Major Abstraction Exhibition Opens This Week At Tate Modern

By Jake Erlewine

A blockbuster exhibition on early abstraction at Tate Modern, titled “Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life,” opened on April 20 in London. The exhibition is the most extensive collection of af Klint paintings in the UK to date, coinciding with her increased recognition as a foundational member of Early Abstraction. It pairs her large-scale work with another titan of abstraction - Piet Mondrian - and charts his concurrent course from figuration to the Neo-Plastic artwork of De Stijl. Although they never met, the curators find an opportunity for convergence in their shared interest in the natural, as well as within their respective explorations of spirituality.

Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge IV, 1911-13, oil on canvas. Credit: Tate Modern

Visually, Laura Cumming of the Guardian picked up on the fact that the curators have segregated the painters in such a way that the works don’t need to vie for attention with each other, calling the comparisons “tactful, never competitive.” In fact, after the first room which displays their early works as academic landscape students, the painters barely share a wall. Their divergences, spiritually and artistically, are well-documented. While Af Klint was herself a medium, isolating herself from society and supposedly receiving commissions from Theosophical spirits, Mondrian’s later work appears to be less overtly spiritual, but when looking at artwork from his later figurative period, such as the Evolution Triptych (1911), viewers are able to see the beginnings of Mondrian’s nascent Theosophical beliefs. Within this work, three female figures lie in various states of spiritual awakening. Reading from left to right and returning to the center, the artist depicts a spiritually unfulfilled and emotionally charged life, where the red flowers surrounding the figure’s head evoke passion. The right panel contains the moment of spiritual awakening - embodied by the Theosophical six-pointed star - representing the union of the physical and spiritual planes. Finally, the central panel glows yellow, akin to a Duccio Madonna, charged with the very same spiritual energy which makes the latter unforgettable. 

Piet Mondrian, Evolution, 1911. Oil on canvas. Picture Credit: Henning Kaiser, Getty Images

Although each was highly spiritual, each still sought inspiration primarily from the natural world; both made tens of botanical studies and the motif of a ‘Tree of Life’ became a significant theme throughout the oeuvre of af Klint. For example, within the Tree of Knowledge series, af Klint focuses on the tree as an axis mundi for the planes of existence, charting the path of psychological, spiritual, and physiological energy from its roots to its highest branches. The inclusion of a heart drives home the notion of the artist’s perception of trees having regenerative and life-giving power. This is certainly neither the pure art of Kandinsky, nor the non-objectivity of Malevich. While the theosophical framework behind each artist’s body of work can be daunting to explore, the intellectual understanding of the works is second to their “retinal,” as Duchamp would say, quality of being incredible works of art from an aesthetic standpoint. In conclusion, these two artists seek to answer the same spiritual questions from different viewpoints; whether they succeeded is up to the viewer, but it certainly is a privilege to see their attempts at answering the unanswerable. The exhibition runs until September 3.

Bibliography

Introvigne, Massimo. “New Religious Movements and the Visual Arts.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 4 (2016): 3–13. 

HODERMARSKY, ELISABETH. “Becoming Piet Mondrian: Two Transitional Works.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 2016, 105–9.

Tate. “Hilma Af Klint & Mondrian.” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/hilma-af-klint-piet-mondrian/exhibition-guide. 2023.