myth-making
Something I’ve come to recognise recently is the non-linearity of art history and the tendency history has to myth-make. I had thought that movements unfolded in a chronological and coherent manner. Though, it is often much more complicated.
Hilma af Klint, for example, an artist from 1910 who started to become widely and more publicly recognised in 2013. Hilma went almost a century totally unheard of and is now being considered the originator of abstraction.
Approaches to creative expression don’t spontaneously emerge from the cosmos in the form of divinely chosen individuals. People are products of their time. Af Klint was a traditionally trained botanical illustrator and naturalist painter, involved in a spiritual community, living in a time when unseen energies, like atoms, confirmed the idea that ‘things that you cannot see exist’.
It makes sense her work is an abstract blend of organic forms, diagrammatic symbolism, with mystical and esoteric undertones.
Similarly, painter and art theorist, Wassily Kandinsky, whose influences originate in religion, grapples with the goal of ‘pure abstraction’ while writing Concerning the Spiritual in Art and painting his ‘Compositions’
Though when closely considered, this work is heavily laden with symbolism relating to the apocalypse, final judgement and the coming utopia. He cannot escape the biblical lens he sees the world through.
It is easy to look back and think famous artists were touched by the divine hand of God. But just like the rest of us, they were humans trying to figure out human things, with the tools they had at hand and with the world view that made sense to them.