Why af Klint and Mondrian make a very happy marriage

This is one of the most unusual exhibitions I have come across. Why put two artists who never met or exchanged ideas into a forced conversation many years after their deaths? Yet Tate Modern has done exactly that with Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian.

Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life Installation View at Tate Modern 2023. Photo: Tate (Lucy Green)

I’m not sure if there is too much or not enough here – each of these artists produced plenty of material. At the same time, if the exhibition is centred around a subject – which seems to be spirituality in abstract art – shouldn’t there be more examples? It’s very odd. Yet despite all the alternative reality and mysticism, it feels very now.

Subtitled Forms of Life, the premise of this show is that both artists were fascinated with the natural world. But who wasn’t? Both gradually moved away from realism into abstraction – yet that’s hardly a unique path for early twentieth century artists. The most convincing link between the two is their shared interest in esoteric movements popular at the turn of the twentieth century, such as theosophy and anthroposophy. It was a new form of belief that wasn’t strictly speaking linked to religion but was interested in the study and understanding of the spiritual world.

Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life Installation View at Tate Modern 2023. Photo: Tate (Jai Monaghan)

The first few rooms offer a close comparison between af Klint’s and Mondrian’s early artistic endeavours, from realistic landscapes to detailed flower studies. Considering that Mondrian’s name is synonymous with grids, and af Klint is known for her swirly works, it was fascinating to see both grappling with realism at the start of their careers. As we find out later in the show, Mondrian continued to paint flowers privately long after he went all grid publicly.

The exhibition highlights our human desire to see logic and links, even when there may be none. As we know Mondrian would go on to devote his later artistic career to black lines and red and blue rectangles, it is almost impossible not to notice some elements of these in his earlier works. Are those careful orderly lines crossing both fields and sky in the Dune Landscape? Is he juxtaposing red and blue in The Red Cloud and again in Red Amaryllis with Blue Background, then a third time in Evening: The Red Tree? You instinctively want to link all his work as if leading to a certain future – which for him at the time wasn’t certain at all. In his early abstractions his colour palette was in fact similar to af Klint’s – lots of pastels and lots of pink.

Piet Mondrian, Red Amaryllis with blue background, 1909–1910. Private Collection

Af Klint moved to pinks early on. Her works are reminiscent of scaled-up microscope studies and seem to be depicting live forms interacting between themselves, or with words and possibly sounds. The closest the two artists come to each other is when af Klint created a series of circles each representing a different religion. Just as Mondrian’s seemingly pure abstract collections of lines can stand for street grids, af Klint’s mostly black-and-white circles with seemingly arbitrary lines next to them stand for beliefs in gods. Once you know that, you instinctively try to find sense in it – to reason why the artist chose that set of elements for this religion and not the other.

Organised religion had been long on the wane, but in the late nineteenth century science was close to replacing it entirely by offering new and extraordinary ways of looking at life. X-rays, radioactivity and electrons were discovered in the 1890s and af Klint’s The Swan, the SUW/UW Series, 1914 seem to explore these invisible yet powerful waves. In the series she moves from a painting of two swans – one white, another black, to works that depict light or rays in both black and white and later brighter colours. There is a clear excitement in the unseen, and yet a fear of its power. The series was painted during the First World War and affected by its brutality.

Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life Installation View at Tate Modern 2023. Photo: Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Af Klint was a medium and believed that a lot of her works were commissioned by her spiritual guide. For her, new scientific discoveries intertwined with spiritual beliefs. The last room of the show is dedicated to a series of very large abstract works that merge her interests in the real and the illusory. They seem full of energy and excitement for life – much more exciting that the bared-out grids of modernism that we’ve been taught to admire. They certainly exemplify a much more playful version of abstract art; it’s almost unbelievable that they were made in 1907, they seem so now. No surprise that Tate chose af Klint’s work for the posters, even though Mondrian’s name is supposed to draw the crowds.

Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life Installation View at Tate Modern 2023. Photo: Tate (Jai Monaghan)

Almost anything human-made can be compared to another thing and some similarities will surface. Do I feel convinced there are reasonably strong links between af Klint and Mondrian? No. But did it really bother me to see their works displayed next to each other? Not really. Mondrian’s later works are well known, af Klint is new to a lot of gallery goers. It is fascinating to see two such disparate ways of moving from depicting the real world in realistic ways, to depicting the observed world unconventionally. You are getting a two-in-one with this show, whether you like it or not.