A Brief Moment of Appreciation for Hilma af Klint

In modern life, there’s no activity more feral than weaving through the Manhattan jungle with a backpack glued to your back with sweat.

My flight had been two hours late (as all flights from Atlanta to New York are two hours late). I’d taken the free bus (free!) and nearly wept with religious ecstasy at the sights, sounds, and smells of the MTA subway. It’d been a decade. I hadn’t realized how much I missed this horrible place.

No time for big spiritual moments. I was on a mission. I only had 30 minutes before MoMA closed. I was here to see a Rothko.

First, I should explain: I fundamentally don’t understand abstract expressionism. For most of the middle class, it’s by far the most indecipherable art movement. It’s the empty backrooms where you’re consciousness is meant to just wander about it. Why is there no furniture? What can I lean on? Where do I hang my hat? I’m uncomfortable.

Aren’t Rothkos just squares?

But I’d recently seen another masterpiece: Red by screenwriting/playwriting legend John Logan. And it had changed my brain chemistry. An unkind reading would call it the epitome of “old man shakes fist at cloud.” A kinder reading might say it’s a depiction of an artist’s spiraling depressive thoughts, in which he no longer has a place in the rapidly changing art world and has given up on all notion of possibly being understood. The dialogue still rattles around in my brain sometimes.

My depressive episode loomed large, and I found Red disturbingly, distressingly relatable. Rothko, in this piece, is supposed to be a bit pompous. Or, at least, he isn’t supposed to inspire affirming nods. But as someone who’s internalized the lack of readers, the swarm of AI “writers,” the desperate landscape of influencers, the demands to have a “platform” in order to write, those platforms being full of anti-human propaganda …

Help, the scary squares are relatable.

In my mind, I now had more context in which to properly appreciate a Rothko, which according to experts, really must be experienced in person rather than on a phone screen.

However, that very notion is the antithesis of the theme of the play. After all, Rothko, the character, calls his own paintings “fragile.” Coming to a painting with a preconceived notion of what it should be breaks the experience. Words, memories, free associations influence the way you examine the colors, take in the gradients, notice the thin layers, observe. If you don’t let your mind loose off the collar to run about in a Rothko painting, then it’s really just a big room with no furniture.

That’s a little “woo-woo,” so let me explain in a different way: If I were an eighth-grade English teacher bringing my class to the MoMA, and if I were to say “don’t the brushstrokes along the bottom look like the tracks of a starving polar bear in the arctic? Don’t the flecks and imperfections at the top look like stars?” the Rothko of Logan’s play would, I think justifiably, shoot me. I’d deserve it. Every one of those kids in my fictional class should come to their own interpretation, with their own beautiful minds reflected in the pool of paint. Because Rothko wanted his paintings to be experienced.

When I panted, my carry-on glued to my back, in the direction of the black-on-grey Untitled, I realized just how misguided I’d been. The narrative I’d built was too big to fit onto the canvas. I thought, He really offed himself after this one, huh? I thought parasocially, God, I relate to him. I thought, It’s so interesting how he designed these paintings to decay over time. Fuck capitalism.

But as I let my mind relax, I saw the polar bear tracks. I saw cigarettes for breakfast. I saw a single star in the black. I saw an argument. I saw dementia. I saw a moonstation. I saw a treasure map and neverland. I saw a slouching old man walking in circles. I saw myself. I saw my hubris and my despair. I didn’t like it.

Overwhelmed, I turned the corner. It was 15 minutes before closing, so I supposed I would glance at Starry Night along with the other tourists before scuffling off to my hotel like a dusty racoon.

I turned another corner and saw Hilma af Klint’s Swan no. 13.

Gobsmacked, I thought this seemed very similar to W.B. Yeats’s wobbling gyres. This is a symbol! It symbolizes something! Doesn’t it? Then, I noticed on the plaque that it said Hilma was also a theosophist. Of course she was!

I said to myself, and, yes, it may have been out loud, “I don’t have time for this right now, Hilma!”

SUNSET

Why do we love narrative? Why are facts arranged as sequential stories more memorable? Why are conspiracy theories so fun? Why is fact checking more interesting when it’s antagonistic? Why is all politics WWE now? Why do we flatten our lives by describing them?

Why are all the most spiritual experiences indescribable? Why do preconceived notions ruin a Rothko? Can you summarize a life?

To love words is to know that they can be vile.

There’s an old legend about Lao Tzu. Every day, the teacher would watch the sunset. Only very best students were allowed to meditate with him, but there was one rule: do not speak. A bold, ambitious student audaciously came to sit with him one day.

The sunset was incredible. It was the most beautiful thing the student had ever seen. He couldn’t help himself. He said, “It’s beautiful!”

Lao Tzu sent him away and didn’t allow him to sit with him again.

Not understanding, the other students asked why Lao Tzu was so harsh.

Lao Tzu explained that the bold student was supposed to watch the sunset. As soon as he spoke, he stopped observing the sunset and instead watched his words.

Just Squares

Don’t get me wrong: Context can be really helpful to understand an abstract image. It’s hard to navigate a Rothko, or a Pollock, or a Mondrian, for that matter, without a few words holding your hand. I forgive myself for using Red to come to the Rothko, even though that’s not what the play was telling me.

Why? To my utmost humiliation, on the train upstate I realized that while I worked in the Empire State Plaza, I’d walked by a blue Rothko painting for months. In my closeted and drunken twenties, I surely must’ve dismissed it as “just squares.”

A moment for Hilma

Hilma af Klint’s narrative is so appealing that it’s easy for it to cloud over her art. What’s more relatable to the working woman than visionary achievements never recognized and overshadowed by men? What’s more uplifting than learning that she was the world’s first abstract artist? What’s more incredible than hearing that she knew that no one would understand her paintings until decades after her death?

But, as I’ve explained, narrative is treacherous. Art is a real experience. Her work doesn’t need a candy coating to be delicious and nutritious. She is more than a self-flattering story.

The Swan series explained to me what I didn’t understand about abstract art. It’s the missing evolutionary link between relational and abstraction. It’s like seeing a fish with legs or a platypus.

It begins with a yin-yang shape of two swans in conflict. It’s relational, literal, symbolic, and understandable.

They burst together. The explosion is almost like an animation, which was new at the time.

With every new iteration of the series, symbolism is peeled away like layers of an onion.

But! Even this is still symbolic, especially if you’re familiar with dense theosophical symbolism. Sometimes, she invented her own symbolic glossary.

Slowly, however, the images get less symbolic, less relational. They become experiences in their own right.

The swans split apart, become swans once again, but something – forgive the word – magical happened between points A and B.

Hilma af Klint used her spirituality to create an experience by slowly abandoning religious symbols. She simplified and simplified until she had a ball of raw truth in her hands, like Marie Curie with radium. One-by-one, she removed the furniture for you to lean against. She removed the hook to hang your hat. She did it with such slow care, such daring, such audacity, that it’s hard not to experience awe. It’s like seeing someone invent calculus.

Strip away context, strip away symbols, strip away words, strip away narrative, and can you really comprehend what’s left? Or, are you too frightened to stand in the big, empty room alone? And if so, why?