Mistress of the Ancient Wisdom

There is certain wisdom about life that you are born with.

I know it sounds dogmatic but having lived almost half a century, having met, interacted and cooperated with countless people, having luckily lots of friends and being a mother I feel like having the right to claim such a poetic licence.

Some are born with a minimum amount, others with huge.

Since I was a kid I remember how some friends of mine seemed like understanding the ways of the world better than me and then I supposed it was because of better family care and a proper sentimental education

(It is not that I wasn’t taken care of, I surely was. It is just that I feel like I never took any sentimental education at all in my family. Learning anything profound about life’s infrastructure and socializing mechanisms was never the case).

I sometimes attributed it to pure intellect but later I understood that intellect has nothing to do with it.

Now I think that it is something inherent. Surely every human being is totally different from the others but there are people that seem to always stay like kids in some behavioural aspects —not the cute ones—, even if they are the smartest, more talented and more cultured ones. So I ended up considering this deep life wisdom as a sixth sense, a talent to get coordinated with the world’s vibes, be able to look behind the sceneries and give the best of advice. Not a matter of education, culture or encyclopedic knowledge. I have met university professors that just don’t have it at all.

I have met it to small children, people with no education or any cultural experience, people with whom ideologically I had nothing in common. And mostly women indeed.

It is obvious in the way certain teachers are so much more reliable than others or in how certain people are talking on TV or in public, a calm spirit like they see something that the others cannot.

It is not either a matter of confidence —I have met unbelievable confidence in people I would never trust— it is a matter of inspiring reliance.

My amount of this cosmic wisdom is minimum.

I still feel like a child most of the time, life and the way the world works very often seems incomprehensible. And I didn’t have either the luck to have such kind of wise people close around me as a child.

But I have met them now and then. I have read their books. I have seen their art, listened to their speaks and their music. People that can make you a better person.

I can feel that Emily Dickinson was one, and John Cage too.

In times I have met this idea, in its extreme excess, in several cultural expressions.

Jorge Luis Borges has written this beautiful short story about a certain man who reveals the good to every person he meets. The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim is a magnificent tale about this magic aura that leaves some “portions” of wonder to everyone who comes around.

In L. Timmel Duchamp’s The Forbidden Words of Margaret A. a woman with revolutionary humanistic ideas is imprisoned for speaking out. Her words are considered so dangerous and contagious that the government adopted a constitutional amendment that restricts free speech and specifically her words. While we read the story it is revealed that she can change anyone she meets just by speaking to them.

Religion is based on people like these. People who inspired the divine religious figures. Buddha, Mohamed, Jesus Christ.

Mythologies talking about second lives maybe have their roots in alike kind of judgements. People so wise than they seem like they had been here “before”.

The eccentric Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky, a philosopher and esoteric, founder of the famous and controversial Theosophical Society, was talking about the Masters, enlightened beings who know the universal truths and can be met among us. She, in fact, claimed that had met them.

Well, I wouldn’t go so far but I can surely tell Blavatsky was an intriguing personality.

(Her) Theosophical Society was a major centre of metaphysics, spiritual and esoteric studies. However, and despite their close relations to Buhdistic and Eastern philosophies, their primary research areas were rather inclined towards paranormal activities and extraordinary phenomena produced by the alleged Masters of The Ancient Wisdom. Too much occultism, indeed. Still, after Blavatsky’s meeting with another impressive and dynamic woman, Annie Besant --a fervent socialist and women’s rights advocate who among other things fought for India’s democracy and independence-- the Society became more active towards human service and spiritual evolutionism.

Amidst the Society’s wider web of followers, there was the Edelweiss Society, a Swedish “branch”, that combined Blavatsky’s ideas with wider spirituality. And it is there where Abstract art was born.

Hilma af Klint had always an inclination towards spirituality but it was after her first encounter with death, the loss of her sister Hermina in 1880 that she started to grow a much deeper interest. As an art student —one of the first women art students in the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm— and in her early artistic career, she walked about landscape and portrait art before starting to elaborate the first ideas about artistic abstraction as an expression of the unseen.

Beginning practising automatic writing and drawing with the “Five”, her group of occultist friends she had met in the Edelweiss Society, led her to her unique primordial abstraction, years before Malevich and Kandinsky (who was also inspired by Blavatsky).

In fact, it was only 1905 when af Klint initiated her artistic non-representational idiom, as a spiritual “commission” by the Masters to depict on “an astral plane” the immortals’ realm.

Let’s make clear here that painting as a means of researching inner connection with the spiritual world was not a particular —and for some even laughable— af Klint’s initiative. The whole abstraction movement that was later developed through the rest of Europe, one of the most significant chapters of modernism, had its roots there. Kandinsky’s imagery was much inspired by Christianity while Mondrian was an anthroposophist.

Af Klint was just the very first (something that was never until recently attributed to her).

I could assume that her sensitive artistic antennas caught very early this inner necessity of modernism’s age to distance from the dominant and rationalized classical sight. When later the German philosopher Wilhelm Worringer expressed these views in his Abstraction and empathy (1908) and even later Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) speaks about the call towards the infinite and the need for waking from materialism, af Klint has already finished the first part of her Paintings for the Temple.

The Paintings for the Temple, her Magnus Opus is compiled by 193 paintings of various sizes made within a decade. Some of them are enormous.

Hilma used to paint on the floor in a kind of trans, led by the Masters’ voices, a method that later was met in Pollock’s painting, though expressed within different words.

The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke,

she describes her method.

(When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about Pollock was describing his groundbreaking method almost half a century afterwards.)

Her artistic vocabulary is very identifiable, her painting absolutely idiosyncratic although the symbols she uses are panhuman. There are a lot of flower-like forms, crosses, spirals, and curves. Some shapes refer to a woman’s or flower’s reproductive organs, seashells and mushrooms’ or crystals’ shapes. Others seem like music notes or letters of unknown alphabets. Some times there are some readable words too. In some of the paintings, there are strong geometric elements in mystic combinations. In others, the patterns are so austere that recall constructivist paintings or the geometric abstraction of Mondrian or Kupka. It is like she moves continuously from the natural to the spiritual, back and forth, remaining, though, in a non-representational plane. Like recording some kind of vibes through shapes and colours.

There is a spectacular series of paintings, The Swan, where she seemed to play with the yin/yang idea with a passionate and poetic mood, while other series as The Evolution or the Dove appear religious in an ecstatic way. Her Parsifal series is totally constructivist while her late works, when she turned again towards the biomorphic shapes have the spirituality and natural charm of a herbarium.

Al Klint art strange, spiritual and astonishingly beautiful. Her artworks are like charms, soothe you or make feel inspired. Staring at them gives the same feeling as listening to music —an inherent characteristic and pursuit of abstract art after all—, as an expressive crystallization of an almighty creative force beyond the known codes.

I cannot know if Hilma was one of those illuminate and wise persons with the gift of deeper life knowledge, or even if she actually had met or talked to one of the Masters. In fact, I cannot know if the Masters even existed or was only a way Madame Blavatsky tried to pass her theosophical ideas to a society that could rely only upon masters and never upon mistresses.

What I can say though, is that Hisma af Klint should be considered, at least now that we are after all kind of familiar with her work, if not one of the Mistresses of the Ancient Wisdom, certainly one the Old Mistresses of Art —.