Religion, Art, and Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint, c. 1890

When I wrote about Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) back in 2019, I noted that while today she is a famous artist, she did not see herself that way. She was a spirtualist who saw her paintings as religious acts. A Swedish foundation tried to set up a museum of her work during her lifetime, but she refused to cooperate. Her inner voices, she said, urged her to avoid any such entanglement. As a result, her paintings ended up under the control of her family. 

Beginning in 1984, Klint's descendants began allowing museums to borrow Klint's works and exhibit them as art. She quickly became quite famous as a pioneer of abstractionism, with accompanying rhetoric about ignored female artists and the like. Her fame has continued to grow ever since. The big retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, which closed last month, was one of their most successful shows ever.

But now some members of her family are saying that this may stop, because it is too far from Klint's personal vision:

On Monday, speaking to the Swedish publication Dagens Nyheter, Erik af Klint, the artist’s great-grandnephew and the chairman of her foundation, suggested that exhibitions like the Guggenheim Bilbao one may soon cease altogether. “When a religion ends up in a museum, it is dead,” he said. “This is not meant to be public.”

He instead claimed that her art should really be shown in a place enterable only by “spiritual seekers,” since that was what af Klint would’ve wanted. “It is a message from the spirit world,” Erik said. “Period.”

I feel like Erik af Klint has just stepped into a very deep and dark theoretical forest. Is there a real difference between art and spirituality? For some people, like me, appreciating art is as close as we get to real spiritual experiences. Somebody else who understood this was Rudolf Steiner, one of modern Europe's most important spiritual thinkers. Steiner wrote books and gave lots of lectures, but he also worked with artists to create visual expressions of spiritual ideas.

Among Hilda af Klint's surviving papers are some sketches for a "temple", apparently described to her by one of her spirit guides. Erik af Klint, I have read, thinks that such a temple would be a better home for his ancestress' works than an art museum. But what, really, would be the difference? Lots of people have said that art museums are the cathedrals of the modern age.

I can certainly understand some concerns about how af Klint's paintings might be used, especially if they were sold. But it seems to me that a properly constructed and run museum could do justice to them as both art and spirit. If there is any difference between those things.