This post was originally published on artnews.com
The discovery of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) took the art world by storm with the blockbuster exhibition “Paintings for the Future,” featuring her 1906 canvases, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2019. These bold and colorful paintings predate any efforts towards abstraction made famous by such male Modernists as Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian.
Perhaps even more striking is af Klint’s claims to have communicated with spirits to create the works. Given their religious nature, however, these paintings have been embroiled in a continually unfolding controversy with her eponymous foundation. Since that retrospective, af Klint has become a kind of cult figure among the art world, with many eager to catch another glimpse.
Nature Studies, a rare portfolio of 46 botanical drawings made by the artist between the spring and summer of 1919 and 1920, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York roughly three years ago, with plans to study and exhibit them to the public. The show, “What Stands Behind the Flowers”, on view at MoMA from May 11 through September 27, considers af Klint’s engagement with the natural world. In the portfolio, one can see her approach to abstraction through more traditional means, as depictions of plants are juxtaposed by abstract diagrams.
ARTnews spoke with the curator of the exhibition Jodi Hauptman to discuss how the show came together and any further insights that emerged about af Klint during the process.
ARTnews: What was the impetus behind the show?
Hauptman: About three years ago, a portfolio of drawings by Hilma af Klint came into MoMA’s collection. All of us who had the chance to see them were really excited about the possibility of bringing them to our public. Since then, we’ve been thinking about how to do that and what this exhibition might look like.
Do you have any new insights about Hilma af Klint since curating this show of her botanical drawings?
It’s been a real journey and an incredible learning experience, with lots of twists and turns.
The portfolio is very intriguing because it puts on in a single sheet two ways of knowing: a traditional figuration based on close looking and an abstract envisioning [of these botanicals]. From the beginning, we were really fascinated by that and started to ask ourselves, “What does that mean? What is she trying to say?”
The drawings date from 1919 and 1920, which is after her breakout moment around 1906. More than a decade later, we were intrigued by how these drawings fit into the story that we know from these other exhibitions of her work at the Guggenheim, the Moderna Museet, and Tate. We began digging into them, thinking about their context and how they fit into the trajectory of her career.
While there have been many exciting discoveries, but I think one of them is this interest in the natural world. This portfolio really shows this intense engagement with nature, and even more so, what we learned from spending time with the portfolio and collaborating other specialists, is that the portfolio reflects a real knowledge of plants that comes both from informal experience growing up in in the Swedish countryside and formal experience from her schooling and professional endeavors. The portfolio became a way into her broader practice as an artist beyond what is known as her breakout moment.
Some of the broader takeaways include a look at how 20th-century artists came to be involved with Abstraction and how much that consideration of the natural world has informed the movement.
Were there any surprises or things that stood out to you?
We were thrilled to discover of a set of drawings of mushrooms af Klint made as a commission that proved she was working as a professional scientific illustrator, with a scientist to make drawings that would serve his purposes for a publication that he was planning but was never realized. There are notes written by the mushroom specialist and we can see that she’s trying to make the drawings as accurate as possible. She imagines the portfolio as a kind botanical atlas, almost like a flora of the spirit, that would bring these elements together. Though we knew of her involvement with nature, we never knew that she was a professional. She’s an incredible draftsperson and, in these drawings, we can see this attention to detail—the close looking that you need for both science and art.
The art world might call them botanical drawings, but we felt like we really needed to understand what these plants were and how they fit into the ecosystem. We collaborated with botanist Lena Struwe who teaches at Rutgers University, and she began poking around with certain questions about the artist’s botanical world. Through this research, she in turn connected with a curator at the Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, which lead to further discovery. These drawings were made more than a century ago, but they have probably been in the archive since the mid-century.
Can you speak to new ideas or techniques explored that differ from af Klint’s well-known paintings?
My colleague, conservator Laura Neufeld, analyzed her palette and how she used her materials. There were also things that were specific to this portfolio, where she might have erased something or sometimes she would write on the sheet and then transfer to a notebook.
We can also see the changes in green across a leaf and the way she’s able to capture these fuzzy hanging Catkins blooms through changes in color—an element we associate with her more famous paintings. Through this explosion of color in the spring and color, we know that she’s trying to look at these plants and understand what they mean.
Neufeld was able to play out daily process that this portfolio reflects because she’s following the season every day. This technical analysis helped with our understanding of the drawings. Now that Neufeld has done this work, hopefully it will spark other studies by conservators, who have access to the works that are mostly are held by a foundation in Stockholm.
In light of recent issues with the Hilma af Klint foundation, what does it mean to be able to show these works?
The foundation has been a great partner. They lent contextual materials to the exhibition, as we try to understand this portfolio. For an art historian and curator, it’s not typical to have most [works and related ephemera] by the artist in one place.
I imagine because the drawings are different in nature from her paintings that that has a bit of an impact on the relationship, too.
How do these drawings compare to af Klint’s better-known paintings?
She goes to art school and knows how to do figuration and traditional representation, but she puts them together with these abstract diagrams. There are these juxtapositions between a Hypnotica bloom from the beginning of spring and a diagram. For those who remember the Guggenheim exhibition, it’s probably unexpected to see those two things together. But, in terms of approach or technique, they’re very much intertwined for her. The close looking allows her to envision this abstract diagram, which has meaning for her. It’s a radical act to show the figurative and the abstract working together [at that time], but she knows that you can’t have one without the other. The drawings indicate how these two ways of knowing come together.
Another Swedish figure interested in botanicals was Carl Linnaeus who classified plant and animal species using his system binomial nomenclature. What was the relationship between his and af Klint’s approach to the subject?
We looked into her formal botanical education because we wanted to understand what she really knew. The notebooks that are related to the portfolio, which we’ll have in the exhibition, showed us that she had real knowledge of plants—she really understood when things bloomed, how things grew and, if they did, how the leaves might circle about a stem, how something would open up in the morning and close up in the evening, et cetera. These are things that she writes about. Linnaeus, of course, was a very famous Swede, who lived and worked in the 18th century, so well before af Klint, but she would have learned Linneas’s method of identifying plants as a student. We know from her school records that natural science was part of her curriculum.
What additional programs or events are planned around the show?
We’re doing special plantings in the museum’s garden. Visitors will be able experience the drawings in the galleries and then go downstairs to the sculpture garden to see some of the plants depicted in the portfolio. Our learning and engagement department is leading a series of programs that includes nature journaling, informed by what Struwe teaches her students at Rutgers, and drawing classes.
What are you hoping visitors will glean from the exhibition?
It’s interesting to be working on a project where we’re more at the beginnings of scholarship rather than trying to tie it all up. The exhibition is very much about close looking and hopefully it will encourage people to look closely and be more attuned to the world around them. As a curator, my hope often for exhibitions is, like a table set with all this information, that others come and experience the work so that they can do something else with and we can learn more.