In a room illumined by the light of a few candles, a group of women with veils over their faces conducts a séance. The year is 1896 and the women, who have recently formed a spiritualist collective called Da Fem (The Five), send a chorus of wishes skyward. Linking arms, they offer themselves as suppliants, as “open receptors” waiting to receive “our ancient truth [from] the ascended masters.”
The stage is thus set for Hilma, a triptych of an opera about the eponymous Swedish artist and mystic, who was arguably the most famous member of The Five. This year marks the 80th anniversary of af Klint’s death, and Hilma, a co-production of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and New Georges in New York that opened in June, pays tribute to the visionary whose haecceity drew on both spiritual and scientific sources.
Af Klint’s monumental, instantly recognizable canvases, some as large as 13 feet, were the subject of a 2018 survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Famously, that exhibition drew more visitors than any other in the institution’s history. But before that show, her work, with spiritualistic proclivities and feminine palettes, was not always taken seriously. A member of only the second generation of women to have studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, af Klint (class of 1887) was until recently an unacknowledged footbridge to modernist abstraction. Her “mediumistic” paintings, which channeled messages she received from invisible forces about the nature of the universe, is echoed in the works of more famous contemporaries like Piet Mondrian and Vasily Kandinsky. At the time of her death in 1944, she left behind 1,200 abstract paintings—many aswirl with pastels, geometric shapes, and biomorphic forms—and 26,000 pages of writings, stipulating that her art was not to be exhibited for another 20 years.
Hilma, 2024.
Johanna Austin
Act I of Hilma is staged as a bio-musical, with a libretto by Kate Scelsa and music by Robert M. Johanson. Delivered largely in recitative, it primarily concerns af Klint’s work on the series of paintings known as “The Ten Largest,” which she produced in just a few weeks in 1907, when the artist was in her mid-forties. She was moved by an emissary of de Höga, or the High Masters, to create works that “move beyond the simple reproduction of reality” and “communicate Spirit’s glory.” We never see full-scale reproductions of the gargantuan paintings. Instead, we catch tantalizing glimpses of soft pink and “madder lake” (or red) hues through a door in an upstage wall. Under Morgan Green’s direction, af Klint (a terrific Kristen Sieh) also physicalizes the process of thoughts taking shape and gears spinning through swirling choreography. In an interlude, characters move counterclockwise as Amaliel (Evan Spigelman), a spiritual messenger, sings about concepts to be used as a starting point: truth, dignity, humility, and mercy. The historical af Klint imposed strict requirements upon herself while working on her paintings, abstaining from meat, alcohol, and salty food, all in the service of becoming an instrument of ecstasy. In a later scene, the vestal artist reveals the costs of austerity: “the division of my personality has recently become nearly unbearable”—a line borrowed from one of her notebooks.
The closest thing Hilma has to an antagonist is Rudolf Steiner (played by Johanson), founder of the Anthroposophical Society. In a meeting about halfway into the show that owes more to hearsay than historical evidence, he predicts that even if af Klint has no intention of selling her paintings, they will be dismissed by the wider public as “oversized folk art.” “The public will call this pretentious / Reject it as precious / They don’t want open-ended feelings,” he sings, after having flung his coat to the floor. In the closing act, which breaks the fourth wall, the cast frankly acknowledges that this portrait of Steiner might not be strictly accurate. As the art critic Julia Voss has written in her indispensable biography of the artist, “af Klint never wrote about being disappointed [by Steiner’s comments on her paintings] or that Steiner had suggested her paintings would only find an audience half a century later. She did not describe the encounter at all.” Writing into the historical lacunae, then, Hilma makes use of what the scholar Saidiya Hartman has called “critical fabulation,” a practice that accounts for silences or erasures in archival records by blending factual evidence with speculative narratives.
Hilma, 2024.
Johanna Austin
Though formally adventurous, Hilma is far from a perfect work. The lengthy is too expository and gives the opera a biographical overbite. And the members of The Five frequently sing over one another, so that it’s not always possible to catch their words. But at its best, Hilma shares qualities with other experimental musical theater performances like Heather Christian’s ravishing Oratorio for Living Things, which debuted in 2022 and sought out the connective tissue between the quantum, human, and cosmic. The point is not to master every message, but to submit to the ordinary afflatus of many hearts beating as one.
