All posts tagged abstract art

Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian @ Tate Modern

‘Nature or, that which I see, inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that…’
(Piet Mondrian, 1914)

‘The more we discover the wonders of nature, the more we become aware of ourselves.’
(Hilma af Klint, 1917)

Mondrian is obviously one of the masters of modern art; most educated people would immediately recognise one of his characteristic abstract paintings. By contrast, Hilma af Klint is a lot less well-known. What they have in common, though, was that they both journeyed from late-Victorian figurative i.e. realistic art, to abstraction, albeit completely different styles of abstraction. And, as with so many pioneers of abstraction, they developed their modern abstract styles in response to surprisingly old-fashioned spiritual motivations, to deeply-held mystical and Theosophical beliefs about Nature and Truth which this excellent exhibition explores in great detail.

I didn’t expect to like this exhibition that much and, from the publicity photos had taken a little against af Klint. How wrong I was! This is a brilliant exhibition – af Klint emerges as a huge artist in her own right – and, above all, I had no idea that two artists could have produced such a range and variety of styles. There are so many different types of painting to savour and enjoy.

Landscape painters

Hilma af Klint (1862 to 1944) and Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) began their careers as academically trained landscape painters in the late nineteenth century, before developing radically new models of painting in the twentieth century. Although they did not know each other – or of the other’s work – the exhibition shows how they began their careers very firmly rooted in naturalistic depictions of the natural world, and how they slowly, steadily took different but parallel paths away from these roots to arrive at highly stylised abstraction.

‘The Gein: Trees along the water’ by Piet Mondrian (c.1905) Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Flowers and trees

Both artists spent a lot of time painting flowers. Room three devotes a whole wall to displaying 20 wonderfully accurate botanical watercolours done by af Klint, the kind of thing which still illustrates guides to wildflowers I’ve bought recently.

Botanical drawing by Hilma af Klint (c.1890) Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation

Marvellous, isn’t it? A whole wall of lovely paintings of buttercups, nasturtiums, stonecrop, thistle, saxifrage, apple blossom and many more. I wanted to buy the entire wall and take it home with me.

Installation view of ‘Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian’ at Tate Modern, showing the wall of botanical paintings by af Klint (photo by the author)

On the opposite wall are 15 flower paintings by Mondrian which are more full-bodied and intense. According to the curators:

Many of these paintings and drawings of flowers that Mondrian made in 1908 to 1909 are full of symbolism, mainly relating to Theosophy. Shortly afterwards, he moved away from symbolist representations, but continued to portray flowers until his death, selling them for income at times of financial difficulty. He repeatedly returned to the same varieties, such as chrysanthemums and arum lilies.

Some of these are really standout pieces. Take this stunning amaryllis.

‘Red amaryllis with blue background’ by Piet Mondrian (1909 to 1910) Private Collection

After staring at it for some time I realised I really liked the depiction of the bottle the flower is standing, a beautifully pure and evocative rendition, almost a piece of 1960s Pop Art.

The Ether

During their careers, new technologies such as the microscope, X-ray radiography and photography were challenging human perception. The evidence of worlds invisible to the human eye catalysed shifts across science, spirituality and the arts. These discoveries in the sciences meshed with slightly earlier schools of thought, especially the theories of Theosophy. The Theosophy Society was founded in 1875 its chief thinker, Helena Blavatsky, published works developing the theory during the 1880s and 90s.

The exhibition devotes an entire room to exploring various aspects of Theosophical belief and its impact on our two artists, and it wasn’t a peripheral impact: in 1904, af Klint joined the Stockholm lodge of the Theosophical Society and Mondrian Amsterdam Lodge in 1909. A central belief, which meshed with the science of the time, was that all living things are connected by an invisible, imperceiveable force, which they called ‘the ether’, and that’s why this gallery has been called The Ether.

One among many aspects of this was an anthropomorphised version of Darwin’s theory of evolution which lent it a spiritual aspect, optimistically hoping that all life forms were evolving and yearning towards higher spiritual truths. Hence af Klint’s series titled ‘Evolution’. Here you can see how zoomorphic shapes and botanical motifs have been simplified and stylised to form the basis of complex but abstract designs.

‘The Evolution, The WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series, Group VI, Number 15’ by Hilma af Klint (1908) Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation

This spiritualised version of evolution attracted many writers, artists and thinkers at the turn of the century. The Great War had yet to dent, or demolish, people’s romantic faith in progress and improvement. Mondrian gave the title to a strikingly different kind of work, one depicting three highly stylised female forms.

‘Evolution’ by Piet Mondrian (1911) Kunstmuseum Den Haag – bequest Salomon B. Slijper. X83910

Mondrian wrote of this painting: ‘It’s not so bad, but I’m not there yet.’ The figures represent the stages in evolution from the physical to the spiritual realm, as promoted in Theosophy. The triangular nipples and navels of the women, which point upwards and downwards, symbolise their spiritual and earthly orientation. The central figure embodies the fulfilment of the evolutionary process, to the spiritual realm. The flowers on the left panel are symbols of purity, while those on the right symbolise tragic suffering.

Incidentally, among many other treasures in the Ether Room is the surprising inclusion of four small paintings by the famous psychotherapist and guru Carl Jung. To quote the curators:

Carl Jung’s Liber Novus is now known as ‘The Red Book’, due to the colour of its cover. It is not certain that he ever intended to publish this account and interpretation of his years of personal crisis between 1913 and 1916. The book is full of illustrations combining symbols from various religions, such as mandalas and trees encased in egg-like forms that resonate with af Klint’s work. It is regarded as the seed of the analytical psychology Jung would later develop, in which the conscious and unconscious are assimilated into the whole personality.

The four works by Jung are surprisingly powerful and certainly fit right in, in this context.

Illustration from Carl Jung’s Red Book © The Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung

Abstraction 1. The impact of cubism

How did Mondrian arrive at his final style? In stages. He travelled to Paris in 1911 and was immediately galvanised by cubism which he reinterpreted with a spiritualist slant. He began reworking drawings and paintings of trees in the new style. the catalogue has a nifty quote from Guillaume Apollinaire assessing a small show of Mondrian’s drawing attention to the obvious cubist influence, but cannily predicting that Mondrian was using it for other ends and would probably develop his own version.

There are many cubist-era works by Mondrian on show. Here you can see cubism hitting his naturalistic depictions of flowers and trees like a freight train, taking it somewhere completely new.

‘Grey tree’ by Piet Mondrian (1911) Kunstmuseum Den Haag

The exhibition includes examples of the many interim steps, fascinating and often beguiling abstracts in their own right, which move towards this, six years later, in the midst of the Great War, when the discrete elements of the earlier paintings have become solidified into blocks, blocks of abstract colour, floating against an empty background (or a background flooded with invisible ether, which joins the disparate entities?)

‘Composition in colour B’ by Piet Mondrian (1917) Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands

Abstraction 2. Mondrian reaches his mature style

‘By the unification of architecture, sculpture and painting a new plastic reality will be created.’ (Piet Mondrian, 1917)

Around 1920 everything came together in the new style of rectangular grids separated by thick straight black lines, a visual language of ‘pure relationships’ which he called ‘neo-plasticism’. These paintings abandoned any form of symbolism as they become irregular grids. He set out to reduce painting to its basic principles, removing individual aspects (which he called ‘tragic’) to express the ‘universal’.

In 1921 he published an essay titled ‘Le Néo-Plasticisme: Principe général de l’équivalence plastique’ which explains neo-plasticism as an approach to representing the ‘universal’ through balancing oppositions of the most basic elements of painting: position, size and colour.

‘Composition with Red, Black, Yellow, Blue and Grey’ by Piet Mondrian (1921) Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Mondrian believed that neo-plastic principles were destined to define the world around us. Some critics described the paintings as having ‘jazz rhythms’ and I’ve seen modern jazz album covers with Mondrians on them, both of them expressing something about the clean pure and yet somehow dynamic lines of modernity. The Tate bookshop includes ‘The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian’ by Nancy Troy which looks interesting, an examination of how the Mondrian style was curated, copied and publicised, of how ‘the popular appeal of Mondrian’s instantly recognizable style in fashion, graphic design, and a vast array of consumer commodities’.

One room is devoted to Mondrian’s mature style and there’s a very noticeable difference between the works from the 1920s and 30s. In both the works from the 1920s, not all the lines extend to the very edge of the canvas. Petty detail though this may seem, it makes a lot of difference, because in the next space are three classic Mondrians from the 1930s and in each instance the black lines do extend all the way to the edge. Trivial though it sounds, they look more complete, more finished, more total.

It’s a mystery to me and something the curators don’t address which is how come such rigid geometric shapes are so very pleasing to the eye and mind. they feel calming, deep, completing in a way which is hard to convey. Mondrian himself commented:

‘Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes “life”. I recognised that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites.’ (Piet Mondrian, 1937)

Not sure that helps explain why this look immediately struck everyone as clean and classic and has remained so for 80 years.

Abstraction 3. The Ten Largest

‘My mission, if it succeeds, is of great significance to humankind. For I am able to describe the path of the soul from the beginning of the spectacle of life to its end.’ (Hilma af Klint, 1917)

I thought the climax of Mondrian’s development in those three classic works from the 1930s, presented in a clean white rectangular space, would be difficult, but in the event the curators completely trump them with the last room in the exhibition. This is devoted to a set of ten enormous, huge and overwhelming canvases by af Klint, titled ‘The Ten Largest’.

The Ten Largest, Group IV, Number 7, Adulthood by Hilma af Klint (1907) Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation

These ten huge paintings represent the stages of life, with two each representing Childhood, two devoted to Youth, four to Adulthood, and the final pair to Old Age. I thought I wouldn’t like these at all but, somehow, the preceding nine rooms, showing the slow development of her style, explaining the mystical and spiritual beliefs behind it, had softened me up and prepared me. I thought they were magnificent.

The Ten Largest, Group IV, Number 3, Youth by Hilma af Klint (1907) Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation

‘The Ten Largest’ are part of ‘The Paintings for The Temple’, a body of works af Klint believed was commissioned by her spiritual guides (we have learned about her spiritual guides throughout the show). Af Klint dreamed of building a temple in the form of a spiral where her paintings could be hung together as a ‘beautiful wall covering’. To ascend through the temple would mean moving towards a higher state of being.

Installation view of ‘Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life’ at Tate Modern showing two of the four Adulthood works.  Photo: Tate (Jai Monaghan)

It took me a while to realise that the four ages are colour coded: the Childhood pair have a lovely deep blue background, the two Childhood works have an orange background, the four Adulthood paintings the lilac colour you can see in the photo above, and the final Old Age pair have a pink background. Then I realised that the colour in each set fades and becomes paler in the second or later work in each set, as if that era’s virility fades as it prepares to transmute to the next stage of life. None of that, none of the richness or intensity of the colour, and the dramatic sense of their changing hues, comes over in these photographs.

Installation view of ‘Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life’ at Tate Modern showing, from left to right, the second Childhood (blue), the two Youth (orange) and the four Adulthood (lilac) paintings. Photo: Tate (Jai Monaghan)

As you can see each painting consists of arrangements of completely abstract designs and patterns and yet, slowly, as you study them, you realise certain motifs recur in each set, giving them a thematic unity.

I spent a lot of time wondering why the final two paintings, the Old Age set, were the ones with the most conspicuous use of symmetry. Is it because, after the storms of life, your knowledge settles into a balanced wisdom?

And the even more puzzling fact that the very last painting is the only one to contain  a square or rectangular feature, namely a grid of squares like a chessboard. Is it because the swirling zoomorphic shapes of active life give way, in one’s last years, to a harder, adamantine, inflexible knowledge?

The Ten Largest, Group IV, Number 10, Old Age by Hilma af Klint (1907) Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation

Almost certainly not, but I was beguiled. I found myself walking round, sitting and staring, getting up and reviewing them slowly, again and again. I couldn’t tear myself away, an experience I’ve had with only a few other exhibitions – I remember not wanting to leave a room full of Monet paintings of the River Thames years ago. Same here. I found this final room completely absorbing, entrancing and didn’t want to leave.

There’s lots and lots of lovely paintings, in an amazingly wide range of styles, sizes, and intentions, throughout this wonderful show. But this final room is worth the admission price by itself.

The video

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by Simon on August 5, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 5, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/hilma-af-klint-piet-mondrian-tate-modern/

Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern

Born in Prague, Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová (1936 to 1996) spent most of her career in the central European Slovak city of Košice, the second-largest city in Slovakia near the borders of Hungary and Ukraine. Here she developed and experimented with relatively small-scale abstract sculptures, the overwhelming majority of them using white plaster cast in organic rounded shapes. To enter the four rooms of this retrospective is to enter a world of whiteness, comprising scores of mysterious, self-contained ovoid shapes, some incorporating metal or wood, but the great majority a pure, smooth, round whiteness. At first glance they might almost be bones or fossils in a natural history museum.

Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern

The four rooms of this exhibition bring together works rarely exhibited before in the UK to create an light and airy survey of Bartuszová’s career from the early 1960s, when she began her experimentation with casting, to the late 1980s, when she was making bigger, more varied and more site-specific art.

During her working life Bartuszová created around 500 sculptures, ranging from numerous small organic forms to larger commissions for public spaces, as well as works designed to be integrated into landscapes. They have titles like ‘egg’, ‘drop’, ‘folded figure’ though many are so pure and abstract they can’t even manage a title and are simply labelled ‘untitled’.

‘Folded Figure’ by Maria Bartuszová (1965) Collection of Amy Gold and Brett Gorvy

Filling balloons with plaster

They look like this because in the 1960s Bartuszová began experimenting with taking balloons or even condoms, and pouring plaster into them in order to create smooth, white balloon shapes. Because the plaster obviously weighted down and distorted the balloons, creating a smooth flowing ‘blobby’ effect, she called this playful approach ‘gravistimulated shaping’.

As an experiment she sometimes dunked the setting plaster in water which also had the effect of smoothing the surface. The early sculptures made using this method evoke natural and living forms, such as drops of water and, above all, eggs, although other biological or anatomical shapes may suggest themselves to the viewer.

‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1973) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

Casting balloons in plaster

In the 1980s Bartuszová inverted her practice, so to speak. Instead of blowing wet plaster into balloons, she started doing the (more obvious) approach of blowing up the balloons and casting the plaster around them. She called this ‘pneumatic casting’.

The most obvious change was in the surface texture of the casts which went from being beautifully smooth to becoming relatively rough and textured. But there were other implications, the most striking of which was that, having made the case, because it’s so fragile, you can crack or fragment it, and suddenly create a completely different psychovisual impact. Instead of smooth completeness, you have fragmentation and craggy edges. And she went on to discover that, the bigger the balloon (she took to using meteorological balloons), the more holes you could make, and the more strange and evocative the resulting shape would appear.

‘Egg, but not Columbus’s’ by Maria Bartuszová (1987) Courtesy Slovak National Gallery, SNG

Endless eggs

This turned out to be a highly resourceful strategy, in that:

  1. It can be scaled up: you can make massive cracked shell sculptures this way and the bigger the sculpture, the more elaborate the sense of shells within shells within shells.
  2. She also discovered that you can add together these balloon-shaped fragments to create ‘multicellular’ shapes and, insofar as they are cracked and exposed, allowed her to explore countless types of empty space and ‘negative volumes’. She described each result as ‘a tiny void full of a tiny infinite universe’.

Looking at them now it suddenly occurs to me they look a bit like the clotted balls of frogspawn, but somehow frozen and cracked. Or maybe the models of complex molecules I saw in school chemistry lessons and you see in scientific literature. She referred to them as ‘endless eggs’. Here she is in her studio, in the 1980s.

Maria Bartuszová in her studio with sculptures, Košice, Slovakia 1987 by unknown photographer

The damaged eggs really have a very different vibe from the balloon casts. The latter feel smooth and complete, and very sensuous to look at. Freud says that looking is an evolutionary advanced form of touching, and you can feel the smoothness and calming weight of the earlier shapes in your mind’s eye. But the cracked shells, obviously enough, feel jagged and damaged, empty and lifeless and, somehow, spent.

Add wire

The next step down this route was to introduce metal wire. If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that that’s what she’s doing: finalising the arrangement of twines of fine wire in, around and through a complex congeries of cracked egg shapes.

‘Untitled’ by Maria Bartuszová (1985) Tate © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

This apparently simple addition adds a whole new layer of complexity to the works. The untitled piece I’ve shown, above, is the work that Tate has used on the poster for this exhibition and it is certainly very characteristic of this phase or branch of her work, but I’m not sure I like it.

I very much like abstract art, and geometric shapes and I know what they mean when the curators point out that many of the balloon ones are small enough to imagine cradling in your hands. But something about the ragged asymmetricality, the unpredictability, and the jagged surfaces of the broken shells made me uneasy. If my mind’s eye warmed to the smooth curves of the full-bodied balloon shapes, it recoiled from the broken, barbed feel of these works.

In the country

In the 1980s Bartuszová moved to a house in Košice with a studio and a large garden on a hillside. There are photos which show a rambling sloping garden with small trees into which she has inserted some of the multiple balloon works.

Tree by Maria Bartuszová (1987) consisting of a plum tree, plaster, string, plastic, foil and paper, in the artist’s garden in Košice, Slovakia © Center for Contemporary Arts (NCSU), Bratislava, Slovakia. Courtesy the Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice and Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Photo by Gabriel Kladek

After the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring of 1968, many artists retreated from political or social statements and found refuge in nature and spirituality. Bartuszová took to spirituality, reading about Zen Buddhism (as so many people did in the early 1970s) and, more to the point, began incorporating natural objects in her work.

Here is a large branch half-drowned in plaster to create the impression of snow. I liked these ‘snow casts’ because they look like branches in snow such as I saw just a few months ago when London had heavy snowfall, and because I love trees. She called the series of works exploring this approach ‘Melting Snow’.

‘Tree’ by Maria Bartuszová (photo by the author)

Metal sculptures

So far I’ve followed Bartuszová’s work along one particular avenue of development but there were, in fact, other strands and threads to her work. For a start there’s a whole different strand made up of works case in metal which obviously have a very different vibe from the cool white plaster works.

Folded Figure II (Haptic) by Maria Bartuszová (1967) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice. Photo courtesy Michael Brzezinski

Ordinarily, I like small, geometric, metal abstract sculptures very much indeed but somehow these cold metal objects felt so far removed from the warm mental feeling given by the plaster casts – from the central logic of her development – that I recoiled from them, in the same way that I wasn’t sure whether I liked the cracked eggshells or their barbed wire finish meshes.

Bound and tied sculptures

More in line with the soft mood of the plaster casts was a kind of hybrid form she developed, where smooth, gloop plaster casts interacted with metal or wood. Most often this took the form of wire, or sometimes string, twined round eggs shapes to make them bulge, very much into the shape of cells at the earliest stage of cell multiplication when the nascent life form consists of only 2 or 4 or 8 cells. You can see examples on the table in the first photo at the top of this review, or in the photo below.

Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1986) © The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

Again, I didn’t like the use of the thin wire or twine. Inexplicably and irrationally, they made me feel tied up in wire, made me feel breathless and constrained. According to the curators, these many objects tied and bound and wired symbolised for Bartuszová ‘the bonds and constraints of human relationships’. The curators only mention in passing that she experienced  ‘challenges in her marriage’ which eventually broke down and ended in 1984. Quite.

The curators make these works out to be sophisticated and complicated meditations on or expressions of the way personal and familial relationships are interconnected with nature, they way they capture the trace of a moment in solid form, in a tactile fragment of time. That her work is a thinking-through of sensual shapes, an extended exploration of feeling through sculptural practice. Fair enough. But the wire-snagged endless eggs made me feel like I was ripping my hand on barbed wire and the wire-bound cells made me feel asphyxiated.

On the other hand, I liked what you could call the ‘belted’ works, where the constraining force isn’t wire but more like a belt. Her work along this line of investigation, in the 1980s, continued with the themes of binding and pressure but incorporated many more materials such as acrylic, string, bronze, rubber and wood. Basically, I found these funny and charming.

Untitled by Maria Bartuszová (1972 to 1974) Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Social art

Bartuszová left a legacy of some 500 sculptures which stimulate, please or disturb in their quiet but steadily experimental, abstract way. About 80 are on display in this exhibition. But there are (at least) two other distinct aspects of her practice.

In the mid-1960s Bartuszová had branched out to experiment with small sculptures composed of interlocking shapes, many from her trademark plaster (such as ‘Folded Figure’, 1965) but also series cast from bronze and aluminium. These were conceived as 3-D jigsaw puzzles which could be taken apart and reassembled.

Installation view of Maria Bartuszová @ Tate Modern showing some of her interlocking 3-D puzzles (photo by the author)

Early in the show there’s a series of black and white photos recording how some of these works were used in innovative workshops for blind and partially sighted children. Rather than summarise I’ll quote the wall label in its entirety:

In 1976 and 1983 art historian Gabriel Kladek organised and delivered a series of workshops for blind and partially-sighted children. A key element was the use of Bartuszová’s hand-sized and enlarged sculptures. The sculptures could be handled and several of them taken apart and reassembled. Kladek photographed the workshops, capturing the young participants’ joyful exploration of the sculptures. The workshops encouraged the children to experience different shapes and textures through touch, differentiating between geometric and organic forms. Prioritising movement, the body, touch, action and active engagement with sculpture, the use of these sculptures highlights the artist’s forward-thinking, participatory approach.

Sweet, huh? But would only work with the smooth and rounded forms, not so much with the fragile eggs, let alone objects bound with wire and twine.

But Bartuszová got involved in a surprising number of public commissions. She lived in a communist country and all artists and writers were expected to make practical contributions to society. Since these are obviously site-specific and generally very big, none of these big public pieces are included in the exhibition, we have to be content with (generally old black-and-white) photos and explanatory wall labels.

Thus we are told about:

  • a bronze fountain she created for the Institute for Physically Disabled Children in Košice (1967 to 1971)
  • monumental reliefs she created for the Southern Slovak Paper Mill (1973 to 1975) and Eastern Slovak Steelworks (1974)

There are photos of her in situ at these locations supervising the creation of the works. In addition there are also photos of the futuristic models she designed for playground climbing frames and slides, and a set of photos recording the creation of a monumental public sculpture titled ‘Metamorphosis, Two-Part Sculpture’ (1982) at the entrance to the Košice crematorium.

These are sort of interesting mainly because they show how brutalist, post-war modernism was very similar either side of the Iron Curtain, suggesting that it had less to do with the creativity of individual artists than a certain design logic emanating from modern building materials, technologies and production methods. If you have lots of steel or pre-stressed concrete available along with large-scale factories and workshops for its production and design, then certain stripped down shapes and designs logically follow, whether you’re in Slovakia or San Francisco.

A photo of her at a large workshop, cleaning snow off one of her slides, and of a partially sighted child paying with one of her forms, can be see at the Tate magazine article, A Futurist of Form.

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by Simon on April 28, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 28, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/maria-bartuszova-tate-modern/

Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings @ Serpentine Gallery

Emma Kunz (1892 to 1963) was a Swiss healer, researcher and artist.

Work No. 003 by Emma Kunz Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Work No. 003 by Emma Kunz Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Emma discovered her gifts for telepathy, prophecy and healing at an early age. She began to use her gifts at the age of 18, around the same time as she began drawing in exercise books.

Work No. 004 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Work No. 004 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

The drawings were intended to be visions of energy fields from which she could formulate diagnoses for the patients who began to visit her, seeking help for physical and mental ailments as her reputation as a psychic and healer spread.

From about 1938, when she was in her mid-forties, Emma began making the first large-scale drawings which she continued to produce for the rest of her life.

Work No. 011 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Work No. 011 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

She used a process she called ‘radiesthesia’. She would address a question to her divining pendulum and then record the way it swung, started and stopped onto large squares of graph paper. In this way she then converted the pendulum’s motions into meticulously worked-out and coloured-in geometric shapes, in which she discovered the answer to the original question she had posed.

Emma used mostly graphite and colour pencils, working intensely and continuously on each drawing for up to 24 hours. The lines of colouring-in are clearly visible in many of the works, much like the colouring-in of children in junior school.

She didn’t give any of the drawings titles, or date them, or go on record attributing any particular meaning to them. The numbers they now bear were attributed to them by art scholars after her death.

Work No. 012 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Work No. 012 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

The drawings were never displayed in Emma’s lifetime, indeed it is not certain that she regarded them as art works in the traditional way at all, but continued to think of them as tools to help with healing.

Geometric abstraction became a means for structuring and visualising her philosophical and scientific research which was not only rooted to her own times and the pursuit of her own restorative practices, but also for the future.

A selection of the drawings was only exhibited in her native Switzerland in 1973, some five years after her death.

This exhibition, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, is the first show devoted solely to Emma Kunz’s drawings to be held in the UK. It features over 60 of these calming, absorbing and intriguing works.

Work No. 013 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Work No. 013 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Interpretation

Emma considered the works an integral part of her approach to healing, and as emblems of her holistic worldview. As she explained:

Everything happens according to a certain regularity which I sense inside me and which never lets me rest.

The Serpentine curators agree with this spiritual interpretation. In their words:

Systematic yet expansive in their compositions, her ‘energy-field’ drawings simultaneously contain micro and macro perspectives of nature, chiming with current discourses on ecology, as well as a desire to forge meaningful connections with our environment.

AION A

Emma earned her living as a naturopath but also thought of herself as an explorer and experimenter with natural healing techniques. She made investigations into the healing properties of all manner of natural materials. She used her pendulum on the flowers in her garden which, as a result, bore unusual multiple flowerheads where single flowerheads would have been expected.

In 1941 Emma discovered in a grotto in the old Roman Quarry outside the Swiss town of Würenlos a marvellous healing rock. She gave it the name AION A. The word aion comes from the Greek and means ‘without limitation’.

Emma first demonstrated the healing power of AION A on a patient of hers, Anton C. Meier, who was seriously ill with infantile paralysis. After treatment with AION A Meier recovered, a cure Emma attributed to the rock’s ‘accumulated biodynamic energy’.

45 years later the Emma Kunz Centre was opened at the self-same Roman quarries in Würenlos. Patients can visit the centre to discover more about its healing practices and undergo cures. In 1991 a museum was opened to showcase some of Emma’s 400 drawings.

View of the Emma Kunz Centre in Würenlos, Switzerland

View of the Emma Kunz Centre in Würenlos, Switzerland

AION A, mined from the same quarry, is still sold in pharmacies in Switzerland and is used to treat a host of health issues from joint and muscular pain to inflammatory skin disorders.

I was surprised to find chunks of the rock, in attractive yellow boxes, on sale in the Serpentine Gallery shop, as well as a spray which also, apparently, captures AION A’s healing properties.

Christodoulos Panayiotou

Christodoulos Panayiotou (b.1978) is a contemporary artist hailing originally from Cyprus.

He has collaborated on a number of projects and installations at the Serpentine, and he had a major creative say in the design and hang of this exhibition.

For the most part the approach has been to hang the drawings sequentially on the Serpentine Gallery’s plain white walls. Each one exists in its own space, giving you plenty of scope to study and examine it.

But the plain, one-picture-at-a-time approach gives way in the gallery’s enormous central room to a completely different design. Here around 25 of the drawings have been piled up on the walls to create powerfully cumulative impression.

After spending some time in this big room, looking at individual works then stepping back to survey each wall as a composition, it struck me that this big, white space has the feel of a chapel. The arrangement of the works is loosely analogous to the altar of a baroque or orthodox church, packed with holy images climbing vertically up the wall and framed to left and right by secondary images of saints and apostles. Not directly similar, maybe – but that’s the kind of feel which the images, the peace and the air of reverence encourage: a mood of quiet devotion.

Installation view of Emma Kunz at the Serpentine Gallery. Photo by the author

Installation view of Emma Kunz at the Serpentine Gallery. Photo by the author

Arguably Panayiotou’s main contribution to the exhibition is the stone benches. See the bench in the photo above (on the lower right)? It was shaped from stone from the AION A quarry in Switzerland. It is made from AION A. It has healing powers.

It was Panayiotou’s ideas to have these benches carved and located around the exhibition. Each of the gallery’s rooms has a bench in it. The gallery encourages you to sit on them and, while you are feasting your eyes and resting your soul looking at Emma’s hypnotic drawings, to let the AION A do its healing work on your body.

Variety

I found the single most impressive thing about the drawings was their variety.

A generic verbal description – geometric shapes on graph paper, decorated with coloured pencils – doesn’t do them any justice. In the flesh they display an impressive variety not only of design and pattern, but of resulting visual effect.

Work No. 307 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Work No. 307 by Emma Kunz. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Some look like spirograph diagrams and please the part of the mind which likes simple, abstract patterns. Others are highly detailed mathematical diagrams which reward close attention to the way the shapes have been worked out to their logical conclusions.

Some feature what appear to be stylised human bodies – one appeared to contain a stylised man and woman, another contains about ten human forms reduced to geometric outlines and caught in a fiendishly complex web of lines.

Others contain uncanny optical illusions, drawing you into the depths of what part of your mind insists are only two-dimensional artefacts.

And all this is just to comment on the shapes, before you consider the colours, which are themselves very varied. Some contain plain washes, others more subtle gradations of colour; some are almost bereft of colour, others feel super colour-saturated. For me the variety of coloration was as surprising as the variety of pattern, and both were endlessly fascinating.

Conclusion

Whether Emma Kunz was a great spiritual healer, a true naturopath, and did make a significant contribution to human health by discovering AION A, I leave for others to decide.

But there’s no doubting that these lovely works, whatever the precise motivation to create them, are wonderfully attractive, calming, fascinating, varied and inspiring.

Emma Kunz at her working table, Waldstatt, 1958. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

Emma Kunz at her working table, Waldstatt, 1958. Photo © Emma Kunz Zentrum

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by Simon on March 23, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 23, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/23/emma-kunz-visionary-drawings-serpentine-gallery/

Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting (1993)

The German publisher Taschen launched its inexpensive ‘Basic Art’ series back in 1985 with a volume on Picasso. 33 years later, it has nearly 200 titles in the series and recently relaunched them as tall, slim hardbacks at a standard price of £10. Decades ago I picked up a clutch of titles about the Expressionist painters when they were in their cheaper, paperback incarnation.

This one, about the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, is 96 pages long. It has about 80 illustrations, mostly in full colour, which give you an excellent overview of Kandinsky’s development from late-Victorian figurative work, through the Expressionist years – which saw his accelerated movement into abstraction around 1910 – his 7-year spell back in Moscow, before he moved back to Germany to teaching at the famous Bauhaus school of art and design, before his final years in exile in Paris.

Colourful Life by Wassily Kandinsky (1907)

Colourful Life by Wassily Kandinsky (1907)

Kandinsky’s life in six chapters

The chapter titles give a good overview:

  • Mother Moscow 1866-1896
  • Kandinsky in Munich 1896-1911
  • Breakthrough to the abstract: Der Blaue Reiter 1911-1914
  • Russian Intermezzo 1914-1921
  • Point and Line to Plane: Kandinsky at the Bauhaus 1922-1933
  • Biomorphic abstraction: Kandinsky in Paris 1933-1944

The pioneer of abstract painting

A picture paints a thousand words, so here’s an overview of his evolving style:

Moscow

Born and educated in Moscow, Kandinsky’s parents divorced when he was young and he was brought up by his aunt who gave him a lifelong love of Russian legend and fairy tales. He studied law, and had a sideline in anthropology – in fact he was made a member of the Society for Anthropology and Ethnography for a study he made of rural peasant culture. But by the mid-1890s Kandinsky’s thinking had moved on. He had decided he wanted to be an artist. Recently married, in 1896 he persuaded his new wife that he was going to abandon his law studies and that they should move to Munich.

Munich

Munich had already experienced a ‘secession’ of progressive young artists from the official art school in 1892 and, as Kandinsky arrived, was just becoming the German centre of Art Nouveau (in Germany dubbed the Jugendstil) which advocated the rejection of Victorian mass-produced clutter, and a return to clarity of line and design.

Kandinsky applied to various art schools, took life and painting classes but he also proved to be a good organiser. In 1901 he was instrumental in setting up the ‘Phalanx’ group of painters and organising a series of exhibitions. For the next 14 years he was a leading light in a whole succession of movements and organisations in southern Germany.

In 1908 Kandinsky settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau, where he lived and worked with his second wife-to-be, the painter Gabriele Münter. He joined the Theosophical Society, a promoter of arcane spiritual knowledge. We know from his letters that he was studying the abstruse teachings of the 13th century writer, Joachim of Fiore. In other words, Kandinsky was soaked in arcane and hermetic spiritualist teachings, convinced that the world stood on the brink of a new era and that his painting would help to usher it in.

In 1909 he began to divide his works into three categories:

  • Impressions which still have elements of naturalistic representation
  • Improvisations designed to convey spontaneous emotional reactions
  • Compositions the most serious category, only created after substantial preliminary work

Note how all three names are taken from the language of music, indicative of the era’s interest in ‘synaesthesia’, in the combination of music and art which had been fashionable since Whistler’s ‘nocturnes’ and ‘compositions’ of the 1870s.

The Blue Rider

In 1911 Kandinsky formed the Blue Rider group, which he led with Franz Marc. Both men wrote extensively on the importance of the ‘spiritual’ in the new art, indeed that’s the title of Kandinsky’s major theoretical work, On the Spiritual in Art (1913).

Together he and Marc compiled the ‘Blue Rider almanac’, designed to include a wealth of illustrations, not only of contemporary art but primitive, folk, and children’s art, with pieces from the South Pacific and Africa, Japanese drawings, medieval German woodcuts and sculpture, Egyptian puppets, Russian folk art, and Bavarian religious art painted on glass. It included nine major essays, not only about art but on contemporary music and included the scores of pieces by the new group of ‘Second Vienna’ composers, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

In both the selection of essays and its innovative interplay of word and image, The Blaue Reiter Almanac remains one of our most critically important works of literature on the art theory and culture of the twentieth century.

The almanac was a call for spiritual renewal across all the arts, which would unite, in particular, music and painting, an idea which remained an inspiration for Kandinsky all his life.

Very quickly he now moved through increasingly abstract depictions of the subject to his first utterly abstract work, painted in 1910 (when he was 50 years old). Kandinsky spent the next four years experimenting with the new idea of ‘subjectless’ painting and was still exploring this new approach when war broke out in 1914 and he was forced to flee Germany to Switzerland. In 1915 he moved back to Mother Russia.

Back in Moscow

Düchting explains how Kandinsky the organiser and networker had also developed quite a career as an art journalist and critic. He had been working for Russian art journals throughout the 1900s, reporting on developments in Germany’s avant-garde. Through his contacts with Russian art journals he had been associated with successive post-Symbolist art movements in Russia such as ‘the World of Art’, ‘the Blue Rose’ and the ‘Karo Bube’ groups – so Kandinsky had plenty of contacts to look up when he reappeared in Moscow in 1915.

But he was to be disappointed. Kandinsky found his extreme spiritual attitudes and wispy abstraction out of tune with the times. The 1912 Futurist manifesto, ‘A slap in the fact to public taste’, had been popular with the new generation of iconoclasts in Russia. Constructivism had been founded in 1913, Suprematism in 1915 – and both were fiercely anti-spiritual, interested in very hard edges and geometric abstraction.

The coming young artists were Rodchenko, Malevich and El Lissitzky, artists who were to flourish in the extreme avant-garde environment created by the Bolshevik revolution, a world away from the nature worship and spiritual ideals of his colleagues in Germany.

Nonetheless, Moscow was a big city, with many artistic strands, and so Kandinsky found employment. He helped to organise a series of exhibitions, found teaching and journalism work – but felt unwanted. He managed to navigate the chaos of the early years of the Russian Revolution. He even found work in the early versions of a State Cultural Institute. It wasn’t Soviet pressure that led him to feel increasingly alienated as the 1920s dawned – it was the opposition of the leading figures in new Russian art. The times were changing.

The Bauhaus 1922-33

In 1921 he returned to Germany – wise move as it turned out. His key compadres in the Blue Rider (Marc, Macke) had been killed in the war and Berlin was now dominated by the bitterly satirical mode soon to be named ‘the Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’).

So Kandinsky was relieved to be invited to join the new Bauhaus school of art and design in Weimar, where some of his former colleagues – Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger – were already working. It looked to be a more congenial environment.

Kandinsky began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922. He taught students in the new Introductory Course where he could involve them in his ongoing investigations of pictorial elements. A few years later he published a summary of his discoveries in ‘Point and Line to Plane’ (1926).

Kandinsky’s teaching was highly schematic, with courses on the meaning and nature of the different colours, their relative positions on colour wheels, their warmth or coldness etc – as well as technical teaching about the effectiveness of different binding media for painting canvas, glass, walls and murals. Paralleling these were lessons on lines, curves, circles and other shapes, exploring their effect on the eye and mind.

(It all sounds technical and impressive, but it’s important to emphasise that all these teachings, thorough and systematic though they were, were essentially subjective, based on his own knowledge of colour and line. If you’re looking for a truly scientific understanding of the impact of colour and line, you have to look elsewhere.)

In 1923 the Bauhaus underwent a reorganisation, with the departure of Johannes Itten, a precursor of the hippies, who valued intuition, held meditation and controlled breathing classes, and was a follower of the obscure fire-breathing cult of Mazdaznan – and his replacement with the Hungarian polymath, committed communist and devotee of industrial design and functionalism, László Moholy-Nagy.

Under the influence of the Bauhaus new emphasis on unifying the arts in the practical cause of building affordable houses for the masses, Kandinsky’s art entered a new, ‘cool’ phase, exploring the interplay of much more clearly defined, geometric shapes.

The Bauhaus went through a number of iterations, the original Weimar incarnation closing in 1925 and moving to purpose-built buildings at Dessau. By the end of the 1930s the leadership and some of the students were becoming politicised by the deteriorating situation in Germany. Hannes Meyer, director from 1928 to 1930, was a communist and encouraged students to criticise Klee and Kandinsky’s ‘ivory tower painting’.

It’s worth stopping and pondering the enormous social and cultural changes Kandinsky had seen since he arrived in Germany in 1901.

The Bauhaus was harassed by the Nazis before they even came to power and once Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 the intimidation intensified. Its final director, the architect Mies van der Rohe declared it officially closed in August 1933. By that time many of the faculty had left the country. Once more Kandinsky had to flee, this time heading west to France.

Paris 1933-1944

Kandinsky’s output from this last decade in Paris is characterised by wonderfully light, even humorous, zoomorphic and biomorphic abstractions. They often look like a fantasy of bacteria seen under a microscope.

He was, as always, involved in the politics of the art world, finding himself rejected by the dominant school of Constructivist artists as well as remaining traditionalists. Believe it or not, he flirted with the Surrealists and met their leader, André Breton who in the 1920s bought some paintings off him. But by the mid-1930s Breton had hardened his approach, politically and aesthetically: for the Surrealists the unconscious was everything, but Kandinsky’s post-war output had been the opposite – extremely carefully planned and organised using his elaborate theories about colour and shape – the opposite of ‘automatic painting’.

Most interesting to me is that, although they all came from different roots, and from different countries, Kandinsky’s art ranks alongside that of Klee, Miro and Arp in a generation which fully established abstract art as a profound and varied visual universe. It’s an odd social phenomenon, the convergence of so many artists on such a similar approach.

And with regard to Kandinsky in particular, it is lovely to finish the book and discover that, even as the world situation deteriorated through the later 1930s, and even as a new World War broke out, he continued to produce work of unparalleled calm, clarity and beauty.

What a colourful journey! What a wonderful life!

Around the Circle by Wassily Kandinsky (1940)

Around the Circle by Wassily Kandinsky (1940)

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by Simon on January 9, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 9, 2018

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Soaring flight: Peter Lanyon’s gliding paintings @ the Courtauld Gallery

I’d never heard of him before but apparently Peter Lanyon (born 1918) was one of Britain’s most important post-war artists, forging a name in the 1950s as a painter of large abstracts which are, in fact, based on the landscape of his native Cornwall. A good example is Silent Coast from 1957.

In the late 1950s he took up gliding, partly for the fun of it but partly to see the landscape he loved in a new way. The experience turned out to be a liberation, not only in how he viewed the landscape below, but how he experienced the ‘airscape’, a medium he described as being as full of life and variation as the sea.

Between his taking up of the sport in 1959 and his tragically young death in 1964, Lanyon painted a series of works (and made some sculptures) based on his experience gliding through the skies. This exhibition is the first one anywhere devoted to these gliding paintings.

It is in two rooms. The first one contains seven abstracts from just before the gliding phase. Room two contains 11 paintings and 3 constructions. The change is tangible: the glider paintings are bigger and brighter and bluer.

Thermal by Peter Lanyon (1960) courtesy of the Tate Gallery

There are lots of blues, lots of shades of blue as, I imagine, you experience them high in the sky, from dark navy to airy azure. The wall panels quote liberally from Lanyon’s own descriptions of flying and the titles themselves indicate the underlying figurative basis of each work. Thermal (above) is, apparently, one of the most famous glider paintings and was bought by Tate at its first showing. The wall label explains what a thermal is and describes the process of warm air rising, creating turbulence and the lift needed to support the motorless glider, and sees it enacted in this painting. Maybe. But it is also a pleasing and imaginative arrangement of colours.

Similarly, Near Cloud from a few years later, may be an attempt to convey what it feels like to be thousands of feet in the air and near cloud. But it may also be that the pleasure comes from the abstract arrangement of colours and patterns: I just like the red squiggle; and I like the way there are some red droplets in the V it makes and off up in the top left hand corner.

Having seen abstract paintings by Malevich, Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly and Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern recently, they made me realise how many approaches there can be to abstract painting. In these works Lanyon seems to have created a formula which is distinctive, but results in strikingly different paintings. Or, despite their apparent variety, there is still a recognisable style at work.

Near Cloud by Peter Lanyon (1964) Private Collection

The commentary situates Lanyon’s work in the great tradition of English landscape painting and references Turner, who he particularly liked apparently. He saw himself as ‘extending the landscape traditions of earlier artists’. Maybe.

But he was also painting in the Pop Art era, as we’re reminded by Glide Path. The two black lines are in fact strips of rubber nailed onto the canvas and represent, well, glide paths. They enact the way the man-made vehicle cuts its way in straight or gently curving lines above a landscape characterised by much more jagged and abrupt demarcations – fields, roads, hedges, walls, cliffs, sea patterned by waves, clouds and fragments of clouds strewn across the sky.

Peter Lanyon Glide Path (1964) Oil and plastic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches Courtesy of The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

Glide Path by Peter Lanyon (1964) courtesy of The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

Although many of the paintings play with blue, and get lighter and airier as they evolve between 1960 and 1964, when I analysed the ones I liked I realised it was because they all had touches of red in them. Drama. Colour. Pop.

The three constructions on display are interesting, but don’t capture the sense of exuberance, colour and freedom that the paintings do.

What a great body of work it is! And how bitterly ironic that his life was cut short prematurely, aged 46, by complications in hospital while recovering from a gliding accident, killed by the thing he loved. Maybe the slashes of red which I like in several of the paintings spookily anticipate his fate. Maybe, in light of his biography, they can be reread as slender threads of human existence which can be snuffed out so casually and so finally.

Soaring Flight by Peter Lanyon (1960) courtesy of Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre

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by Simon on January 6, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 6, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/soaring-flight-peter-lanyons-gliding-paintings-the-courtauld-gallery/