Weird Art: Hilma Af Klimt and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, Tate Modern
Although billed as a compare and contrast exhibition, there was also a lot of weirdness here. Most shocking was the first room — where Af Klimt and Mondrian started off as Impressionists!
Society was a flux of change — science, increasing accuracy in botanical drawings, scientific slides and being able to illustrate and record the hidden and invisible — electricity, magnetism, light waves, sound waves, atoms, particles, viruses, and bacteria in clearer ways than before.
In a search for what makes humans human and how to show the hidden in physical creations, both Af Klmit and Mondrian spiralled off into a search for new artistic ways to show these ‘hidden within’ qualities, life forces if you like. Both experimented with geometric connected forms: Af Klimt went large and sinuously, delicately Art-Nouveau, Mondrian increasingly going Cezanne before heading to his famous striking cube and rectangle shapes, (yet always connected by an encircling grid of lines).
Interested in spiritual evolution and achieving higher spiritual powers, they both sought to portray this in art. Mondrian saw everything as one thing, producing detailed botanical paintings including ones with the aura of deceased plants. Problem is that I’ve read E F Benson’s Secret Lives and found myself sniggering at all this mention of auras.
The exhibition got very excited indeed by Af Klimt’s seeking of spirit guides to produce enormous canvases and flooded a room with spirit produced drawings and all things Ether. This was to its detriment as it didn’t really analyse what Af Klimt was trying to achieve through the techniques, presenting the finished works more as a given — a sequence of higher conscience depictions — and paid very little attention to what was happening to the wider world at the time. (Revolutions, World War One, empires and nations rising and falling, rapid industrialisation, photography, cinema, a global focus)… Why such huge canvases too? More stunning and receiving less attention were the detailed drawn out microscope slides and some very detailed botanical drawings.
Intriguingly Af Klimt abandoned her spirit guides to create works which are more like a cosmic Ying and Yang, symbolised by equally sized black and white swans, co-existing and yet in conflict, opposed and connected. In his attempts to show the hidden spiritual parts of living things, Mondrian moved into glorious beautiful shapes, including a diamond lozenge style frame. And I was happier looking at the stylishly coloured squares — didn’t expect Mondrian and Af Klimt to go pink though! (The pastel colours were almost as shocking as the Impressionism). I loved seeing Mondrian’s direct and beautiful self-portrait, as well as how he moved from deconstructing to more detailed trees across three canvases. Equally delightful was the delicate reconstruction of Mondrian’s studio with its large white walls and stylish shaped paintings.
Weirdly I embraced Mondrian’s forms, whilst being weirded out by a lot of Af Klimt’s spiritism pieces! There was also a chilling and thrilling tripych showing the three sides of human spiritual evolution — the female figures were dramatically and proudly Gustav Klimt-like, but the figure representing suffering included a yellow star. This symbol was never addressed in the exhibition — it was ominous to see, immediately making me think of the terrible suffering in the Shoah. Though I’m not sure if it was meant to be a yellow star or echo the red flower on the other side of the trio. Pyramid forms were also used throughout, about which Dan Brown would have a field day.
