Name: Hilma af Klint
Uploaded: 2021-10-01T10:30:20.000Z
Duration: 7 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

SUSAN CIANCIOLO: It goes beyond the visual.

Adverbs of degree

JOSIAH McELHENY: What's astounding is her bravery.

There was nothing being made like this in the whole world.

TRACEY BASHKOFF: The leap into full, nonobjective abstraction—

NARRATOR: At the turn of the 20th Century,

the world was on the brink of dramatic change.

Painters like Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian

began to replace perceived reality with signs,

But that very same year, another artist passed—

one whose work was yet unknown to the public,

a female artist who worked to make the invisible visible.

Hilma af Klint: an artist for the future.

Hilma af Klint produced hundreds of paintings

and thousands of pages of writings and notes

that are as confounding as they are revelatory.

with more questions than she did answers.

BASHKOFF: Hilma af Klint's abstract work predates

long considered the pioneers of abstraction.

Af Klint, working apart from those artists,

af Klint was among the earliest women to study

at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm.

She painted botanical studies, landscape paintings—

But her experience with spiritualism and the science of the day

CHRISTINE BURGIN: Whether it's Christian, Rosicrucian, Theosophical,

she explored many different spiritual realms.

NARRATOR: Af Klint began to conduct séance sessions

Here's the table they met at. Here's an altar they built.

Together they would communicate with spirits as mediums.

The guides they encountered would send them messages,

One of these séance sessions proved to be fateful.

In 1906 a spiritual guide commissioned af Klint

to prepare an artistic message for humankind.

BASHKOFF: This commission that she receives

NARRATOR: In the period between 1906 and 1915,

af Klint produced 193 paintings that attempted

faith that it contained meaning and meaning

that was essential to how the universe is put together.

NARRATOR: A mystical, idiosyncratic geometry emerged.

CIANCIOLO: They look like sacred geometric languages.

So, it's living, It's a living being, her work.

Forms began to interlock or even come into collision,

Botanical studies stood beside watercolors

Words and letters, sometimes indecipherable,

Af Klint charted and codified these images and her

philosophy in an expansive series of notebooks.

NARRATOR: “The Ten Largest” are among

BASHKOFF: The scale of “The Ten Largest”

McELHENY: These gigantic, beautiful, bright, bright pink images.

BASHKOFF: The subject is just as monumental

The ten paintings go through the life-span of humans,

NARRATOR: Af Klint rarely exhibited this work,

keeping these paintings and hundreds like them

not be shown for twenty years after her death.