THE TEN LARGEST, NO. 7, ADULTHOOD
HILMA AF KLINT, 1907
Okay. So this thing is over ten feet tall. She painted it in four days, lying on the floor, in 1907. That's before Kandinsky. Before Mondrian. Before anybody had decided you were even allowed to do this. And that's the whole thing. Nobody had done it yet. There's nothing to copy. She's not taking a tree and boiling it down to a shape. She's painting something that doesn't have a picture. Look at it. Roman numerals. Dashed lines, like a diagram. Looping letters down the side, an alphabet she made up and never bothered to translate. Pods, seeds, cells splitting in two. It's not a picture of anything. It's a map of something only she could see. This one's number seven. Adulthood. One of ten, the whole arc of a life, childhood to old age. The big yellow shapes, pinched in the middle, numbered one, two, three. Stages inside a stage. And here's the part nobody can quite handle. She's taking dictation. From spirits. She called them the High Masters, and they told her what to paint. Four days a canvas, then the next one. And no, that's not a figure of speech. She meant it, literally, spirits and all. Then you look at the wall, and if you ask me, the spirits had taste. Whatever was happening in that room, it worked. And she knew nobody was ready. Rudolf Steiner, the great spiritualist of the day, the one man who should have gotten it, stands in her doorway, looks at all of it, and tells her to wait. Fifty years, he says. He was being optimistic. So she makes it a rule, puts it in her will. Nobody sees these until she's been gone twenty years. And while she waits underground, Kandinsky walks off with the title. Father of abstraction. Not around to give it back. Oh, and she painted it for a temple. One that didn't exist. A spiral building, she said. Which sounds like more spirit talk, except they went and built it. It's the Guggenheim. A spiral she never walked into, full of paintings she never showed a soul.