Beyond The Visible - Hilma AF Klint

Director Halina Dryschka's lush, fascinating 90-minute documentary "Beyond the Visible" fights to recognize pioneering Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), a master of the abstract before that term was even invented, and before Wassily Kandinsky (who also died in 1944, as well as Piet Mondrian).

The moody, thoughtful "time capsule" film (mostly in German and Swedish, with English subtitles) aims to correct the art history that has excluded female innovators, and re-creates Hilma making her cosmically colorful, curvilinear canvases, exploring her meditations on "we're not here forever" alongside the director's comments and expert interviews.

The film tracks the effort to insert Hilma into MoMA's "Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925" timeline. Her yellow squares from 1916 predict Joseph Albers' 1971 effort, other geometric constructions from 1920 predate Paul Klee, cursive scribbles from 1896 anticipate Cy Twombly's 1967 piece, and Hilma's four faces happen 30 years before Pop Art and Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe squares, as Dryschka dramatically illustrates side-by-side.

Well-educated vegetarian Hilma grew up in a family of naval officers where she first embarked on naturalist paintings and drawings at an art academy, a haven for unmarried aristocratic women at the time. She became a successful portrait and landscape painter and illustrator.

At the turn of the century, she made 10 abstract paintings in 42 days, while her male contemporaries were slower and timid to move in that direction. In one year, she made 111 paintings, including ten panels of colorful (predominately yellow, blue and pink), large-scale work capturing the four phases of human life: "Childhood," "Youth," "Adulthood," and "Old Age."

Her work also reflects burgeoning scientific research that included the realm of the invisible, like da Vinci's work before. Like playwright August Strindberg, she participated in spiritualism to access these unknown worlds. As a medium, she claimed that the work came through her. Her circle of mystic women was called "The Five," and her work represented this spirituality, theosophy, anthroposophy and love of nature. Hilma's work also explores circles, squiggles, and bifurcation. Hilma seems to echo the talent, ethos, and marginalization of Frida Kahlo, who also suffered from a trolley accident.

Hilma willed to her nephew over 1500 paintings and a cache of journals containing art notes during trips around Europe, but no personal reflections. This cache survived for 40 years in non-temperature-regulated storage. She required that he not sell her work, keeping her remarkable, yet relatively unknown, collection intact. New York's Guggenheim Museum hosted a six-month show in 2018, 75 years after her death, which broke attendance records.

"Beyond the Visible" rallies for female visionaries like Hilma to not be erased from history, but rather, in fact, to be celebrated as the mothers of invention that they are. Guerilla Girls asks, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female." Today, there are more women than men in art school, but fewer "famous" women painters. "What happens between school and the marketplace?" an interviewee asks.

Beyond the Visible is available at virtual theaters around the country: https://kinomarquee.com/beyond-the-visible-hilma-af-klint
Info and trailer here: https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/beyondthevisiblehilmaafklint