***ZOOM INFO***
Topic: Hilma af Klint: 20th Century Visionary, 21st Century Artist
Time: Apr 23, 2020 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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Hilma af Klint -- 20th-Century Visionary, 21st-Century Artist
Bernard Welt (75mins)

One of the most exciting recent discoveries in international art is a painter who was born in 1862 and completed her most significant body of work by 1915. Among the first women artists to complete her formal training at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), rapidly innovated her own fully developed system of abstraction, independently of the European modernists—Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich—who have been credited with “inventing abstract art.” Like them, but earlier, she abandoned the traditional aim of art to faithfully reproduce reality as perceived by the senses, in favor of a mission to communicate a “higher” reality, perceived not by the sense but by the spirit. Charting the spiritual progress of life with biomorphic forms, geometric shapes, signs and symbols, and above all, a stunningly vivid palette, Af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple,” recently displayed in a blockbuster exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, have now claimed their place as one of the most remarkable bodies of work in 20th-century art, and Hilma af Klint has been anointed a pioneering genius of modernism.

This presentation will provide discussion of Hilma af Klint’s own writings on inspiration, imagination, and visionary art, profusely illustrated with images from af Klint’s captivating artwork.

This slide talk can serve to deepen experience of the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, available this week starting - Friday April 17th via Sofa Cinema at The Grailhouse. (http://www.grailmoviehouse.com/coming-soon-blog//booksellers-xfs2f)

Bernard Welt, Professor Emeritus at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University (Washington DC), is the author of Mythomania: Fables, Fantasies, and Sheer Lies in American Popular Art and a contributor to many arts journals and catalogues. His particular area of interest is counter-realism in modern art: aesthetics of imagination, vision, and dreams. He wrote the articles on Dreams and Creativity, Dreams and Literature, and Dreams and Cinema in Dreams: Biology, Psychology, Culture, Robert Gongloff and Robert Hoss, eds., Greenwood, 2019; and formerly served on the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. He is a widely published poet and has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Writing and a Lambda Literary Award nomination.