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In this moment, I'm aware,
living as I do in this world,
that I am an atom in the universe,
possessing infinite possibilities of development...
And I want to explore these possibilities.
That's wonderful. I didn't know that.
That's the real discovery of modern physics,
which she puts into words:
We all believe
that the universe consists of atoms
and that these atoms determine the universe.
But it's the other way around.
And when she says she feels like an atom in the universe,
she's also saying
that she's building the universe from her inner self
while also receiving the signals she needs from the universe
to create new forms which she shows us as atoms: Wonderful!
A thought crystallizes the universe
into geometrical figures.
You must learn to ignore your fear,
for without the will to believe in yourself,
nothing good will happen.
We are not here forever.
So it's not at all astonishing that someone once wondered about
what it means to be in the world
and how everything fits together...
And came up with a huge answer.
The strange thing is,
I only found out about it more than 100 years later.
Hmph. Art history has to be rewritten.
Three great abstract artists died in 1944:
Wassily kandinsky,
piet mondrian,
and hilma af klint.
Now we have a real scandal.
Suddenly, more than 50 years after history was written,
completely out of the blue,
at least for the general public,
we discover this woman
who painted abstract works before kandinsky,
creating this huge oeuvre, fully independently,
and by a kind of miracle it's all stayed together.
It's like finding a time capsule in Sweden.
And now we have to ask: How should we integrate it?
I had never heard of her before.
And I have been studying art at university, so...
Art history is a man's suit.
Imagine a man's suit.
So the fiber is man.
So all these women have been always
acted as decoration.
Dear Mr. neumann,
all that is missing, is the photograph
of the "first abstract painting,”
which no doubt is standing rolled up somewhere.
Since it's neither numbered nor signed,
I would like photographic proof
that the picture was painted by me, in the year 1911.
It is indeed the very first abstract picture in the world,
for not a single painter was doing abstract work at that time.
It is therefore an "historic painting".
Yours, kandinsky.
So, in order to tell the history of abstraction now,
you have to rewrite it.
Because, basically,
all the people who said, "it happened in this year,"
well, no, it didn't, it happened in 190...
What we know is that she did exhibit her early, naturalistic works.
But never in her lifetime
did she put any of her abstract work on show.
Hilma af klint's project was something much grander
than what we today call "art."
It was all about seeing the world we live in
in a larger context,
to understand who we really are
in a cosmic perspective.
So...
Let's rewrite art history.
Well, in science,
a citation can always be overturned,
but in art history,
it seems like citations cannot be overturned.
An "historic painting.”
So, when you write art history,
you cite was was written before,
and you can add, but you can never overturn.
There was this exhibition at moma entitled "inventing abstraction"
and not one word was said or written about hilma af klint.
And this attests to a hostility that speaks volumes.
In answer to my inquiry,
the museum of modern art in New York,
the so-called Vatican of art history, replied,
they weren't so sure whether hilma af klint's art
actually worked like abstract art.
After all,
she hadn't exhibited in her lifetime,
so how could one tell?
So it makes it almost impossible
to insert hilma into... Reinsert anybody,
but especially somebody who would disturb the history
so much as hilma.
But it might be because being so early,
hilma af klint would cause such an upheaval in art history,
that some would say: It's better to leave her outside.
I want to acquire real insights about our existence on earth
in relation to the center of the universe.
She was a delicate person
with beautiful blue eyes that looked right through one.
And she was what, in olden days, was called "charming" in a shy way.
It broke out when one met her.
I admired her enormously,
and I saw what she had accomplished.
How she managed to do all of this on her own
remains a mystery to us.
All the works that may only be opened 20 years after my death
are marked with the above sign.
It was all packed up after she died.
Her nephew inherited it all and wasn't too happy about that.
So it turned out that Erik had to look after it.
Which was quite touching,
but came as a shock to us,
because it was a great responsibility
and we were by no means prepared.
1,500 paintings
and books with over 26,000 pages.
What should one do?
And nobody understood what this is.
So, you can imagine these crates lying here,
and were there for 20 years.
I mean, it gets very hot in the summer,
and then in the winter, we have -15,
and in the summer, it could be +40 here.
And that they survived, it's just amazing,
it's a miracle.
Okay.
So.
So, this is Sweden sea atlas,
svensk sea atlas.
As a naval family,
we're very famous for the charting,
the naval charting.
We have seven generations,
father, son as nhaval officers.
What might it be like for a girl to grow up
in a family of naval officers?
Hilma was like the rat
that the cat has brought into the house.
She was a female,
she was well-educated,
she had a mind of her own,
and she painted like nobody else.
And she was controversial.
Soin 1862, hilma af klint was born
into an aristocratic family
and lived for the first ten years of her life
in karlberg castle,
a naval cadet school hear Stockholm.
There, her father, Victor af klint,
taught not only the young sea cadets...
So, besides school, she was taught at home
mathematics and astronomy and navigation, and so on.
He also encouraged and supported
his daughter's talents.
Where did we have her?
Yeah.
Number 805, hilma af klint, of course.
And it says what her father's occupation was
and when she was born,
and she registered the first time
the fourth of September, 1882.
She was, I would say,
the second generation of women at the academy
who studied, so to say,
and received a full education.
The models were male,
they had some kind of... Some very small trousers
or some kind of cloth,
like, draped over the essential part.
Clearly, hilma af klint broke the rules,
which only applied to women.
Obviously, outside the academy,
there were other possibilities.
What I find fascinating about her naturalistic early works,
is that she never tried to make people more beautiful than they are.
In accordance with whatever ideal there might have been.
This is someone who not only has an eye,
but is also trying to understand the world in visual terms.
Well, she had a couple of rewards, really, in money.
She got 50 Swedish kronor in '84 for drawing an anatomy,
and '88, her last term here,
she got 100 Swedish kronor for painting a model,
and 100 Swedish kronor is a lot of money
at that time.
One reason why they were accepted at the art academy
was because there were lots of aristocratic women
not being married at that time.
When they were not married,
their older brother had to support them.
They found out
that giving the women a good training at the academy
would give them a job and an income
so they could support themselves.
There are several of these lying here.
And it works.
Hilma af klint becomes
a successful portrait and landscape painter.
She also earns her own money
as an illustrator,
and even with drawings for a veterinary institute.
But wasn't there more to come,
much more?
Although she left piles of books
with notes about her work,
there's almost nothing personal to be found,
not even a postcard.
Have you read them all? =-no.
That's a beautiful one, look at that.
But I did find some hints
that her life must have been enriched in many ways.
Notes from the Italian journey
Leonardo da Vinci.
Bellini Madonna, beautiful
She had the baltic exhibition in 1914 in malmo.
She showed her academic paintings
together with, how do you say,
the union of the Swedish women painters.
By the way,
another artist also presented a landscape painting
at the baltic exhibition:
Wassily kandinsky.
Should hilma and wassily happen to have met there,
they could have told one another
that their work was already moving
in other directions.
In order to create work that is strong and powerful,
I have been forced to renounce the dearest wish of my youth:
To be able to reproduce outer form and color.
Those granted the gift of seeing more deeply
can see beyond form
and concentrate on the wondrous aspect
hiding behind every form,
which is called life.
If you compare her to the men,
the supposed “genius” men,
their steps towards abstraction were very timid, in a way...
Like, very slow, year...
It took years for them to do,
and you can sort of see elements of their later vision
creeping in slowly to their paintings.
This is someone who knows
how to work with color, composition and format.
At the same time, it doesn't look like any of her other work,
nor like anyone else's from that period.
The power of the first 10 paintings she makes
in 42 days,
as an artist, they're sort of terrifying,
because they're so powerful, they're so perfect,
and they look like they were made yesterday,
and they don't look like anything you've ever seen,
and how could she invent this in one moment?
So we know now
that the universe is 95% dark energy, dark matter.
But the strange thing is, nobody gets excited about this.
I think our world has become more blunted, stupid, dulled,
unless somewhere out there there's a hilma af klint painting it all,
so in a hundred years we'll see what we've missed.
I think this world has forgotten how to marvel.
In 1900, we still knew how to marvel.
Today, we sit in front of our iPhones and media and are bored.
At the time when hilma af klint was working,
it was becoming clear in the sciences
that reality is not only what we can see and touch.
But it also extends beyond the visible.
Major discoveries were being made, which were in the invisible realm.
And suddenly we knew that all of space is full of waves
that we can't perceive, but which are all powerful.
The spectrum is enormous, starting out here with gamma rays,
x-rays, radioactive waves, and all the way across to radio waves.
The discovery we make here is:
That we haven't seen the world at all.
Here is the strange consequence.
If I, as an artist, want to portray the world as it is,
I must not portray it as it looks. Because it isn't like that!
So if I want to show the world as it is, I must invent it.
But also something very responsive
to what's happening in science,
so she's looking at quantum mechanics
as much as she's looking at natural science and at botany.
A bit like Leonardo da Vinci:
He was both an artist and a research scientist.
And I'd say that hilma af klint was also both,
in the field of images.
She tried to dissolve the boundaries
of what we call reality.
Do you know what light looks like?
In the 19th century, they were sure they knew what light was: A wave.
But then Einstein realized
you have to conceive it as a particle, too.
Which led to his essential point, when he said:
“If light is simultaneously both wave and particle,
then we no longer know what it is."
And he said that at this moment, he felt no ground under his feet.
What I needed was courage
and it was granted to me through the spiritual world,
which bestowed rare and wonderful instruction.
As a young, newly trained artist,
together with her women friends,
who were fellow graduates of the royal academy,
they engaged in spiritualist séances.
This was quite common in the late 19th century,
so there was nothing remarkable about that in itself.
The edelweiss society:
There women and men attended séances,
including the director of the royal academy,
and also August strindberg.
Yet it was women above all who were active in the society.
Is it possible that hilma af klint met August strindberg there?
I'm sure they did. I think so.
But neither of them knew how important the other would become.
Hilma af klint
admitted on June 8, 1896. It's crossed out,
meaning that she left at some point, like Anna cassel, too.
Then she started a group called the five
with four other women.
And they received messages.
"Accept, accept, hilma," the angel says.
Then a wonderful energy flows
from the heavenly into the earthly.
There's the angel, and the earthly being is hilma.
Here you see an utterance from these spiritual beings:
"Hilma, you were brought here to do this."
25,000 pages of notes,
of a relentless quest to understand
what this voyage of the mind and the visual was actually about.
And science is also devoted
to actually observing what is there.
So in that sense,
those two impulses are not so far apart.
She begins by looking,
and she begins by listening.
I registered their magnitude within me.
Above the easel, I saw a Jupiter symbol,
which shone brightly and persisted for several seconds.
I started the work immediately, proceeding in such a way
that the pictures were painted directly through me,
with great power.
In one year,
she painted 111 paintings.
That is three days per painting.
Ten panels, of paradisiacal beauty, would be created.
They were edifying colors,
and intended gently to impart to me all my feelings.
It was the leaders' intention to give the world an insight
into the systematization of four phases of human life.
Each of the "ten largest” was to be created over four days.
They are called: "Childhood",
"youth",
"adulthood"
And "old age".
For many people it's very provocative when someone says:
"Ll did this physically, but it's not by me,
it came through me,
I was in contact with energies greater than me."
Just imagine. In the early 70s, they offered hilma af klint's work
to the moderna museet, and the director at that time said:
"Thanks but no thanks.
She didn't make her work accessible in her lifetime,
so she's of no interest to us."
When he heard that she was a medium
at one stage,
there was no discussion.
He was not interested.
He didn't even look at the pictures.
If we start saying that artists with visions are not artists,
then there's very little of art history left.
We have to throw out constable and Blake
and even strindberg and then kandinsky.
To be thorough we need to throw out the entire Christian pre-history of art.
I really don't know who would be left.
Exhale - inhale
whether they exist or not,
I think that hilma af klint's achievement
lies in accepting the possibility
of higher states of consciousness.
She was one of the top students.
She was granted a post-baccalaureate studio.
This was the center of Stockholm in those days.
So she was on top,
and the blanch salons were on the first floor.
And everybody with a certain name came here.
So, hilma was exposed to the modern ways of painting
and to all modern painters that passed by here.
And she was here for 20 years.
Whenever I was not using the studio at hamngatan 5 for my paintings,
it was used by lotten ronnqvist
and Alma arnell.
Both were of the opinion that my work was improper.
We have to remember that, in hilma af klint's day,
people thought women could only be artists until they married.
Because the real role of a woman is to be mother,
housewife and spouse.
The only witness she could call upon,
to assert her right to do what she liked, was theosophy.
The theosophical movement,
according to Helena blavatsky,
broke down all boundaries.
Starting from the premise
that all religions are basically the same,
it leads to an awareness of the oneness
of all human beings.
The current standpoint of the mahatmas
the Jewish standpoint of the birth of Jesus
Buddha's standpoint during earthly life
the standpoint of judaism and heathendom
the mohammedan standpoint
the teaching of buddhism
the Christian religion
Theosophy was a kind of women's liberation theology.
It gave women license to access higher worlds,
which no other religion had given them.
But theosophy said: "Sure, you can be priestesses.”
Suddenly an infrastructure existed where they could meet.
This anti-authoritarian aspect of theosophy,
its welcoming of women,
was a huge step forward for women.
People look for ways to dismiss things,
so one way is to say, "oh, I don't have
to deal with this work, it's made by a woman."
Or, "oh, I don't have to deal with this work
because it wasn't written about before."
"Oh, I don't have to deal with this work
because she had some crazy spiritual ideas.”
Well, I mean, that's ridiculous on its face,
because, first of all,
every single intellectual that you can find at that time
was a theosophist.
Kandinsky, malevich, mondrian and hilma af klint,
they were all interested in spiritual issues,
in theosophy and anthroposophy, to differing degrees.
That was due to the time they were living in.
"Dr. Rudolf steiner.
Now I have a purpose to do,
after taking counsel of some of the members
of 'teosofist, '
asking you if it should be possible for you
to go to Stockholm.
The paintings are many and great,
and I cannot go to you.
Please do it, if you have any time."
Rudolf steiner was a man of great charisma.
In 1908, he was still head of the German-language section
of the theosophical society.
She brought steiner to look at her pictures.
She was a strong character,
but she also wanted acceptance and guidance,
coaching, you would say today.
And I think she saw that steiner could be that person.
I don't think that steiner saw the same thing.
And then he told her
that her way of working was not appropriate.
She shouldn't be painting like a medium,
and that her contemporaries wouldn't accept her painting
until 50 years later.
That was in 1908, and after that,
it was a rupture for four years,
where there are no traces of her paintings.
Well, in the same year, 1908,
Rudolf steiner also met wassily kandinsky.
From a letter, we know that photographs
of hilma af klint's huge abstract paintings
were in steiner's possession,
maybe even the hand-colored ones,
and at a time when nobody else
was painting abstract.
It's quite possible that actually some artists
saw her work and brought those ideas to Paris,
for example, before... We don't know.
She lived in this environment quite intensively
for most of her life.
For a few years after that, she stopped working,
and only started again in 1912. For four years, she didn't work.
It was also the time when her mother went blind.
So suddenly she had to do much more for her mother at home,
I think she had this problem with her family,
I think she was not really understood by her family.
I think she was close to her father,
but when he died,
I think she was kind of alone.
I'm not sure about her relation to her mother.
I'm curious about that, but I don't know.
The family said hilma was painting odd things
that no one should see.
So everyone was offended
at her keeping all this secret.
Having her as a dinner guest was a bit difficult.
She never ate fish, she never ate meat.
And actually, I don't think she ate eggs.
So it was root vegetables or Greens -
a real vegetarian.
Choose appropriate food
Hilma was by the locals here said to be very kind
but rather serious and a little stiff upper lip,
so to speak.
- Oh dear. - Oh dear.
I don't picture her like that.
Because I found this picture in a magazine
where she actually was dressed as a clown.
So she has a sense of humor, she must have had.
There was someone she loved,
a doctor from the malaren islands,
called helleday.
This doctor seemed to have been very fond of her,
but she declined marriage. She once said,
"within me Wells forth such a power
carrying me forward,
that marriage and family happiness are not my destiny.”
The more we discover the wonders of nature,
the more we become aware of ourselves.
First, I want to understand the flowers of the earth.
I shall start with the world's flowers.
Then, with the same care,
I shall study whatever lives in the waters of the world.
Then comes the gate into the blue ether
with its many species of animals.
And finally I shall enter the woods,
to study the damp mosses, all trees
and animals living among the cool, dark multitude of trees.
Flowers, mosses and leeches by hilma af klint
The common spirit of humankind
Transmission of power
it's obvious that hilma af klint's works are not intellectual maps
to be understood rationally.
You need your whole body,
to receive these works in a way
in which the intellect only plays a small role,
and by no means everything.
Notes on letters and words,
pertaining to the works of hilma af klint.
The essence of all human existence lies within "wu".
One symbol that you see again and again is the spiral.
In all cultures, when you're moving out from a central point,
a spiral signifies development.
And if you follow a spiral inwards, towards the center,
you can think of that as going deeper.
And people said on adelso,
"how strange, what can miss af klint possibly want
with all the eggs that she buys?”
I think she has such a luminous palette, which actually,
looking at it today, has a sort of pop art quality.
Like these large-format, sunny orange tones...
I really can't think of any oeuvre to compare it with.
To my mind, her color scheme is very important.
Blue is the most important color,
then comes yellow,
and the kind of ground, as you see in the 10 largest,
is pink, the world is pink.
It's the color of life and growth.
We know that blue is a color she associates with femininity,
and yellow with masculinity.
Many players struggling in this drama,
have been dressed in the wrong clothing.
Many a female costume conceals a man.
Many a male costume conceals a woman.
A lot of hilma af klint's work is actually about living
in a polarized world - a world of male and female,
of day and night, of heat and cold
and where we feel that the world is divided
into extremes.
The development of the world includes the wonderful dilemma
that light itself is divided into brightness and darkness.
This problem is especially difficult to understand for a blind world
whose organization is founded on two forces
instead of one.
The atom is myself and the world,
for I am inseparable from the world.
The atom is here. I am the atom together with the world.
We are both indivisible. I and the world, both of us.
That is the atom.
It was a new way of painting,
it was a new form of art,
and she... she walked away at the same time
as she made the way,
she has written herself,
and that's not easy,
to be a pioneer in that sense.
In solitude
It might have been a hand towel or a bedsheet, or a pillowcase
whatever she'd sewn together.
People once had beautifully woven textiles in their homes.
Of course, materials are expensive, and hilma af klint
had sold very little since 1906, when she started painting
her abstract works, and she was living very frugally.
So this makes sense. It's interesting that you saw that.
In the summer, she wanted to live in the studio
she'd built for herself on munso.
How she was able to exist was a mystery to us.
Hilma and Anna cassel met at the royal academy
in 1882.
As one of the siblings said, they forged a lifelong friendship.
Later, it was said in our family,
that Anna financed hilma's painting.
She was extremely well-to-do, and she helped in various ways.
She also saw to the building of the studio on munso,
which was on the giertta family's land.
It was demolished after hilma died.
Come on, follow me.
We have the oldest one over here.
This is my husband's great-grandmother
and grandfather.
They befriended her,
and hilma spent a lot of time here in this house.
Their daughter-in-law and hilma were great friends.
Hilma and Emily were very close,
very close indeed.
They had the same, you know, outlook on life,
and they did séances and stuff together.
I knew she was doing abstracts
but not with that power, oh gosh.
No wonder she needed this big house to have them in!
It was a great view out to the lake.
It was a very peculiar house.
It was built in the gothic style.
It was very tall and not very big.
It consisted of a large hall,
with rods slung across
so she could hang her paintings.
There she lived during the summer
together with her elderly mother.
There was also a nurse
to help her with her mother.
There hilma was able to paint.
Every time I succeed in finishing one of my sketches,
my understanding of humanity, animals,
plants, minerals,
of the entire creation, becomes clearer.
I feel freed and raised up above my limited consciousness.
And we want to fit her into this story
that we typically tell about artists,
but it's impossible,
because women didn't fit that story,
and so, you know, she would have to find
another way to live
and to live out her... The kind of grandeur
of her creative vision.
The temple that will hold the paintings one day
must be built of alabaster.
In other words, it must be completely white.
At its central point will be the astronomical tower
with an internal spiral staircase.
The place we have chosen for it is the island of ven in the ...Resund.
She wanted it to be surrounded by water.
She was old at that time,
and it wasn't so much about her personal success.
It was more about
giving the paintings to the world.
She then went up to dornach,
to Rudolf steiner, and said, "look.
We want both to build a temple.
I have the paintings.
Let's build it together.”
She did say that. And he refused her and said no.
"I'm building my dornach first,
then we'll see what happens to your temple."
Herr Dr. steiner,
should the paintings which I created
between 1906 and 1920,
some of which you once saw for yourself,
be destroyed?
Or can one do something with them?
That sounds more like a threat,
showing how urgent it was for her
to find a place for her paintings.
In order to influence the zeitgeist
or influence the art world
or influence at different levels,
you have to have some key people on your side.
It's really that simple.
Dear Mr. neumann,
I know how important “publicity” is, especially in America.
Could I ask you, therefore, to beat the drum a little?
I have never before exhibited watercolors in New York,
which would be a reason for a resounding drumbeat.
It's often said that hilma af klint
never exhibited during her lifetime,
but there are many letters left in her estate in Sweden
which tell another story.
June 9, 1928.
Dear miss af klint,
yesterday at the hague, I heard that you would be exhibiting.
The matter appears to be well in hand.
So please ask again when you are ready to send the paintings.
Heartfelt greetings, Peggy kloppers.
Dear Mrs. kloppers,
transportation from Sweden to London is not very quick,
and packaging everything up also takes time.
I have today written to Mrs. merry.
To ask how many square meters I can have,
and to emphasize that it would be better
to put the paintings in a room next to the exhibition hall.
But here, the correspondence ends.
The path Peters out.
Until, in the year 2018,
when suddenly, a postcard comes to light...
From London.
Dear Anna,
we enjoyed a glorious voyage of four and a half days
with the most amiable captain.
He helped us with the car.
Tomorrow Mrs. merry will be joining us,
to unpack the paintings as planned.
Heartfelt greetings, your friend, hilma.
So, in 1928,
hilma af klint had an exhibition
in the center of London.
Did it also include her ten large ones?
And why has it taken 90 years for this fact to surface?
Art history, the past 500 years,
how many women are in it?
None, basically, you know?
And then... and you say, "why?"
And they say, "oh, because there were
no great women artists," but it's not true.
That's not true... that's a lie.
In male art history, it's all about "genius."
But "genius" excluded women because women "had no genius."
They could do pretty still lifes of flowers,
or a nice portrait,
or a successful landscape, but not a "work of genius."
It's still harder for women to be in the art world.
There's no shadow of a doubt.
You take it for granted
that you have a collection
and it's mostly male artists
and you take it for granted,
and that's the way it's supposed to be.
There are as many women artists.
Art schools, it's like still
a bigger percentage of women at art schools,
so you have to ask yourself, you know,
what happens between art school
and the marketplace?
This is a club system, you know?
Boy... you can call it boys' club,
you can call it "the market club,”
you know, you can call it anywhere.
There is this club system
that excludes so many people,
and museums are not immune to this.
Now, with all these all-women shows,
people are ticking a box and saying,
"okay, tick, done.
Okay, let's go to the next.
They're done, politically correct, done.
We have adjusted the imbalance.”
And so... and all these all-women shows have become also
kind of fashionable,
and no, we don't want to be fashionable.
We really want to be part of art history.
There were always outstanding women, but what's interesting is
they came and were forgotten again and again.
So every generation is repeating: "Hey, I didn't know about her!"
It's true there weren't that many,
but there were not as few as we find in our museums,
or admit into art history.
There were far more than are being shown today.
I think that's the scandal we really must address.
She lived a most industrious life.
And she agreed with her dear kinswoman, hedvig af klint,
to move to live with her at djursholms ...Sby,
in her very pleasant villa
next to ...Sby station.
But hilma had not been living there long
before she fell victim to an accident involving a tram,
as a result of which she became ill and died.
She was 82 years old.
And she had waited
for Erik to come back from sea.
And yes, he did return to her in time.
I understand why she did that.
Because Erik was the only one she could turn to,
the only one who was capable
of getting to grips with all this and understanding her.
Her will left everything to Erik,
but nothing could be sold.
It's basically like a trick played
on the art establishment,
an experiment that shows the establishment up for what it is.
Our present point of view
who wrote the history of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s?
The museum of modern art in New York.
Who has all the pictures of that history?
The moma in New York.
Now suddenly there's a counter history:
Centered around a woman,
who is not on the market, and from whom they have not a single work.
Of course they're going to say: "Sorry, she's not important.”
All these successful artists who are sold internationally
as investment strategies,
work in series.
Only series can be sold at the same time across the world,
only with series can prices be driven higher.
So should hilma af klint come on the market now,
she'd be a hit, with everyone interested,
and the moma would be first in line to exhibit her.
And part of this devious trick
is that she can't be integrated into this market system.
Which I think shows,
in a diabolical way,
how narrow-minded this art system is.
It's all about the question:
"How much money can we make?"
And with hilma af klint you can't make any.
Less selfishness, more indifference
She lived under hardship and didn't sell anything
because she knew that she had to keep this intact.
My mission, if it succeeds,
is of great significance to humankind.
For I am able to describe the path of the soul
from the beginning of the spectacle of life to its end.
There are a lot of works,
that have never even been unrolled
or taken out of boxes since hilma af klint's death.
We've spent many months looking at works,
unrolling them so that we can exhibit them.
It's thanks to the commitment of a woman curator
that hilma af klint has now got this exhibition.
One million people have seen this exhibition,
which is a terrific number, an unbelievable number.
Never in my wildest dreams
did I think that so many people would come.
It really hit me like a bomb.
I've never seen anything so extraordinary.
And I don't even like kandinsky.
"The woman who invented abstraction"
"Hilma leaves vassily behind”
Many who saw the exhibition
were astonished at their own reaction to it.
For instance, I saw people who suddenly burst into tears,
or suddenly became completely calm and quiet.
It appears that these works do something to us,
not only through their sheer size, but also through a kind of energy.
If I pass away in lund and am cremated in malmo,
the urn should be buried in the churchyard on munsao.
Here you have the grave of Victor,
the father of hilma,
and he lies here with his wife
and hilma.
How do you know?
There's no sign.
Uh, because my father had her interred here.
The question remains:
Why is there no reference to hilma af klint anywhere,
not even at the houses and places
where she lived and worked?
The... l find it very strange,
because Sweden is... We are such a small country,
and usually, we are very proud of people
that are doing something remarkable,
because we need everybody, you know,
to get our country on the world map.
Sweden is an incredibly secular country now.
It used to be a very mystical one,
shrouded in myth and legend,
and the modern swedes very much distance themselves from that.
I think it's going to take another ten or twenty years
before Sweden truly realizes what a treasure it possesses,
that perhaps in twenty or thirty years, hilma af klint
will be acknowledged
as the most important Swedish artist.
If we ask ourselves,
"how do we want to relate the history of abstraction?”
It's no longer possible to tell a story
that excludes hilma af klint.
Suddenly there's a woman, suddenly we have to talk about spiritualism,
and we have to ask, what is meant by abstraction?
We can't present hilma af klint as an isolated figure,
because she brings with her a whole series of questions
that will hopefully make art history exciting again for years to come.
We have an opportunity right now
to remake the history of art in a better way
by using hilma af klint.
It seems to me there's
a window of opportunity right now
that everybody's unsure
because it causes them to rethink,
and let's hope that people are brave
and that they allow her work to change other people's work,
and that's what art is supposed to do.
And if they don't do that,
um, that's sad,
and they have made life more boring, um, so...
Sometimes we need courageous spirits,
and I would truly say that she was a courageous, determined person.
Sometimes it takes time
for others to come closer,
to dare to cross boundaries or to see the larger context.
Only for those prepared to leave their familiar life behind
will life emerge in a new gown
of continually expanding beauty and perfection.
But in order to attain such a state,
it is necessary to achieve stillness
in both thought
and feeling.
Whether thinking about electrons, or kandinsky, or painting,
the only thing that really interests us is:
"Who am I? How can I find myself?"
You find yourself by reflecting and working on it, becoming self-aware.
You'll find yourself in the end. As in my favorite quote from novalis:
"Where are we really going? Always home."