Review of Documentary Film on Visionary and Abstract Artist Hilma af Klint

If you regularly read this blog, you’ll have noted a lot of postings regarding visionary Abstract artist Hilma af Klint who’s work pre-dates what’s considered the dawning of Abstract art by several decades. Besides the beauty and puissance of her work, our interest has been picqued by her claims of inspiration from mystic sources. Now there’s a documentary film devoted to Hilma and her work, “Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,” by Halina Dyrschka. Here’s a review in the NY Times (home of course to much fake news – so we’ll understand if you choose to disregard this posting because of the source). Excerpts read:

“‘Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,’ a documentary by Halina Dyrschka, provides a thoughtful survey of its subject. It’s enriched by the dazzling charisma of her art and limited by the scarcity of biographical material. The timeline of her life is set forth, and her voice is conjured by passages from her voluminous notebooks, but the fact that she lived and worked so far from the centers of the art world means that some of the usual supporting material in a film like this is lacking. Nobody who remembers her well is still around. There are a handful of photographs of af Klint at various stages of her life, but no moving images, an absence Dyrschka addresses with discreet re-enactments that show af Klint in her studio…

“She was drawn to the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky and to the teachings of the Austrian spiritualist Rudolf Steiner, with whom she corresponded. Her visionary interests, far from suggesting eccentricity, place her squarely in the mainstream of modernism, many of whose exponents in various arts (including Kandinsky) found inspiration in the esoteric.”