Film Review: Beyond the Visible
This film is about art.
It’s about the story of abstract art.
It’s about how the story of abstract art has left out the work of a pioneer of the movement.
It’s about a woman who was never given her due in her lifetime.
I hear you all now, saying, “How nice: what’s this got to do with the paranormal?
Ah, yes.
This film is about communion with spirits.
This film is about channeling.
This film is about divine inspiration.
This film is about painting for the future.
There we go!
Now you see why I’m telling all of my friends and family and paranormal peeps to watch this documentary which you can rent on Amazon for a few dollars.
This is the story of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, a daughter of a naval commander who was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm at the age of twenty. There she studied portraiture, botanical drawing and landscape painting, and for a time made a good living as an illustrator and portraitist.
And then, she became involved in Spiritualism and the Theosophy movement. She formed a group of young women artists who called themselves “The Five” and began holding regular spiritualist style seances where they came in contact with spirits who they called “The Higher Masters.” One of these beings named Gregor stated to five artists that, “"All the knowledge that is not of the senses, not of the intellect, not of the heart but is the property that exclusively belongs to the deepest aspect of your being...the knowledge of your spirit".
”The Five” diligently recorded the words of “The Higher Masters” from their seances and all of them experimented with automatic writing and drawing as early as 1896.
Hilma began drawing and painting in a symbolic language based both in geometric forms and the languid curving lines extent in nature. Spirals, triangles, quadrangles and intertwined whorls began expressing a host of unseen forces from both the inner and outer realms of her experience. Mathematical and scientific concepts such as atoms and the spectrum of visible and non-visible light were expressed as well as spiritual ideas about the immortal soul and the spirit that imbues all life.
“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 brush stroke.”
Eventually, “The Higher Masters:” assigned to Hilma her life’s work: she was to begin a series of gigantic paintings that were to be hung on the walls of “The Temple.”
Huge sheets of paper were prepared and laid upon the floor of her studio, and Hilma walked barefoot upon them, her skirt rucked up to her knees, drawing with a pencil mounted on a long stick so she could work from a standing position.
Then, she ground her own pigments and mixed them with fresh eggs, creating a palette of colors never before seen in art, and painted on her hands and knees in bold swathes of color, line and form.
Her work was intensely graphic, and utterly new and abstract.
She painted these works between 1906-1915; Wassily Kandinsky, who is widely considered to be the father of abstract art, painted his first works in that style in 1910.
Hilma considered herself not as the originator of these works, however, merely as the vessel through which the art flowed. This is true of many visionary artists who worked both before and after her, yet in her case, it has caused some art historians to disregard her work.
This was corrected in 2018 when the Guggenheim Museum put on a retrospective of her works entitled “Paintings for the Future..” There, finally, her illustrations of invisible realms were revealed in their full glory for the eyes of all humanity.
The film beautifully expresses the story of Hilma and her art, while also perfectly showing the grand scale of her paintings done for “The Temple.” It’s well worth a watch, and my only negative comment upon it is the choice to make all of the subtitles in white. When they appear on some of the paintings, they blend into them and they are hard to read; I had to read aloud as they were unseeable for some of my household.
It is a small flaw, one that can be overlooked. I never was bored or distracted in watching this film, and all of the art historians who narrate the film have very interesting things to say on the artist, her work and her visions.
