INTERVIEW: New Hilma af Klint documentary goes ‘Beyond the Visible’
Photo: Beyond the Visible looks at the career and life of Hilma af Klint. Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films / Provided by press site with permission.
The doyenne of the modern-art world may just be Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist who didn’t find great fame in her lifetime (1862-1944), but whose posthumous influence is profound, no doubt cementing her status in museums and amongst critics. Exhibitions of her abstract works have been blockbusters in several museums across the world, especially New York City’s Guggenheim. Her paintings, several of them enormous in size and bright in color, are stirring creations that draw the eye in to a series of rounded shapes and wondrous shades.
However, quite sadly, Klint didn’t receive a tremendous amount of acclaim during her own lifetime — no doubt a byproduct of the misogyny of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Looking back with the assistance of hindsight, it becomes obvious that Klint was a trendsetter and trailblazer, an abstract artist who predated other more recognized painters, such as Wassily Kandinsky.
Filmmaker Halina Dyrschka has crafted a new film that looks at the mastery of Klint’s work and also tries to fill in some of the historical blanks in her narrative. The result is Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, which opens virtually in New York City and Los Angeles April 17.
“I was supposed to come on April 4 to the U.S., and on April 10, there should have been the premiere in New York at The Metrograph,” Dyrschka said in a recent phone interview. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted her plans and turned the movie business on its head.
For now, Dyrschka’s film will be presented as a streaming showcase, but perhaps in a few months, theaters will open once again — and Beyond the Visible, from Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber, will be offered properly to the moviegoing public.
For the director, Klint’s story was so interesting to learn about, but what truly hooked her into the story were the actual paintings. These massive creations, many of which are on display in the documentary, immediately capture the attention of the viewer, begging them to interpret, consider and evaluate.
“What inspired me were the paintings when I saw them for the first time,” she said. “Actually I was reading the newspaper one day, and there was an article where it was written … ‘Art History Has to Be Rewritten.’ That was the title of this article, and then I read it. It was about Hilma af Klint, an exhibition in Stockholm, and half a year later it came to Berlin. So I went to the exhibition in Berlin, and I was speechless when I saw those paintings. Then I immediately thought … fantastic, and second I thought who is responsible that I’m living for such a long time on this planet and nobody has told me about it. That’s how the idea came for the film. I thought I have to make a film about this.”
Dyrschka read that cultural article in a January 2013 publication, and she viewed Klint’s paintings in person in the summer of 2013. Throughout these months, she kept hearing a narrative about how this female painter led a “very lonely and isolated” life somewhere in the northern reaches of Sweden.
“She [apparently] never exhibited her abstract paintings, and nobody realized her and recognized her,” the filmmaker said. “That was the picture I had, and then I went into the exhibition. And when I saw those huge paintings … I immediately realized that it can’t be true. It can’t be true because whoever saw or laid eyes on these extremely beautiful paintings, whether you like them or not, you don’t forget them. You don’t forget them, so it’s impossible that nobody saw it.”
After quite a lot of research, Dyrschka realized there were many layers to Klint’s story. For starters, the artist was making these characteristic and unforgettable paintings in the middle of Stockholm, and she was sharing an archive with other artists. According to the director, many people were dropping by and seeing the work.
“She must have met other artists and even known artists in Sweden, so she was very well aware of everything that was going on,” Dyrschka said. “And I’m sure that the people who have seen her paintings must have talked about them, so the whole picture was falling apart while I was doing my research. And I thought, hmm, OK. What was so interesting for me is … not many people have asked too many questions about Hilma af Klint so far when I started this. This has changed now. When you start the research, you realize by simple questions you just find out some things because nobody has ever looked them up.”
As an example, one archive that Dyrschka contacted originally said they had no Klint paintings in their collection, but the filmmaker kept asking, thinking that the initial assessment must have been wrong.
“Then they said, we can look it up,” she remembers. “The next day I got a call, and they discovered that they had eight paintings of Hilma af Klint.”
For Dyrschka, when she first laid eyes on the paintings, she was struck by both their gargantuan size and their vivid colors. However, most memorable of all was the atmosphere created by the works of art.
“I was walking through the whole exhibition — I went several times — and that was something that I experienced that I had never experienced anywhere before in any other museum, and that is the total lack of negativity,” she said. “I can’t describe it in another way. It’s a total lack of aggressivity or negativity, even if she’s showing … scenes that are quite brutal, with swans or something and you see blood all over, but it is never in a negative way. She’s showing somehow the world behind everything, and it seems to be a good world, better than this one that we have created, I think. And so the atmosphere with the people standing there looking at her paintings, there is a pure joy coming out of those paintings and a pure joy that is really reaching out for the people in front of them. You could really feel that. People are completely happy or just calm and thinking, standing there very silently thinking. It’s a good atmosphere, and that is something special. I’ve never experienced that anywhere in an exhibition before.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, directed by Halina Dyrschka, will virtually premiere Friday, April 17. Click here for more information.
