Hilma Af Klint & Piet Mondriaan exhibition: integrity, myth and money

From October 7 Hilma Af Klint will gloriously return to the Kunstmuseum in The Hague. In 1986, now 37 years ago, Af Klint rose to international fame as the discovery of the century in the American travelling exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1895-1985, of which The Hague was the last venue. In 2018, Af Klint’s international acclaim as the pioneer of Swedish abstract art was sealed at the Guggenheim Museum. Af Klint’s work has acquired cultish dimensions. People swoon before her work. Researchers and critics regard themselves as channeled by the artist. 

So, nothing wrong with this new exhibition, is there? False: everything is wrong about this exhibition. Literally everything. 

The Victory Boogie Woogie - a corpse dissected

Last week I received a review copy from the Amsterdam University Press: a new book on Piet Mondrian, Inside Out Victory Boogie Woogie, edited by Maarten van Bommel, Hans Janssen and Ron Spronk. Mondrian started on the painting Victory Boogie Woogie in 1942, but it stayed unfinished because of his death in February 1944. The painting was bought in 1998 from the collector Samuel Irving Newhouse at a whopping price of 82 million Guilders (approx. 37 million Euro’s) through a gift of the Dutch National Bank to commemorate the introduction of the Euro in the Netherlands. The acquisition caused a public outrage, and even the House of Representatives raised questions about the way it was acquired. But now the painting is on victorious display in the Gemeentemuseum of the Hague, and is by now a prominent attraction of the museum.

Art & Western Esotericism: from rejected knowledge to blockbuster

From 1996 onwards, Dutch art historians Marty Bax, Andréa Kroon and Audrey Wagtberg Hansen have realized various projects aimed at drawing attention to the relationship between ‘art & western esotericism’. Because our goals have largely been realized, we feel the time has come to focus on other lacunas in our knowledge of art history. This column therefore marks the end of our joint ‘lobby’ for this fascinating subject. 

Art and religion are closely related. Like the main world religions, lesser known religious currents have also provided artists with inspiration. Freemasonry, spiritualism, theosophy and anthroposophy for instance, were relevant to the development of modern art. Within the academic Study of Religions, these organisations are seen as part of western esotericism: an umbrella term for a group of related currents, which date back to the gnosis of Antiquity, the hermetic philosophy of the Renaissance and the ‘occult’ sciences (alchemy, magic, astrology).