Hilma
af Klint was sort of like the Emily Dickinson of abstract painting, except she
was the first artist to ever do it. Her first abstract paintings erupted into the
world fully formed, predating Kandinsky’s more hesitant experiments by several
years. Cineastes will also know her as the artist who interests Kristen Stewart
in Personal Shopper. Her art is boldly colorful, but the presentation is
a bit sedate throughout Halina Dryschka’s documentary profile, Beyond the
Visible: Hilma af Klint, which opens “virtually” this Friday.
Dryschka
and her on-screen experts do a nice job establishing af Klint’s influences,
science and spiritualism, as well as explaining why that was not as contradictory
as it sounds today. Of course, the latter is what made the artist such a
perfect fit for Personal Shopper. At times, she claimed her paintings
just flowed through her, much like the automatic writing of Chico Xavier. She
was even a member of a séance circle called “The Five,” so eventually someone
is bound to produce a straight-up Hilma af Klint horror movie (can’t wait).
However, her personal life was quiet to the point of being cloistered, but at
least she apparently had one great, relatively reciprocal love of her life.
Visible
scores
a real coup uncovering a hitherto unknown 1928 exhibition of af Klint’s abstract
paintings in London, when the conventional wisdom held that only a handful of
her early academic paintings received any kind of public showing. On the other
hand, all the talking heads wildly overstate their arguments regarding the
perniciousness of the art-world’s so-called “patriarchy” and the crass
commercialism of the art market. Yes, there are many more examples of men who
found fame in the art world than women, but somehow Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary
Cassatt still eclipsed nearly all of their colleagues.
At
times, Visible also reaches for poetic lyricism, but sounds rather
pretentious instead. Frankly, the strongest asset the film has are af Klint’s
paintings themselves. Her use of color is striking, as is her sense of
composition. Unlike some works of abstraction, her oeuvre looks like it would
be easy to “live with,” not that is a realistic option. Yet, in biographical
and cultural terms, one of the best comparative artists might be Clyfford
Still. Both artists’ fame is largely posthumous, but they each mandated terms
in their wills that have kept their respective bodies of work largely in-tact. Still,
most viewers would give af Klint the clear aesthetic advantage.
Visible
will
have you completely convinced regarding af Klint’s merits as an artist, but its
merits as a film are another matter entirely. It is safe to say the rhythm of
the film is rather languid. It is what we have now, so it is a handy way to see
a lot of her work in one sitting, but it should be safe to predict her story
will be told many more times in the future. Recommended for the “Exhibition on
Screen”-style visuals (if you can tune out the talky commentators), Beyond
the Visible: Hilma af Klint opens virtually through Kino Marquee, in
conjunction with BAM in Brooklyn, this Friday (4/17).
