66 review.

Number 350, November 2022 I THE ART NEWSPAPER

BOOKS A selection of what is

Reviews new and notable in art
scholarship and publishing

Julia Voss, translated

by Anne Posten
Hilma af Klint: A Biography
University of Chicago Press, 448pp, 44 colour
& 49 b/w illustrations, £28/$35 (hb), published
UK/US 6/19 October

Kurt Almqvist and Daniel

Birnbaum (eds)
Hilma af Klint Catalogue Raisonné:
Vol.1, Spiritualistic Drawings
1895-1910; Vol.2, The Paintings
for The Temple; Vol.3, The Blue
Books; Vol.4, Parsifal and The
Atom 1916-1917; Vol.5, Geometric
Series and Other Works 1917-1920;
Vol.6, Late Watercolours 1922-1941;
Vol.7, Landscapes, Portraits and
Miscellaneous Works 1877-1941
Bokförlaget Stolpe and Axel and Margaret
Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit,

H
2020-22

ilma af Klint (1862-1944)

is an artist whose time
has come. The fascina-
tion with the Swedish
artist’s work has grown
since the 2013 retrospective at the
Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and
reached a high point with the 2018 Gug-
genheim exhibition in New York. Paint-
ing at the behest of “higher spirits”, Af
Klint embraced the spiritualist beliefs Above: Hilma af Klint’s undated self-portrait demonstrates her skills as a realist while works such as Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No 9 (1915) were the result, she believed, of
of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and mediumistic revelation channelled through her “higher spirits”; the artist embraced a number of spiritualist beliefs and was a founder of “The Five” seance group in Stockholm

Bringing order to spiritual fascination

Anthroposophy, while remaining open
to contemporary scientific develop-
ments (from x-rayographs to research
into atoms), which similarly penetrated
superficial reality. Her paintings trans-
formed these various sources into an
individual imagery that ultimately fulfils Hilma af Klint’s first biography, coupled with an ambitious seven-volume catalogue raisonné, will
help to cement the Swedish artist’s rightful place as a pioneer of Abstract Art. By Matthew Gale
her prediction that “the attempts I have
undertaken … will astound humanity”.
In complementary ways, the English
translation of the first biography and the
completion of the seven-volume catalogue Voss ably traces paths through the activity of Ida af Klint, the artist’s sister, made miniature copies to show to Daniel Birnbaum, scholars closely asso-
raisonné this year bring order to the fas- networks of the international spirit- working for equal rights through the Steiner, hoping for their inclusion in his ciated with re-evaluating the artist. Their
cination, while asserting Af Klint’s posi- ualist groups in the late 19th century. Fredrika Bremer Association. Anthroposophical centre at Dornach, endeavour benefits from the survival of
tion within the historical narrative of In Stockholm, these included the pho- These details, garnered from deep Switzerland. More concretely, Af Klint the abstract works in the Hilma af Klint
non-objective art. The long neglect of her tographer Bertha Valerius’s Klöverbla- research beyond even the artist’s 26,000 presented the originals—although Foundation. They acknowledge the art-
paintings exposes the predominance of a det (cloverleaf) and Huldine Beamish’s pages of notes cited in great-nephew which of them remains unclear—at the ist’s own organising principles for her
misogynist and formalist interpretation Edelweiss Societies. From within these Johan af Klint’s “Afterword”, help to World Conference on Spiritual Science work as well as the register compiled by
of abstraction ill-equipped to accommo- circles, in 1896 Af Klint and Anna Cassel, achieve the correctives Voss sets out held in London in July 1928. Neither Olof Sundström after her death. With
date her gender-fluid spiritualist inspira- a close friend and fellow artist, formed in her introduction. As well as distin- yielded sustained interest and, there- full-colour and full- or quarter-page illus-
tion. The familiar claim that Wassily Kan- an intimate séance group, “The Five”, guishing Af Klint’s own spiritual under- after, she nurtured unrealised plans to trations throughout, this publication
dinsky made the first Abstract painting in with Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman standing from the Austrian philosopher build a temple for her work. certainly constitutes one of the most

SELF-PORTRAIT: ANDERS FREDRIKSEN © THE HILMA AF KLINT FOUNDATION

1913 was part of this modernist tendency,
but the contention that this should have
been the right of Af Klint’s 1907 works
is now firmly established. Her “higher
spirits” (named Amaliel, Ananda and
Gregor) dictated her Abstract composi-
tions as a mediumistic revelation, while,
as Julia Voss unravels in her pioneering
biography, the painter’s everyday needs
were sustained by family and friends,
portrait commissions and, in difficult
times, lodgers.
and Mathilda Nilsson. Though initially a
junior participant, Af Klint emerged as
the dominant conduit for the mediumis-
tic messages that determined her great
cycle of The Paintings for the Temple (1906-
15). As Voss interestingly shows, many
of the spiritualists were simultaneously
active in the more temporal demand for
women’s rights. Af Klint served briefly as
secretary to the Association of Swedish
Women Artists, founded in March 1910,
and Voss draws attention to the parallel
Rudolf Steiner’s (rather distracted) inter-
est in her art, Voss links this sociopolit-
ical aspect to the artist’s understanding
of the material world.
Crucially, she demonstrates that Af
Klint proposed to exhibit the Abstract
works on more than one occasion—a
factor of critical importance given the
painter’s retention of almost her whole
oeuvre had fed notions of a withdrawal
from public engagement. Af Klint and
her companion, Thomasine Andersson,
Certainly, those astonished by Af
Klint’s story should turn to Voss’s biogra-
phy. Well-served by her translator, Anne
Posten, Voss marshals as much of the
personal detail as the painter’s surviving
notes would divulge and has filled out
an account that will surely remain the
standard for years to come.
Last month, the Hilma af Klint cat-
alogue raisonné reached its seventh and
last volume. This significant under-
taking is edited by Kurt Almqvist and
handsome catalogues raisonné produced,
and those seeking a compendium of
these works will be richly rewarded.
The catalogue order is sanctioned by
the artist’s own concentration on the
spiritualist paintings to the detriment
of her more functional realism. So it
is that the first volume (published in
2020) plunges the reader into the closed
world of the notebooks made during the
séances of “The Five” from 1895 to 1910.
They contain urgent sketches, scored by
 THE ART NEWSPAPER I review. Number 350 November 2022
jabbed pencil marks that either staked
out or filled in the eventual image.
The second volume displays The Paint-
ings for the Temple made in two marathon
bursts, in 1906-07 (notably the series
The Ten Largest) and 1912-15, and which
constitute the heart of Af Klint’s output.
Here, the enjoyment of the works
on which her reputation rests more
than justifies the publication’s high pro-
duction values. The editors emphasise
the “fluid interchanging of abstraction
with figuration, and continued imaging
of unseen worlds” but, surprisingly,
their laconic introduction somewhat
underplays the works’ recently estab-
lished importance.
The whole sequence as remade by
Af Klint in miniature occupies the cat-
alogue’s third volume. Here, the book’s
design uniformity slightly obscures the
sequence, as several of the notebooks
illustrated would be more logically
legible if ranged vertically on the page.
The notes that Af Klint added are trans-
lated but, as the editors’ introduction
declares, “textual elements that are part
of the artworks themselves have not
been translated”. This decision seems
surprisingly unhelpful in an English-lan-
guage catalogue of this nature.
Symbolic geometric watercolours
dominated Af Klint’s output in 1916-20
and are covered by the next two
volumes. Their delicate control contrasts
sharply with the freely handled water-
colours of the following two decades
gathered in the penultimate volume.
These are some of the most atmospheric
of Af Klint’s works, stretching the range
of her colour harmonies before being
complicated by figurative elements.
Academic dexterity
The final volume constitutes a miscel-
lany. Floated free from chronology, it
opens with 1880s works as a student
at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in
Stockholm, which confirm Af Klint’s
academic dexterity (a mistranslation of
the Swedish “akt” as “act” rather than
“nude” creeps in here), and sweeps up
her realistic portraits and landscapes.
The grouping by genre (but mixing
media) obscures any sense of develop-
ment. This heterogeneity suggest that
taste and a view of the artist’s reputation
discounted the early material from occu-
pying its logical place as a first volume.
There are conventions associated
with catalogues raisonné: they are arranged
chronologically, assign a unique number
to each work and contain definitive
information on the individual pieces
(title, date, dimensions, inscriptions),
their material (paint, support) and
history (provenance, exhibition history,
citations in the literature). Beyond the
title, date, material and “HaK” number
(in a list at the back of each volume),
the Hilma af Klint catalogue defies many
of these conventions. As she kept the
Abstract work there is no need for prov-
enance information—though the works
in the final volume are widely distrib-
uted—but overlooking recent exhibi-
tions and the wealth of literature on the
artist seems something of a disservice.
Furthermore, there is no chronology or
HURVIN ANDERSON: © HURVIN ANDERSON: PHOTO: CATHERINE WHARFE; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND THOMAS DANE GALLERY
bibliography.
Somewhat disarmingly, the final
volume includes the statement: “It would
not have been possible to include all
known works from these [genre] groups
in a volume comparable in size to the
previous ones.” This indicates—rather
than lacunae in the knowledge—that
a 340-page volume does not suffice to
encompass this aspect of Af Klint’s work.
It is clearly a matter of judgement, but
one that undercuts the claim of these
elegant volumes to function as a cata-
logue raisonné of the whole oeuvre.
• More on Hilma af Klint—in VR and on
film—in Media, page 71
• Matthew Gale is an independent art
historian and curator, formerly senior
curator at large, Tate Modern
Caught between
two identities
The first major monograph on Hurvin Anderson
lets his painting do the talking. By David Trigg
Catherine Lampert, Roger
Robinson and Courtney J. Martin
Hurvin Anderson
Rizzoli, 320pp, 210 colour illustrations,
£55/$75 (hb), published UK/
US 6 September/25 October
Hurvin Anderson often speaks about
being in one place while thinking of
another. As this sumptuous volume
reveals, it’s a sensation the British painter
has explored for 25 years, through sensu-
ous, open-ended images that slip between
figuration and abstraction. In his exu-
berant canvases and works on paper,
themes of emigration, citizenship and
identity shift in and out of focus, never
quite willing to be pinned down. From
the nostalgic interiors of Birmingham’s
Black barbershops to the verdant land-
scapes of Jamaica, his art, shaped by an
immersion in both British and Afro-Car-
ibbean culture, interrogates places where
history and memory collide.
This, Anderson’s first major mono-
graph, covers his entire oeuvre, from
the swimming pool paintings made
soon after leaving the Royal College of
Art in the late 1990s, to his recent Jamai-
can hotel series, inspired by abandoned
buildings he discovered in Oracabessa.
Flipping through its pages, you see he is
a bold colourist, saturating works with
the vivid hues of the Caribbean, yet tem-
pering his palette with a British urban
murkiness. When it comes to discussing
his practice, however, Anderson can be
coy, preferring to let the paintings do
the talking. Rizzoli has ostensibly taken
his lead by including more than 200
high-quality colour illustrations (includ-
ing previously unpublished images
from the artist’s archive), yet commis-
sioning just a single essay by the art his-
torian and curator Catherine Lampert,
which follows Yale Center for British
Western arrogance on parade
A collection on culture and conflict is a challenging read. By Robert Bevan
Timothy Clack and Mark Dunkley
(eds)
Cultural Heritage in Modern
Conflict: Past, Propaganda, Parade
Routledge, 344pp, 33 b/w illustrations, £120
(hb), published 9 September
Culture and conflict have been entangled
for the whole of recorded history: Poly-
bius warned fellow Ancient Greeks that
armies should avoid damaging religious
sites unnecessarily. But in recent decades
the deliberate targeting of culture in wars
on the one hand and the emergence of a
military-heritage complex on the other
has led cultural professionals to either
work alongside the military on herit-
age protection or be full-time officers or
reservists themselves.
This has ratcheted up since recent
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan
where the US military deployed anthro-
pologists in the field. Cultural Heritage
in Modern Conflict is mostly soldiers and
military-adjacent figures giving their aca-
demic perspective on the issues arising.
You don’t have to be a raging peacenik
to find the idea of (mostly British) gen-
erals, captains and colonels and various
Back (2008) from Peter’s Series, which
was shown at Tate Britain in 2009, recalls
the attic barbershop in Birmingham
frequented by Hurvin Anderson’s father
Art director Courtney J. Martin’s brief
but lively foreword recalling an early
encounter with the artist.
The youngest of eight siblings, Ander-
son is the only member of his immediate
family not born in Jamaica, from where
his parents emigrated in the early 1960s.
No wonder, then, that his art so often
conveys a sense of being caught between
two worlds. This was amplified during
a 2002 residency in Trinidad: “I was the
Englishman, but I was also the Jamaican,”
he said. “You could kind of drift back and
forwards between these identities.” His
paintings from this period are character-
ised by a sense of separation, as Lampert
writes of the brooding Country Club:
Chicken Wire (2008), which depicts a well-
tended tennis court seen through a mesh
fence: “its surface covered in repeated,
sun-reflecting hexagonal shapes, tends to
induce in the viewer an immediate sense
of exclusion and unease”.
Also striking is the artist’s penchant
for working serially, repeatedly returning
to a subject until it is exhausted. Take the
barbershop paintings, which brought his
work to prominence when they were dis-
played at Tate Britain in 2009. This series,
which is the focus of a major retrospec-
tive at The Hepworth Wakefield next
year, began with the bright blue interior
of Peter Brown’s barbershop, a gather-
ing space for Anderson’s father and his
friends in the attic of the proprietor’s
suburban home. To Anderson, this space
felt like a little piece of the Caribbean and
the photographs he took there spawned
numerous paintings. Some show a client
having his hair cut, while others focus
on the intimate space devoid of people.
Related works examine the barber’s par-
aphernalia, posters stuck to the walls, or
the room’s geometry; several are decon-
structed to the point of pure abstraction.
For Anderson, the barbershop series
other wagers of war as chief contributors
to a book on protecting heritage to be,
let’s say, challenging. And, with some
honourable exceptions, you won’t be
surprised at the panoply of well-meaning
delusion, outright cynicism and Western
arrogance on parade.
Too often, this is not about protection
for its own sake, but securing military
advantage using culture as a “non-lethal
lever of influence” to pacify a country
under occupation. Major Luke Wattam,
a Cultural Specialist Unit reservist in the
British army, writes: “My understand-
ing of the role was…to endear myself
to target populations as a means to
exploit relationships for defence effect.
I was never under the illusion that I was
making friends or operating in an envi-
ronment that was anything but geared to
toward exploitative outcomes.”
Professor Peter Stone, the Unesco
chair in cultural property protection and
peace at Newcastle University, is more
nuanced. He has worked tirelessly to get
armies to take account of heritage and
has been directly involved in preparing
no-strike lists for Nato that seek to avoid
damage to historic sites. A favourite
“bears the stamp of political, economic
and social history”, and led him to paint
Is it OK to be Black? (2015-16), commis-
sioned for the Arts Council Collection’s
70th anniversary. Speaking overtly to
questions of Black identity, it depicts
an assortment of posters of influential
personalities tacked to the barber’s
mirror, from Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X to Olympic athlete Carl Lewis
and Muhammad Ali. Defined more
abstractly, the treatment of these latter
figures suggests a certain instability—a
quality that pervades so many of the
works reproduced in this book.
Lampert’s considered reading
of Anderson’s practice is rigorously
researched and laden with insights
drawn from her close observation of
his work and correspondence with the
artist. Technical detail and analysis are
deftly balanced with socio-historical
context, biography and evocative descrip-
tions. “At one moment,” she writes, “he
seems to go down a route that relishes
pictorial flatness, and the static quality
of photography; on other occasions, or
even in the same painting, he revels in
anecdote, repeated here, is the decision
by Nato, following Stone’s involvement,
to use smaller armaments in Libya to
destroy Gaddafi’s mobile radar stations
sited within a Roman-era fortified farm
at Ras Almargeb. The target was duly hit
and the archaeology saved.
But a preserved Roman farm was a
high price to pay for Nato’s adventurism
across Libya, which turned the country
into a failed state complete with modern
slave markets and leaving its entire herit-
age at incalculably greater risk. Similarly,
it was the decision to preserve historic
Kyoto that led to the nuking of Hiro-
shima. Should we view this as a success?
It is the repeated failure to have regard to
the larger ethical picture that character-
ises this book and the wider military-her-
itage complex.
Some contributions are jaw-drop-
pingly odd, such as counter terrorism
expert Suzanne Raine’s discussion
of Islamist attacks on culture. Her
clash-of-civilisations narrative spends
rather too much time examining Ariana
Grande lyrics, while her analysis of the
effects of securitisation on our free-
doms doesn’t go much deeper than bag
67
the fluid weather-like potential of paint,
as puddles, as blobs on the canvas-win-
dowpane surface, or as windscreen-like
washes across ‘empty’ space.”
While Lampert’s engaging overview
is informative, if necessarily discursive,
the absence of other essays exploring
specific aspects of Anderson’s multifac-
eted approach is curious; for instance, a
quote from Eddie Chambers, professor
of art history at the University of Texas,
whets the appetite for a scholarly Black
perspective. In its stead, an illustrated
chronology of the artist’s life and career is
accompanied by 15 poems by Roger Rob-
inson, the British writer and musician.
These sensitive reflections on Ander-
son’s themes offer alternative ways to
think about the work of this remarkable
painter, perhaps revealing more about
the way his enigmatic images operate
than any conventional text.
• David Trigg is an independent writer,
critic and art historian, and a regular
contributor to The Burlington Magazine,
Frieze and Art Quarterly
searches at concerts.
There are exceptions. The ever-reada-
ble Dacia Viejo Rose, associate professor
of archaeology at Cambridge University,
wonders whether the intertwining of
identity and heritage forms anchors or
quicksand. It is inevitable, she reminds
us, that heritage will be contested—“all
heritage is dissonant”. Etienne Bergès,
humanitarian policy adviser at the
British Red Cross, gives us a bracingly
frank account of the failures of reconcil-
iation initiatives in Myanmar’s Rakhine
state that put oppressor and victims on
an equal footing.
Overall, the book is a fascinating
insight into intellectual friendly fire; the
soldier-contributors are justifying a good
war on the back of saving culture yet buy
into a neo-colonial view of the world that
has destabilised entire regions. Of course,
some co-operation with uniforms is nec-
essary to safeguard heritage in war zones
and as a result of natural disasters, and
Stone wants his organisation, Blue Shield
(this writer is also a member), to become
a heritage version of the Red Cross. If that
is to happen, though, eliding humani-
tarian and military goals is a profound
mistake. This book reminds us why we
need healthy boundaries and for heritage
to keep firmly to the humanitarian path.
• Robert Bevan is the author of Monumental
Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth about
the Past, published last month by Verso