Understanding the origins of artistic genres is tricky. When is the first pure European landscape painting? To answer that question, we might need to exclude the landscapes appearing behind narrative pictures presenting New Testament stories. When is the first still life? To resolve that debate it may be necessary to look beyond Renaissance storytelling scenes in which still life objects are present in the foreground. The creation of a novel artistic form does not merely depend on the development of artistic skill. Piero della Francesca painted landscapes within his narratives — and Raphael showed still life objects within his. But they didn’t make landscape or still life paintings. What matters is when artists created autonomous art form.

Identifying the first abstract painting is also tricky. A great deal of pre-Modern decoration now looks abstract. But if abstraction in painting is identified by the rejection of figuration as artistic goal, then such designs are not really abstractions, even if they look like abstract paintings. An abstract work of art, it would seem has to be made intentionally. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish artist who, starting in 1906 and inspired by the theosophical writings of Rudolf Steiner, made many large non-figurative images. She also produced conventional landscapes and portraits, exhibiting as a professional artist. Her will stipulated that her abstract works should not be seen in public for at least 20 years after her death, because she felt that the world was not ready for her spiritual message. Her abstractions were displayed in the group exhibition “On The Spiritual in Art” in 1986 in Los Angeles, and, more recently, in 2005 in the exhibition of three women at the Drawing Center in New York. They were shown in a recent large-scale solo exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction,” which toured in Sweden, Germany and Denmark. This book complements that show, documenting an eponymous symposium. The images are fascinating: biomorphic forms or geometric diagrams connected by curving lines and accompanied by words float on pale-colored backgrounds. Whereas it’s easy to see that Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian’s more-familiar early abstractions are derived from landscapes, it’s not obvious how to interpret these pictures. Steiner is a not a theorist usually read by present day art critics, but his writings, and those of other theosophical figures, were a major influence on early Modernism.

The 19 essays in this book, all clear and all interesting, cover some topics: the early abstractions of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian; J. W. Goethe’s color theory; and the story of Rudolf Steiner’s visual ideas, which are only tangentially related to the theme at hand. And while there are 42 good color plates showing her art (along with many black and white plates, some duplicating those presented in color), we’re not given dimensions of these works, nor information about their location. The real trouble, however, is that the personality of af Klint doesn’t come into focus. Some commentators treat his images as works of art — others disagree. While I can understand the desire of the publisher to present diverse points of view, this presentation, with frequent repetitions of basic information, is simply confusing. It’s not clear how she wanted her images to be understood. Some of the writers call them works of art, while others disagree. She wrote extensively, but most of her notebooks have not yet been studied. Neither are we given a full account of the Swedish art world of her time. And so it is still hard to evaluate these images on her terms. These images have some claim to be the first abstractions, pioneering works by a previously marginalized woman artist. But if they are really diagrams — large, colored versions of the pictures found in spiritualist books — then maybe they are not meant to works of art at all. If in fact the surviving documentation is unlikely to answer these questions, then why not say so in as many words?

Ultimately, of course, these complaints are beside the point: now that her works are well known, we may reasonably hope that they will attract more scholarly attention, as they deserve. In the catalogue for the 2013 Venice Biennale, in which af Klint’s art was presented, Massimiliano Gioni, who was the exhibition’s director, offers an interesting perspective. His show, he writes,

Blurs the line between professional artists and amateurs, insiders and outsiders, reuniting artworks with other forms of figurative expression—both to release art from the prison of its supposed autonomy, and to remind us of its capacity to express a vision of the world.[1]

Perhaps, then, to understand af Klint we need to avoid a rigid distinction between spiritualist diagrams and abstract painting. After all, Renaissance altarpieces, which originally served sacred functions, nowadays are treated as works of art and so placed in museums.

[1] Gioni, Massimiliano. “Is Everything in My Mind?” Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), vol. 1, 23.

Almqvist, Kurt and Louise Belfrage, eds. Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible. (Stockholm, SE: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0989890212, 348 pages, $46.50

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The small show of Vasily Kandinsky’s early work, now on view in the third floor annex of the Guggenheim Museum, offers an intimate, insightful glance at the more formative years of this celebrated artist’s career. The 16 paintings and woodcut prints included in the exhibition highlight a period of inquiry, exploration, and discovery, the decade during which Kandinsky began testing the boundaries of his aesthetic credo and barreling toward his eventual ascension into the heady realm of pure abstraction. And although the low ceiling, low lights, and somewhat disjointed hanging scheme do not quite do them justice, the works themselves are a joy to behold: not only are they lovely and challenging, but they reveal a great mind on the verge of genius, toiling to piece together the aspects of a grand puzzle whose total image would change the face of art and the modern paradigm forever after.

The four early landscapes — picturesque en-plein-air sketches of Munich and Amsterdam — are studious and impressionistic, their subject matter and thick, gestural brushwork emulating the work of Monet. Though the mastery of color that characterizes Kandinsky’s later blockbuster Compositions had yet to materialize, one can sense his curiosity and desire to push his palette further, to release each color from its expected role and see what it might otherwise be capable of. In Amsterdam – View from the Window (1904), for example, there is a palpable tension between tradition and innovation. For all its richness and loose suggestion of form, the painting is still a representational rendering of the empirical world, and everything in it is more or less as it should be: the grass is green, the bricks are red, the sky is blue, and the city sits comfortably on its axis, extending out from a level and distant horizon. Fishing Boats, Sestri (1905) and Pond in the Park (1906) find Kandinsky compressing the picture plane and honing his attention to color, creating increasingly delineated zones in unexpected hues like ochre and cerulean with a vigorous back-and-forth of the brush.

Also included in the show are six woodcuts — four black-and-white and two tinted with metallic paint (all 1907) — whose presence feels largely didactic, serving as stepping-stones into Kandinsky’s next, more pioneering painterly phase. By removing the necessity of color, the medium forced Kandinsky to focus on simplified shapes, careful composition, and the manipulation of space, both in regard to truncated perspective and the rhythmic alternation between inked and non-inked areas. A few of the later jewel-toned paintings, including Landscape near Murnau with locomotive (1909) and Landscape with Rolling Hills (1910), retain the woodcuts’ flat, blocky shapes and further manipulate the space within the picture plane, suspending gravity and tilting the ground at such a pitch that the trees, houses, and clouds seem as though at any moment they might float away or tumble right out of the canvas.

From 1908 onward, Kandinsky began to gradually abstract and strip away recognizable imagery in favor of placing the emphasis on painting itself. Group of Crinolines (1909) marks a major shift in this direction, depicting a luncheon party à la Manet in an expanded palette of vibrant pastels that leans toward the secondary, slanted hues of the Fauvists. On a distinctively larger canvas, eight men and women stand stiff and flat as paper dolls against a highly abstracted countryside, their faces rendered in shades of celery green, lilac, citrine, and ice blue. Close inspection rewards the viewer by revealing a pleasurable trick Kandinsky has played, for the near-neon hues are tempered not by black, but rather by colors that adroitly tip toward black: deep navy or teal, olivey green, or overripe plum. The brusque juxtapositions of Braque’s early landscapes are fused with the scribbled, aggressive marks of Kirchner, giving one the sense that the objects are still isolated but on the cusp of dissolving into a raucous din of color and light.

By the time he painted Pastorale (1911), Kandinsky was squarely en route to abandoning representation altogether, his female figures and their bucolic surroundings blurred into vague, fuzzy fields of buttery yellows and dusty whites accented here and there by saturated shades of blue, pink, and green. His use of color is more material and his composition loosens up, allowing for a new kind of space to enter the picture. As art historian John Golding once observed, this is the moment where:

Kandinsky’s blues, his reds, his yellows, are becoming nouns, objects, substances in their own right: blue is blue, red is red, yellow is yellow… and the pocketing of space, both visually and psychologically, suggests a space that can engulf us. To this extent the picture plane now carries with it implications of concavity; as our eyes penetrate into individual areas, compartments of visual activity, others swim out to the periphery or sides of our field of vision.[1]

Within his first decade as a serious painter, Kandinsky successfully unlocked and activated a realm of aesthetic experience that reverberates through the annals of art history and still has the capacity to inspire awe, and often render viewers speechless. In the year following Pastorale he went on to co-found Der Blaue Reiter and publish his seminal text, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” I, for one, am glad to live in an age where these breakthroughs are safely behind us, and can be brought together and marveled at simply for the price of admission.

[1] Golding, John, Paths to the Absolute. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 90.

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