,” which is a recognition of spiritual belief, and identical to any generic “As a <believer in specific religion>” in format. Much like writing, “As a musician”, does not actually specify any actual musical talent. They could be really terrible at it. In fact this describes much of the music industry.
The very same sentence then goes to on to confirm that it is entirely about the artist’s beliefs: “Af Klint believed that her abstracts were painted under the direction of higher spirits.”
Indeed, but that wasn't the point. The point was the journalist says Af Klint is clairvoyant, or doesn't want to write "self-proclaimed clairvoyant", possibly out of fear of damaging Af Klint's image.
> The very same sentence then goes to on to confirm
Nonsense. "As a movie star, Garbo believed ...". That doesn't say Garbo only believes she's a movie star. The construction doesn't warrant that interpretation.
> “As a musician”
So, everyone is a clairvoyant, just a very bad one. Well, why add it then to the list of features that have to be mentioned? Plus, it still accepts that clairvoyance is real.
> As a <believer in specific religion>
Look: it has believer in it, literally, unlike "musician" or "clairvoyant". If you now say "but I meant a word like Catholic", then indeed: the common interpretation for a Catholic is a believer (there's another meaning, but that doesn't matter in this context). You can even check current online discussions about witches: people explicitly differentiate between witches and those who believe they are witches. And don't you dare say the latter to someone who believes (s)he's a witch: it suggests they're delusional.
It's counter-factual journalism in an article to whip up public interest for a click-bait-y art historian.
This article does not claim that Af Klimt, or indeed anyone, had or has supernatural powers. It merely describes that they and others held such beliefs.
Any other reading requires performing cartwheels with language to foster a gross misreading of a single sentence fragment, one that even by your own admission is open to multiple interpretations (Catholic indeed), and it’s an interpretation that is not supported by any of the rest of the text.
That final tirade explains why, I guess: this is some personally motivated attack on an individual. The only takeaway I have from this exchange is “be careful with phrasing in published articles, lest some hostile crank try to make it sound like you claimed something unintended”.
> The point was the journalist says Af Klint is clairvoyant, or doesn't want to write "self-proclaimed clairvoyant", possibly out of fear of damaging Af Klint's image.
It’s entirely possible they did write more explicit words to such effect, and the author or a sub-editor trimmed it for length as simply unnecessary. As the most banal explanation, Occam’s razor once again applies, and this seems more likely than allegations of intentional disinformation.
Looking past the weak attempt at slandering a journalist - a profession hardly short of far more deserving targets, when it comes to questionable claims - there is an actual interesting question to be asked, and that’s the extent to which their beliefs drove artistic output. Sadly I will not likely be in London for the Tate Modern exhibition to find out.
I have a vested interest in this era of European art. At the time, Colour science was torn between the empirical (Newton, Chevreul) and mad-ass angry mystics like Goethe and Itten. The later did nothing but obfuscate the truth, and threw mus at anyone of opposing views. In the end the latter won, and their muddled teachings have reigned supreme in art schools ever since.
I'd already read that Goethe was a bit touchy about his color theory and that it was basically wrong, but I somehow missed this about Itten. When I was in school, Itten and Albers were the color-theory heroes.
Also Color space and its divisions (Kuehni, R. G. 2001) will help you tell the difference between up and down in the color domain (not an easy task in the world of colour).
My own thoughts...
Goethe's full text of his `Colour Theory' is effectively a hate letter to Newton. However, that part of the book is rarely translated into English.
Generally, that whole bunch of romantics/spiritualists brought nothing but fuzziness to the subject of color theory in art. For example, in ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ Kandinsky remarked that `orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow'. Goethe described the colour ‘yellow-red’ as being a favorite of `savage nations'
and `impetuous, robust and uneducated men' and Itten himself describes the colours of a stained glass window as offering a `...direct invitation to higher spirituality'. Lovely words, but of little application to confused art students.
The problem with that hot-head Goethe is that he misunderstood a lot of what Newton was saying. Newton was addressing the physics of colour, whilst Goethe was addressing its application. These (generally) involve two different colour spaces defined by two different sets of antagonistic pairs (RGB/subtractive/light for Newton and RYB/additive/paint for Goethe). These two different ways of understanding the same thing are difficult to reconcile. For example, in RGB black is an absence of light, whilst for the painter's RYB space it is an active element.
Goethe is often credited with discovering the physiological dimensions of colour (that one colour can influence our perception of another). In fact it was Newton, though he did not pursue it very deeply.
Goethe had a massive influence on the way art and colour is addressed and I don't believe that art schools will ever recover from that. However, I still respect Goethe for his obsessive approach to the subject. Itten, on the other hand, is a whole bucket of shit. His set of contrasts developed out of his teaching, and he was the living embodiment of a bad art teacher. You have been to art school I guess... you know the type. Charismatic, cultish and mistaken. He required all his students to be vegetarians, and to practice calisthtics at the beginning of class. Unsurprisingly, was a proponent of Mazdaznanism, which was a fire cult.
There are many errors and inconsistencies in his work. For example, in his book `The Art of Colour' he describes yellow as being ‘lighter’ than blue. This is clearly erroneous, as lightness is independent from hue, and any hue has the potential to be lighter than any other hue. What he is responding to is that the maximum saturation of yellow is reached at a lower lightness value than (for example) blue or green. The annoying thing is that in the same book he recognizes HSL as being the three perceptual dimensions of color! I could fill a book with other mistakes he made.
You mention Albers. He is someone I have a lot of respect for. Goethe and Itten tried to construct general theories on the subject. Albers was more humble. His book `Interaction of Color' was a set of thoughtful observations, as indeed was his whole body of work 'Homage to the Square'.
> For example, in RGB black is an absence of light, whilst for the painter's RYB space it is an active element.
As a painter, I find it all very interesting because there are no pure colors anyway. There is no "black," there is (for example) bone black and Mars black, and then if it's bone black is it real bones and if so what animal and how was it made? And then Liquitex Ivory Black is most definitely not Amsterdam Ivory Black.
And so on. Right now I'm in Asia and cadmium colors are readily available -- what exactly is Cadmium Yellow Hue anyway?
Then along come some scientists who claim to make the truest, blackest black color ever to be painted with, and what happens?
Some rich megalomaniac buys the exclusive rights to it[0]. Goethe would be proud.
It’s a wry and pithy comment. Sorry dang, you’re in the weeds on this one. The article simply doesn’t say that this artist had supernatural powers.
The bizarre misreading otherwise is a mixture of magical and rigid thinking, or possibly poor English comprehension. However, there’s nothing substantive about speculating upon what goes on in someone’s head.
Sometimes “no” is the correct and complete answer.
This isn't about supernatural powers, it's about low-quality internet comments. We're against them.
The comment was obviously unsubstantive regardless of how "wry and pithy" it felt to you. You've been posting other ones in other threads too, which is why my request was in the plural.
I don't recall if I had those comments in mind, but yes, they're examples of low-quality comment.
The problem with stuff like that is that everyone overestimates how funny their jokes are. Mostly they're just lame. The gold standard HN explanation about this was by scott_s many years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
It's clear you didn't read the article and don't know anything of Klint's work. I've seen her and Kandinsky's work, if anything Kandinsky is derivative of Klint, who developed her abstract style a full 5 years before him. Both are wonderful artists, and she is "rediscovered" because she had been written out of art history books. She is now recognized as a contemporary of Kandinsky who influenced _him_.
Here's an excerpt from the article, "She developed a vocabulary of triangles, squares, circles and spirals before Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction. While Kandinsky claimed to have created the first abstract painting in 1911, Af Klint had in fact beaten him to it in 1906"
Af klint never showed her work to anyone but a few people which is why she wasn't credited with creating abstract art. She definitely wasn't written out of the history books and wasn't an influence on Kandinsky or really any other artists of the time
we know that kandinsky saw af klints art before he made his own. her work wasn’t rediscovered, it was deliberately not shown for 100 years at her request. many artists saw it for a brief period while she was first active and it had a documented impact on them
> it was deliberately not shown for 100 years at her request
"She specified that her work should be kept secret for at least 20 years after her death. When the boxes were opened at the end of the 1960s, very few persons had knowledge of what would be revealed."
Exactly. It is hard to forget that abstract expressionism was (by their own admission) heavily funded by the CIA, in order to broadcast the idea of America as the land of creative freedom.
K-pop music was funded by the Korean government for similar reasons.
The huge boom in the value of Chinese art was, it turns out, massively inflated by crooked deals (collectors and galleries selling to each other in order to boost the value of their artists).
Without a doubt the reputations of curators, administrators and critics related to this exhibition are dependent upon the success of this exhibition.
interesting thing tho is hilma's will says her paintings cant be bought and sold. it would be great if all of her work (including notes, diaries etc) could all be scanned into internet archive for everyone's benefit which is what she intended.
Part of why af Klint is interesting is that some of her abstract work apparently preceded Kandinsky’s. They were at least working in parallel for a time.
Apparently is the key word here. At that time Europe was awash with art vaguely inspired by spiritual gurus. As the article mentions, Theosophy (the likes of Mdm. Blavatsky) and Anthroposophy (Rudolph Steiner). Kandinsky evolved to be the most well known. Before Steiner and Blavatsky, there was Goethe. Before Kandinsky there was Leadbeater.
I teach art history (disclaimer… I am not an art historian). Too many times I have seen standard art history canon questioned on grounds that later prove to be questionable. The sad fact is that art history is most of all a question of ‘first past the post’, with little regard to inherent merit. Once written, it is very hard to unwrite.
I think it would be much more interesting to talk about the intersection of wealth[1] and large-format painting.
[0]: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint
[1]: https://hilmaafklint.se/about-hilma-af-klint/