Hilma af Klint's exhibit Paintings for the Future: successful, popular and ... late!

Hilma af Klint's exhibition Paintings for the Future has been a sensation. It's the most successful exhibition at he Guggenheim ever: 600,000 visitors. I don't have much to add to the general conversation. I have just a few pondering thoughts:
Why is her work so popular?
Is it sad that fame came too late?
Would it have changed the course of Modern Art?
Where was the work since she died in 1944?
How much money is the work worth?

Thought: Why is her work so popular?

 I love her work. So does everybody else, it seems. The atmosphere at the Guggenheim was festive, the public diverse, colorful. Nothing rarefied about this crowd, and how pleasant that is. What is the secret to its success? The work might be inspired by spirits, it breathes life and energy and joy and curiosity. It's spectacular. It's harmonious often. We have also seen similar works, Delaunay, Klee, Kandisnsky, Miro, so that the works' form is not shocking to us as it would have been to Klint's contemporaries.

Thought: Is it sad that fame came too late?

I wondered whether it is sad that she was not celebrated during her lifetime, as is the case for Kahlo and O'Keefe who would have very much enjoyed the fame their work attracts now. It probably was not so important to Hilma af Klint who had a spiritual approach to creating. But she must have thought the spirits had something to communicate to the world through her paintings. Rudolf Steiner, the theosophy guru, ordered her not to show her work for 50 years. Which is probably how long it took until her first works were shown to the world.

Her work would not have been understood nor welcomed by her contemporaries. See van Gogh, see Gauguin, or Seurat. The critics would have laughed. But her peer might have been struck by her audacity.

Thought: Would it have changed the course of Modern Art?

She was the first Western artist to paint abstractions. Had they been seen at least by contemporary artists, her work might have changed the course of Modern Art. Put it on a faster track. The first abstractions were not painted until about 10 years later, and they tended to be more timid than hers. Her work also demonstrates an astounding variety. Below landscapes by Kandinsky (on the left) and by Malevich (on the right) both painted around 1906: they were looking for abstraction but had not found it yet!

Thought: I wish I had been the one to discover the trove!

I day dream: imagine opening the door to a barn and coming upon these superlative paintings! Breathtaking moment. Well, it's actually pretty much how it happened. When she died in 1944, she requested that her work not be shown for another 20 years. Hence the title of the show, Paintings for the Future is particularly apt. She left her 1000+ paintings, her texts, her notebooks to her nephew, Eric af Klint, an admiral in the navy. His reaction, according to his son Johan? "he was horrified". He probably felt this legacy of crazy paintings by his crazy old aunt was a curse more than anything else. It was stored in fact in a barn until the farmer asked them to move it out.

Thought: What is the future of the Paintings for the Future?

Her nephew Eric af Klint started a foundation in her name in 1972 which is worthy, considering he did not appreciate it, but just to preserved her work, without exhibiting it. According to her will, her work could have been shown from 1964, andit took another 20 years before it was first exhibited internationally at the 1986 Los Angeles show "The Spiritual in Art". MOMA did not include any of her work in its 2012 show "Inventing Abstraction". Apparently, they alleged as the reason that she did not define her work as art, - despite the fact that she went to art school and was trained as an artist. Occultism worries the establishment.
But in primary schools all over, children will be doing Hilma af Klint art projects. And young women scholars will write their thesis on her work for their art history degree!

Thought: how much money is the work worth?
The future of the work is uncertain. Not a single one has been sold yet, quite an incredible fact in regards to the monetization of the art world. Her work is in the position of a young, virginal girl, bare foot in her white night gown. Who will pay the most to wed her? Once a work or two has been sold, the fee paid for it will determine her place in the hierarchy of art economics. Will it be 10MYO, say like a Paul Signac or 100MYO, like a Modigliani? There is talk of the Foundation selling some of her work, and they are likely to go for a pretty penny, given the popularity of the show which will pay its money back for Museums. The fees would be used by the foundation to fund research into the artist and her work, assures Patrick O'Neill, the chairwoman of the Foundation. As there are more than 1000 paintings, that means that bundle of works left in a barn would be worth maybe half a billion dollars. An ironical lot of money for work by a woman who struggled financially through her life. But same story as van Gogh or Seurat, naturally. Now Robert Longo lives on the fat of the land with works that fetch 500K+, and where will they be in 100 years? 

Thought: Influences

I could not find information, and the exhibition shares none, about what art and artists she was exposed to. It's clear from her early work that she was familiar with contemporary painters,whether local ones or French: Monet, Manet. She was certainly influenced by science aesthetics as in the elegant scientific plate which she drew (see below) to sustain herself.
She is known to have traveled to Italy and to Switzerland. Did she see exhibitions there? Did she travel elsewhere?

I am glad she has found us and that we have found her.

written and published by  - -  Arabella von Arx

10 Women Artists That Are Vastly Underrated

Calla Lillies by O'Keefe

In the list of the 100 most expensive art work sold, the first work by a woman is in 100th place (maybe they cheated a little and dropped a few male artworks to sneak in one woman, Georgia O'Keefe, and spare our feelings). This stresses how much women's work has been suppressed and underrated. I believed for the longest time that women had created very little art work throughout the centuries, because they were discouraged to do so, did not have access to instruction nor to adequate equipment.

As I researched the project The Thread where I use the art work of women to illustrate women's condition through History, I realized that many more women created than I expected. Some were famous in their time such as Sofonisba Anguissola and Giovanna Garzoni. It was later that their work was systematically excluded from museums and art history books. I have enjoyed many wonderful, underrated artists's works. Here are some my favorite works, the ones that also should sell for hundreds of millions of dollars if any work of art should sell for that kind of money. Absent from the list are the most famous women artists whose work also should be in the 100 most expensive list, but who are not as underrated: Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Marina Abramovic. This is also a list concerned mostly with Western Art. We would need a more knowledgable art historian, and a much, much longer list for all the women creators from the rest of the world.

1. Giovanna Garzoni - Still Life. It amazes me that in the middle of the Renaissance, where the tendency was to shut women up (yes, women had more legal rights in the Middle Ages - they were not yet persecuted as witches which started in the Renaissance), the sexual innuendo in the work of Garzoni went completely unnoticed and uncensored. Artemisia Gentileschi could be pretty explicit too. See the violent birth scene disguised as Judith cutting Holoferne's head, or Mary Magdalene enjoying an orgasm thanks to her skulled lover. Giovanna Garzoni was called Chaste Garzoni during her lifetime, but in my opinion, she was familiar with a man's aroused private parts as evidenced by the beans above, gently swollen with life: life that is, life that might be. Neither vertically erect nor martial, it's a very different image from the aggressive phallus men artists have favored. Her open figs and melons are quite juicy too.

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Transgressions, Nalini Malani

2. Nalini Malani: (B 1946) - Remembering Mad Meg. There are many contemporary women artists who deserve a larger spot in the limelight, and that includes Malani who is bigger than life.  Her work is big, her referential is big, her soul is huge. Consequently, the work she produces, bewitching, is an enchantment. Malani has addressed the feminine condition extensively, but not exclusively. This is what she has to say about her piece: 'Mad Meg was a character in a Breugel painting, which is in Antwerp now. It’s not a very large painting; it’s about 75 centimeters high by about a meter wide. You see this figure, this woman who almost looks like an androgynous figure striding across a landscape of completely perverted things around her, for example, there is an egg-like humanoid eating through his anus. It’s almost like she is seeing all of this and somehow wants to put things right but then she is considered the deviant.' I find it very touching that she goes and salvages a female character from a European Renaissance painting.

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3. Sofonisba Anguissola: Her work is outstanding, it's difficult to choose one piece. She made stunningly beautiful portraits of women. In fact, she often explores the relationship between men and women, the female condition: a girl looks at her reading brother with an ambiguous expression: resentment? In Portrait of the Artist's Family, featured, her sister Minerva looks at the bond between her brother and her father, who seems only interested in the boy, and turns his back to her. The dog is the only one looking at the artist, asking her to bear witness to the injustice.
Anguissola is finely getting her due, with Lavinia Fontana, with an exhibition at the Prado in Madrid.

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4. Berthe Morisot might be considered famous enough to be excluded from this list. However, quite famous is not good enough. She should be the star because her work is amongst the very best there is: bold, gutsy not too say ballsy, big, passionate, sensual, daring, there is nothing "feminine" about it but her attachment to representing women, girls, and often mothers and daughters. She painted extensively her daughter Julie who was born from her marriage to Manet's younger brother Eugène. She merged impressionism and expressionism in work that is unrivaled in its exuberance.

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5. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an African American sculptor who studied at RISD and spent 12 years in Paris when that city was attracting African American luminaries where she nearly died of hunger, literally, while sculpting. She might be the most underrated of the women in this list. She was talented, expressive, brilliant, but her work got her very little recognition, and still to this day is acknowledged by a handful of art historians or African American scholars. She exhibited during her mid career, the Whitney purchased the Congolaise above, a piece of utmost delicateness and elegance, and she taught art. But later, her career petered out, and she ended up working as a maid. Makes me mad.

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6. Helen Schjerfbeck: An honest self portrait by painter Helen Schjerfbeck, prolific despite suffering from bad health. She could be a bit scattered, she tried all sorts of styles, and was very adventurous in her experiments. She had an original and reflective approach to womanhood. She was Finnish, at a time when a number of talented, inventive women painters worked: Elin Danielson-Gambogi and Ellen Thesleff. She is also to enjoy, finally, a large retrospective at the Royal Academy in London.

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7. Paula Modersohn-Becker: Selfportrait at 6th Wedding Anniversary is a paradoxical painting: she had left her husband to commit to her art, and was not, at least physically, pregnant. She eventually went back to her husband, and died following the birth of their daughter. Her last word is supposed to have been: "Shade". Shame. Yes, what a shame for her, for all of us. She would have been one of the major painters of the 20th Century. During her short life, she was prolific: her work, clearly inspired by Gauguin, incorporated Northern European naive styles. She also tended to frame her subjects very closely, giving them a mythic presence. I miss her deeply.

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8. Belkis Ayon: I'm at a loss to discuss her work, either it would take pages and pages of thinking and analyzing and scrutinizing, or there is only need to look at the work. But here are words that seem apt: extremely mystical, extremely original, extremely beautiful, extremely inventive. She was Cuban and died way too young in mysterious circumstances, as did Ana Mendieta who could be included in this list too. Both are supposed to have committed suicide, and both might have been murdered. 

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9. Leonor Fini, Leonor Carrington, Remedios Varos: that's three, but it was too difficult to choose amongst these superlative surrealists. This print was produced to promote a production of Tristan and Isolde at the Met in NYC. I prefer to call it "Two Women". It can be looked at as the epitome of dualism. Is it one woman or two? One sees, the other dreams. One comes out at the viewer, the other one invites the viewer into her self. Only their faces are quite distinct, their bodies might be merged even if the indication of a shoulder seems to locate the closed eyed in front, the open eyed protecting from behind. The technique, so skilled when we consider Fini was never formally trained, brings to mind Michelangelo, and creates an impression of translucence, as if we are looking at spirits.

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10. Marie-Gabrielle Capet  had to be in this list with this vibrant self portrait painted at the age of 22. How confident and bold she looks. Later, she seems more demure, alas, maybe she got the message that confidence was an unseemly attitude for a woman. She was a devoted student of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, also underrated, who taught other women (see her self portrait with two students including Marie-Gabrielle). Their studio must have been a lot of fun, and tender and warm too.

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The suppression of these women's work is unfair to the artists who were actually often more prominent in their life time then now. The institutionalization of art, through the creation of museums and art schools, the institution of art history, has been most prejudicial to women, and other minorities. In the Renaissance, when they wanted a good portrait, patrons did not mind so much the gender of the craft person as long as the painter had talent and could make a good likeness. But when it came to immortality, women were eliminated from memory. 

The suppression of these works has also been unfair to the public, particularly women. Many of these artists depicted their peer, not as objects but as subjects. They presented an interpretation of what it means to be a woman. Women have been deprived of this legacy, of this interpretative mirror of themselves while they have been assailed by images of women reduced to sexually available bodies, or to sexless saints.

Finally....  Most of art works by women artists are anonymous: sacred texts illuminations by nuns, embroideries, the magnificent tapestries from the Renaissance, quilts, pottery, dolls, not to mention the many women who worked in their father or brother or husband's workshop, unnamed and unrecognized. And now, the latest findings posit that even the Lascaux cave paintings were created by prehistoric women, and did they have talent!

written and published by  - -  Arabella Hutter von Arx

The Thread: A Prologue

Below is the prologue to a project part memoir, part historical fiction, The Thread: 

Inspired by Helen Schjerfbeck

Inspired by Remedios Varos

We were the only family that ate corn on the cob and celebrated Christmas on the 25^th of December instead of the 24^th. We didn’t know the simple explanation to these peculiarities: our mother was American. One day, long before she came to Switzerland, she had taken a machete and cut her life in two. Did she open this gash over one day? A month ? A year ? My father, who met her when she was 20, knew little more than we did. She had already changed her name, did not see any of her family nor any childhood friend. She did not write to them, did not speak to them, did not discuss. Thus we knew her, born at twenty, all questions about her past taboo. This code of silence existed before I, the youngest of the family, started asking questions. Even friends of my parents seemed to be aware of the taboo and respected it.

“She must come from Britain because she speaks English and often travels alone to London. “ we whispered during one of our secret conferences. She sent us beautiful postcards from the British Museum, with sweet words that failed to touch us as her absence seemed further proof of her aloofness.

“She must have lived near the sea, as she talked about picnics at the beach. “ Reported my sister. “She mentioned a nanny. “I added. “ She didn’t. “ “ Yes, she did. “ I imagined a large Victorian house, a bit run down, near windswept dunes covered with brambles. And behind the shutters of the villa, the great secret, the deep mystery that was hidden from our sight. If she made any allusion to the past, we would freeze and pretend casualness, in the hope that, oblivious to our presence, she would inadvertently slip into confidences.

The day of the revelation, we sat at regular intervals around my mother, hearts pounding. The living room looked reticent now that I didn’t live home anymore. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know, I was frightened. She started speaking, without much preamble.

‘I went to the embassy in Geneva to look up my last name in the phone book. I found my brother’s phone number. When I called a man answered. I didn’t know who he was.

“I’d like to speak to Vincent.”

“He’s not here. Who’s calling?”

 “His sister. Who are you?”

“His father.”

A childhood can not be restored in one or two hours. This narrative of her past would normally have been built over time by what our childhood terribly missed: by hearing touching and humorous anecdotes, stories from the grandmother we never met, looking at family photographs together, visiting relatives. We asked a few questions, as if stroking cautiously an unpredictable cat. She answered, describing the harrowing events that led her to cut all ties with her family in a manner as devoid of emotion as a notary reading one more will.

Inspired by Ana Mendieta

The burden of suffering which my mother had shed became mine. I filled not just with my mother’s pain, but her mother’s as well, and that of all her little brothers and sisters’, rippling down the generations. The only way to drain the overflowing vault was through the valve of my imagination. I began to make up the missing episodes in my mother’s life, and in her mother’s. Then I went back to my great-grandmother, the famous Lietta, who seemed the source of all our calamities. This emotional monster, what could she have gone through in her childhood? I had no reason to stop, and beyond this cruel grandmother, I went to listen to the story of each woman who miraculously gave birth to a girl who then in turn became a mother, a long meandering thread over the centuries, saved against all odds from being cut down by nature and men. I followed it back to the time when a handful of thinkers on their peninsula decided the important facts to remember would not be desires, births, jealousy, vanity, rape. Instead they came up with a discipline that would only record political events, thus excluding women’s memory: History was born.

To read the first story of 100 women talk to their daughters over 2500 years, click here.

All illustrations original works by Arabella Hutter, as are the texts.