COLLECTION NAME:
Undergraduate Thesis Collection
Record
Title:
Hilma af Klint: Mediumship as Agency
Creator:
Payne, Madeleine
Subject:
Thesis (B.F.A.) -- Art History
Subject:
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Art History
Rights:
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract:
“Throughout the history of art, women artists have not been accepted as easily as their male counterparts and are often excluded from the canon. In order to be acknowledged as practicing artists, women had to go to extra ordinary lengths just to be taken seriously. Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) serves as a model for this phenomenon. At the turn of the 20th century, she worked as a traditional landscape and portrait artist, satisfying the normative gender expectation at the time. While painting in accepted genres for her gender, af Klint was also pioneering in abstraction. As abstraction was just emerging in fine art at the beginning of the twentieth century, Hilma af Klint understood that as a female artist using abstract forms, her work might be received with criticism or perhaps with derision.
Earlier in her career, af Klint relied on the practices of mysticism and mediumship. She discovered these practices through a Spiritualist group called the Theosophical Society. Her use of mediumship allowed her to gain a sense agency in the art world. The technological advancements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries opened the eyes of the public to the existence of complex systems beyond visual reality. This gave rise to the popularity of the practice of mysticism. Mysticism is defined as the ‘direct communion with ultimate reality.’ 1 Mediumship became a popular mystical practice because people wanted to communicate with the dead and beings from higher dimensions. Most mediums were women, and these women often used their alleged ability to commune with a higher plane to rise above the confines of their gender and have a voice to which people listened.2 Hilma af Klint, is Linda an artist who utilized mysticism as a tool to pioneer in the world of painting. Through seances conducted with four other women, a group who called themselves De Fem, Af Klint claimed to receive messages from male spirits known as the High Masters who directed her to paint her abstract works: The Paintings for the Temple.3 Later in her career, af Klint moved away from the idea that her paintings came directly from the spiritual beings and took credit for her own ideas and innovations. However, based on the reception this work received from her contemporaries, she understood that her work was not likely to be taken seriously in her lifetime, so she took an unusual step: she wrote in her notebook that her abstract works could not be shown in public until 20 years after her death.” –Abstract
Keywords: abstraction, High Masters, Hilma af Klint, De Fem, medium, mysticism, theosophy.
Earlier in her career, af Klint relied on the practices of mysticism and mediumship. She discovered these practices through a Spiritualist group called the Theosophical Society. Her use of mediumship allowed her to gain a sense agency in the art world. The technological advancements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries opened the eyes of the public to the existence of complex systems beyond visual reality. This gave rise to the popularity of the practice of mysticism. Mysticism is defined as the ‘direct communion with ultimate reality.’ 1 Mediumship became a popular mystical practice because people wanted to communicate with the dead and beings from higher dimensions. Most mediums were women, and these women often used their alleged ability to commune with a higher plane to rise above the confines of their gender and have a voice to which people listened.2 Hilma af Klint, is Linda an artist who utilized mysticism as a tool to pioneer in the world of painting. Through seances conducted with four other women, a group who called themselves De Fem, Af Klint claimed to receive messages from male spirits known as the High Masters who directed her to paint her abstract works: The Paintings for the Temple.3 Later in her career, af Klint moved away from the idea that her paintings came directly from the spiritual beings and took credit for her own ideas and innovations. However, based on the reception this work received from her contemporaries, she understood that her work was not likely to be taken seriously in her lifetime, so she took an unusual step: she wrote in her notebook that her abstract works could not be shown in public until 20 years after her death.” –Abstract
Keywords: abstraction, High Masters, Hilma af Klint, De Fem, medium, mysticism, theosophy.
Publisher:
Savannah, Georgia: Savannah College of Art and Design
Date:
2020-05
Format:
1 online resource: 1 PDF (Thesis, 53 pages, color illustrations)