00:01:47.000Great, bright swaths of color from the future.
00:01:51.360Thank you for joining us at the Missing Witches podcast.
00:01:55.020And thank you especially to my guest today.
00:01:58.460I feel so fluttery and like I have a celebrity crush on this academic writer, which tells you both a lot about me and a lot about her incredible work.
00:02:16.740This is like the one you need if you've seen Hilma F. Klint's work and you felt this movement of her and this story about collective creation, these women around her, this story that's slowly unfolding, rewriting abstract expressionist history, teaching us new ways of writing a history of seeing.
00:02:37.300like that's Helma and the women around her and the person who took the time to go back
00:02:42.560and read all the journals, all the letters, translate her friends' letters, translate
00:02:48.780other collaborators, situate us in time, is Julia Voss.
00:07:32.200and they worked very closely together.
00:07:34.540and but there's you know there's no note that says they had a physical relationship
00:07:43.020and somehow they they have these names for each other which is Vestal for Anna and Asket for
00:07:51.960Hilma and the Vestal is the priestess in the temple that guards the temple and that's Anna
00:07:59.240and the Ascet is named after being, living as, how do you say that? Ascetic? Ascetic.
00:08:05.960Ascetic? Yeah. So in a way, the very fact that they have chosen these names makes me think
00:08:13.780that they had a very strong platonic love rather than a physical love. But who knows?
00:08:20.700Yeah. Well, it seems like maybe they struggled with it. They were halves of the same entry point, the same archway into some way of understanding, but maybe it was too far.
00:08:38.260Yeah, I mean, that's also something you can find in the notebooks.
00:08:42.520I mean, there's a lot of sexual energy, I think, in the paintings.
00:11:04.040And I think this is like a code word or a way for themselves to get sort of an idea about the way they want to live.
00:11:13.660And then also to find maybe historic forerunners for what they are doing.0.58
00:11:19.420I think for women, it might have been a bit easier to share that kind of love because women living together was nothing people cared about.
00:11:30.160And I think probably a lot of people would have been less suspicious of women sharing a life than they were of men.
00:11:38.620But still, I guess, yeah, it's something they had to develop themselves and see how they wanted to practice what.0.96
00:11:48.180And, you know, since there were a lot of women, I guess, you know, each of them had a different idea of what should be done and could be done and could not be done.
00:11:56.700How do you think the channeling practices, the medium practices, all of those aspects of the rituals that they participated in and in some senses created, how do you think those spaces served for them as a way of like talking through things like that, talking through ideas?
00:12:19.860or how do you think that happens in general have you participated in a channeling session what do
00:12:24.640you think happens do you think there's an aspect where this was a way of liberating some ways of
00:12:32.140talking about things it's coming out in automatic writing and so I can detach from what I am allowed
00:12:39.040to know and sort of open up yeah yeah yeah I guess I guess this is what happened but in a way you
00:12:49.600I mean, much later, the surrealist movement used the kind of same techniques in order to release feelings they had and desires they had.
00:13:00.500And I think the automatic drawings also are full of desire and also the text.
00:13:07.100I think the text also developed when you look at the first collective, the five, it's much less sort of sexual than later.
00:13:16.480I think especially from 1905, 6 onwards, the language is much more energetic
00:13:24.480and there are many more sexual symbols in it and something new develops.
00:13:32.640And you also can see that on the canvases.
00:13:34.280I mean, there are also a man and a woman shown having sex actually on one canvas.
00:13:43.620Yeah, I believe these rituals were there in order to release that.
00:13:47.480Unfortunately, sort of for my taste, the rituals are pretty, you know, if you look at what happened, I tend to think that something extraordinary must have been there before, you know.
00:14:02.260But it's not like they do anything that's more than holding hands and praying.
00:17:13.420I think that's the most important thing.
00:17:15.600I do love the way it's treated in your book.
00:17:17.760I felt like on the one hand, I really appreciate your sort of refusing to dismiss her spirituality, her mediumship, but also like let's ground.
00:17:55.520Like she's clearly technically incredibly proficient in making choices, but both sides are real.
00:18:02.240She also is painting a commission from the spirit world.
00:18:06.740Yeah. What was important for me to see is that it's a dialogue between her and the spirit world. Because in the beginning, I was also off-put by the idea that it's commissioned. Because I thought, you know, here we have a brave woman who does all these beautiful paintings, and then it's just a commission by someone else, by some sort of higher beings.
00:18:29.080right and but the more i read the more i understood for like for example the the spirits
00:18:34.960ask her would you like to do that and then she answers yes and then you know when she has
00:18:41.300moments where where she's unhappy they they support her and they try to cheer her up or they
00:18:49.040applaud her on her paintings so they're also like invisible friends to her and and it's good to see
00:18:57.460that it's not a not a hierarchical relationship where someone sort of commissions something and
00:19:03.780then she executes it and then you know something new is being commissioned but it's a dialogue and
00:19:09.640yeah this was for me a relief to see and I think you're also right it's a mixture and she also
00:19:15.420talks about this later on in the 30s she gives a lecture at the anthroposophical society in
00:22:07.300So, yeah, I think they're believed to be two parts of one thing.
00:22:12.860although so far we have only studied Hilmar Acklin notebooks and it's clear that also in
00:22:20.100terms of dimensions and in terms of size that Hilmar Acklin paintings are the dominant ones.
00:22:25.100There are also passages where they talk about how much space these works should take up for
00:22:29.480example in the shared studio house they built on Munzu and it said that Hilmar Acklin should
00:22:34.820receive like three quarters of it and Anna should receive one quarter of it. So I guess they
00:22:42.120yeah they're twins but they are kind of uneven twins let's say yeah something about the size
00:22:49.820too it was painting so different in scale yeah and it also seems i mean him of clint has exhibited
00:22:58.280her work during lifetime there's one exhibition we know in 1913 and there is one exhibition also
00:23:04.460in london later in the late 20s it's her paintings of the pet temple that she shows in london so
00:23:11.720I guess there was, among them, there was a kind of tension, what exactly the relation was between these paintings, between these works.
00:23:22.560What do you think the ideal future home for these works is?
00:23:30.120It seems like there's debate among members of the foundation or there's legal things.
00:23:35.740I can't really follow all of it, but what would your dream version of it be?
00:23:41.720That's a very good question because, I mean, what I really like about Hilma Aptlin's idea of the temple is that it's something, on the one hand, something outward, a building, but on the other hand, it's also something inward.
00:23:54.180It's something you build in yourself and she built in herself and the women around her built in themselves.
00:23:59.100So it's a work that needs to be done inwardly and outwardly.
00:24:05.240And on the one hand, the situation now is quite beautiful
00:24:09.200that these works travel all over the world
00:24:11.200and people get to see them in Europe, in Australia,
00:24:14.240in North America, 25, they go to Asia also.
00:24:19.420So this is beautiful, but this is also something
00:24:23.100that's not very sustainable for the paintings
00:24:25.880because, you know, traveling is not good for paintings
00:27:35.000I mean, it shouldn't be copied in a casual way.
00:27:37.840You know, you would have these sacred books of the Middle Ages.
00:27:41.860Take, for example, Hiddigard's visionary works.
00:27:44.620they were illustrated and copied and multiplied at several places and that was the way to spread
00:27:52.160them i love that idea yes as soon as you said this might be heretical i was on board can you
00:27:58.720talk about like so she's she's studying she's interested in blavatsky and then she kind of
00:28:06.440leaves it behind with steiner when he makes his break and and she says repeatedly you know that
00:28:12.860she's working with Steiner and this is anthroposophist work but it also seems like
00:28:17.720she's going her own place does that does that sound right to you like what does she exist just
00:28:25.780in one of these traditions is she just trying to illuminate his thoughts or is there something more
00:28:30.220that she's saying on her own or or channeling on her own oh I would very much see it that that she's
00:28:36.880you know there's a lot she's saying on her own and that's also how Steiner saw it I think
00:28:41.620He didn't see her work as something that would perfectly illustrate what he was doing.
00:28:47.400I think the relation to Steiner is a difficult and troubled one.
00:28:52.520For a lot of people, Steiner completed what a lot of people tried to do.
00:28:58.600So, I mean, Steiner built this beautiful anthroposophical center in Switzerland.
00:29:05.180It started in 1914 and then was finished.
00:29:07.940And then Hilmar af Klint also went there actually nine times in the 1920s.
00:29:13.160And so Steiner was the one who was really able to construct this entire universe, which had, you know, a building, which burned down, but he rebuilt it, a building, text, art.
00:29:27.160He collaborated with a lot of artists.
00:29:29.700And maybe I sometimes wonder whether this was also something that attracted Hilma Avklund a lot, because he completed what he wanted to do.
00:29:39.580And it's absolutely clear that he comes up in all her writings.
00:29:44.440She has, you know, almost every of his books.
00:29:48.780And she gets a lot of ideas from Steiner, and she's inspired a lot by his writings.
00:29:53.140And you can see that also, I mean, for example, if you take the Serious Tree of Knowledge, there is a text by Steiner, which is very close to what she's actually drawing.
00:30:03.460It's a tree that is turned upside down.
00:30:05.600It's a kind of trouble that you do inside your body and outside in the universe.
00:30:10.980And it's, I think when you read this text and you look at the paintings, you feel there's a very closeness and there's a lot of fondness in her paintings of his thinking.
00:30:21.520So while he was still alive, she didn't manage to get his full attention.
00:30:27.000I mean, it looks like they met around 1910, probably, and that he actually saw her paintings
00:30:35.740and commented on them, but he wasn't taken by them.
00:30:39.400It's not like he thought, oh, wow, you know, this is excellent and I would like to have
00:30:44.000them in the Goethe Anum and we should work together.
00:32:19.200I can see how the myth developed because it's like a line in one book
00:32:24.640and then it's taking a bit further in the next book.
00:32:27.980And there was a degree of disappointment in Hilma Apklin, that's clear.
00:32:33.880She would have liked if she got his full support and she didn't get that.
00:32:38.740So there is a little bit of truth in it.
00:32:41.040And the other thing is that Steiner was really skeptical of visionaries.
00:32:46.440This kind of working sort of unconsciously and completely receiving something wasn't something he was fond of.
00:32:54.440And I sometimes wonder, this is just speculating, but I sometimes wonder, Steiner was in Weimar before he joined the Theosophical Society.
00:33:05.700And in Weimar, he experienced also Nietzsche, who was then in a state of almost unconsciousness and had all kinds of outbreaks.
00:33:14.920and he was the first biographer of Nietzsche's actually and I sometimes wonder whether he
00:33:19.960associated with being you know in these hallucinatory states whether this reminded him of
00:33:26.520Nietzsche which was a very sort of off-putting example of someone sort of losing his consciousness
00:33:33.880and maybe that was an experience that he digested by staying away from that and in a way you know
00:33:41.000It took me a while to understand that these kind of visionary states or ecstatic states Hilma Afkind was in were actually something very enriching and beautiful for her.
00:33:54.380Because we have a lot of cases of people who work kind of in a visionary state or in an ecstatic state and have these breakdowns afterwards.
00:34:08.840And I think the difference with Hema Upland is that she managed so well with reaching out to the other side.
00:34:16.620Yeah. And there's there's bits you quote that sort of indicate that she she changed in how she saw her relationship with the messages she was receiving, that she had to become more of like a chooser.
00:34:33.560She had to become more of an interlocutor or something with the messages coming through that the nature of her relationship with that world changed, maybe in a way that Steiner wanted her to reach for or something.
00:34:47.700I think, I mean, it's inevitable if you experience, make these experiences a lot, you develop a way of dealing with it. And I think this is something that also happened to her, that it, you know, from probably being very overwhelming in the beginning, that it became more manageable the longer she did it.
00:35:07.460And also, I think she tried different channels.
00:35:14.440So from when World War I rages, almost at the end of it,
00:35:21.500she develops this very pantheistic attitude towards what's around her.
00:35:27.360So I think in the beginning, you would always have these flowers in her paintings
00:35:32.520and you would have all kinds of organic forms.
00:35:35.780But then she turns to actual flowers in her environment and tries to channel their souls and succeeds.
00:35:45.800This might have been another door to entering different, another consciousness, you know, through a kind of pantheistic melting with the world that's around you.
00:35:58.260what do you think you know we talk about paintings for the future she was
00:36:06.380writing for us somehow or painting for us she was throwing images forward i i interviewed an
00:36:13.920academic who writes about witchcraft and uh channeling and she said when she saw the hilma
00:36:21.000show at the guggenheim she felt so emotional feeling like this woman had succeeded in tossing
00:36:27.800these seeds you know that they were for us they she threw them far enough that we we caught them
00:36:32.620um yeah what do you feel I guess it's not so much a question of what do you feel she was trying to
00:36:39.520toss us because I think sometimes she wasn't clear what the messages were but what do you feel like
00:36:45.300when you've looked at all these paintings and read all these notebooks what are you left with
00:36:49.960wanting to underline or or or yell loud on her behalf or she wouldn't want me to yell
00:36:58.780just very politely yeah i mean what what i find really touching and really and i mean you're right
00:37:10.300it really feels like a gift and i think this is why people are so moved when they see it because
00:37:14.880they feel like something really, something generous is offered to them. And it's not rigid
00:37:23.240in the sense like it says, you know, this is the system you believed in. Actually, it's all wrong.
00:37:28.520Here's the new system. Take it. It's more like, it's very tentative, right? I mean, it's more like,
00:37:35.500why don't you try to connect with something else and reach out and put your feelers out in order to
00:37:43.500build a bridge and then let something new come in and develop and i think this is the idea that
00:37:51.160you never you you know you never stop if you are open for the things around you and if you
00:37:58.000try to connect with them then what you receive is that
00:38:03.360it's it's a lifelong evolution and maybe even longer if there is a message that's the message
00:38:10.540that it's a message of yeah of the gift of lifelong evolution and even beyond that i love that you
00:38:18.080said why don't you put your feelers out as like sort of the one of the messages from her can you
00:38:23.680talk more about how we see that in the paintings so there are actually i mean in the 10 largest you
00:38:29.840have these it's also primarily chaos one organism that comes up again and again is the snail right
00:38:38.260and the snail with feelers and they are also in one of the 10 largest you see two snails sort of
00:38:43.680touching each other with the feelers so I think this is why the metaphor of the feelers also came
00:38:48.900up for me but it also it comes again and again in different forms so sometimes you see two things
00:38:55.680that go into each other and then you know a blue circle meets an orange circle and they make green
00:39:03.160together and also in a series like Passivo it's almost like two planets and then one planet sends
00:39:09.840out something that you know it could be a seed or it could be it could be even a spaceship and then
00:39:15.080it flies to the other planet and then the other planet gets illuminated and then it returns
00:39:19.780something that goes back again so this reaching out and trying via moving and whirling to get
00:39:27.720to something else I think it's almost in every painting yeah me too so you come to these
00:39:36.360paintings with so much more than I do here at Art Historian and you had that moment where you
00:39:42.900saw the first one and then you went and you saw more and you saw them in a context of art history
00:39:51.320what stood out like why were they important why were they beautiful what what did you know about
00:39:58.480them when you saw them and you knew the context of art history do you know what I mean yeah yeah
00:40:03.620so the first time I saw them in 2008 when I was in Stockholm they were presented I think they
00:40:10.220were surrounded by Russian constructivist works and I felt color wise because they
00:40:28.440And I thought, wow, you know, color-wise, this white, red, and black really looks like Russian constructivism.
00:40:35.600But on the other hand, it also looks more organic.
00:40:38.620It's less rigid, and it looks strange.
00:40:41.820And when I saw them, I thought maybe they were done a little bit later.
00:40:45.940And I think a lot of paintings look like they could have been done much later.
00:40:51.640And then, as I said, Iris Miller-Vesterman started telling me about what she knew about it.
00:40:58.120But yeah, I mean, in terms of art history, the story we have been told over and over again is basically that Western art abstraction was invented by these men,
00:41:08.140starting from 1911, starting with Kandinsky
00:41:59.360And so, yeah, she seemed to be kind of this odd person who would challenge art history to either rewrite everything they believed in or leave her outside.
00:42:15.280And this is what happened for a long time.
00:45:39.360have a better relationship to the world around them.
00:45:42.700But I think in order to get a different idea of nature rather than looking at nature as a resource, but actually respecting nature as something that is a being in its own and has a life and has individuals and organisms we should connect with, I find her work really helpful for building a bridge.
00:46:06.720And I think this will make us think a lot more and we will come back to this.
00:46:12.700Yeah, I think so, too. There's been so much brilliant work, mostly by you putting her into a rewriting of abstract expressionism. Do you think there's another lineage that she belongs in? Like there's mystics, revelatory women, Monica Cho, Hildegard of Bingen. Is there a different story there still to be told?
00:46:36.680What are we learning from these women who tried so hard to tell something that they couldn't tell in their present, it feels like?0.97
00:46:44.940Yeah, I mean, this, yeah, I mean, certainly there is a tradition of visionary women.
00:46:49.940She also, I think, at least explored whether she put herself, she should put herself into that.
00:46:55.700So there is a notebook where she looks back at visionaries and also touches upon Hildegard of Bingen.
00:47:02.340And Hildegard of Bingen is someone, actually, I think I discovered through Hilma of Klint because, I mean, I knew the name before, but then I saw in the notebook and then, you know, Bingen is in Germany. I went there and looked at things and so forth.
00:47:15.340So, yeah, I think the beauty of it is really that there are a lot of things that we cannot really explain.
00:47:24.260I mean, with Hildegard von Bingen, we also have people, even like Oliver Sacks, who is usually a brilliant author, and I like his writing a lot.
00:47:33.060But, you know, he had this idea that Hildegard von Bingen basically suffered from migraine.
00:47:39.220But, you know, a lot of people have headaches and migraines, but it's not like they come up with the same things.
00:47:45.340And if you look at her paintings, her visionary paintings, she didn't do them herself, but the experts I trust say that she, how do you say, that she commissioned them, right?
00:47:57.420She commissioned them and told the nuns who executed them how to do them.
00:48:02.420And so if you look at these small paintings from the 12th century, it's really extraordinary because they're all kind of allusions to texts and pictures from that time.
00:48:18.000But nevertheless, they also look like nothing that was being done at the same time.
00:48:23.540And we have to come to grips with that.
00:48:27.820Whatever it is, whatever that kind of state is and wherever it comes from, it's a kind of state that was able to produce something that we don't have any better explanation for.
00:52:28.120in which she did little reproductions of her work
00:52:31.840as photographs and as little watercolors and they were also meant you know to allow her works to
00:52:38.780travel and we even know that they went to Amsterdam and they were sort of handed around in the
00:52:44.680audience of a talk at the Antiposophical Society which was given by a friend of Hilma's so she
00:52:51.520tried to open up all these channels exhibitions texts albums reproductions and and it took her
00:52:58.900nowhere during lifetime or you know it wasn't a huge success and I think that was a disappointment
00:53:04.060but then again what's great with her is that she that she didn't sort of turn it around and thought0.99
00:53:12.820okay maybe the others are right and I'm just you know a stupid fool doing these I don't know0.99
00:53:18.240canvases nobody's interested in let's forget about it but instead she decides okay so that's the world0.99
00:53:25.720I live in I have to accept it but I'm sure there are better times to come I'll give that work to
00:53:31.300the future and then again a kind of a rush of creativity came and she had these ideas for how
00:53:38.760to build a temple and where to build it and so forth so I don't know again she managed to in a
00:53:45.300way start over new I mean this is also something that really impresses me the the fact that she
00:53:50.200has the power and the strength to start over and over again that is that is something very cool
00:53:58.680remarkable remarkable very remarkable and she must be working through you to get her artwork
00:54:05.880out to the rest of us in the world so thank you thank you thank you so much the great collaboration
00:54:14.000continues thank you so much again julia it's such a treat to meet you please also tell your husband
00:54:20.920how much i love his book i've shown it to everyone i will and i'm and he will be very happy about it
00:54:26.960it's just so cool to see yeah just to like get to feel her like the paintings the the drawings where
00:54:34.700she's like floating in the world of the art yeah i like them a lot too and i think this is also
00:54:40.000So, I mean, this is, I mean, I guess it depends.
00:54:44.220But sometimes when I see her works in exhibitions and there are not too many people, it really feels like you can enter them.
00:54:51.220And they are portals and they are doors and they open up in the world.
00:54:56.020And I love in the graphic novel that you get a feeling of that, that she is part of this world and that it's a universe.
00:55:04.620It's not just something flat on a canvas, but it's a whole universe she opens up.
00:55:10.000Oh, thank you so much. Is there anything you want to tell the listeners about how they can find you and support you? And where do you want them to send their love and excitement?
00:55:21.640Oh, that's so sweet of you. So actually, in these days, the audiobook is coming out of the biography, and it has been read by Doria Bramante, and we will make a post soon. So maybe I recommend that.
00:55:36.820And I'm on Instagram. You found me on Instagram. And, you know, any thoughts and love and
00:55:43.260considerations, I'm more than welcome. Wonderful. We'll include the link to your Instagram and
00:55:49.100everything else we can find in the show notes, as usual. And blessed if I can be.