Unfortunately, Hilma af Klint’s Work Doesn’t Really Fit the Big Screen

The odd thing about “Hilma,” the new film about the pioneering abstract painter Hilma af Klint, is how blatantly its mise-en-scène poaches upon the work of other artists. Edouard Vuillard, Edvard Munch, Wilhelm Hammershoi, Ferdinand Hodler, Christen Købke: The works of these and other figures are explicitly referenced in terms of composition, lighting, costume, and texture. Director Lasse Hallström was undoubtedly out to establish a distinct sense of time and place — that is to say, late 19th-century Europe and, in particular, its northern climes, the milieu in which af Klint spent her working life. In that regard, “Hilma” is effective, though the golden sfumato favored by Mr. Hallström and cinematographer Ragna Jorming does invite a romanticism that is high in caloric intake.It’s also probable that Mr. Hallström quotes extensively from more traditional painters as he was hard-pressed to create the cinematic equivalent for the otherworldly realms af Klint embodied using oils on canvas. The rare moments Mr. Hallström attempts to do so come off like excerpts from a fairy tale or a cartoon version of High Modernist yearning. Painting as flat and emblematic as af Klint’s doesn’t readily lend itself to the naturalism of the movies.“Hilma af Klint: Painting for the Future,” the 2019 exhibition mounted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, was a signal event, not only because it introduced the artist to a huge public but because it was hugely popular with the public. That enthusiasm has since continued: Hilma af Klint has been gaining a pop credibility that’s typically reserved for the likes of Frida Kahlo and Jean Michel-Basquiat.Abstraction has never been an easy sell, but viewers of all stripes took to af Klint’s brash, often brightly colored, and sometimes enormous canvases. Chalk it up to her integrity as an artist, her interest in outré spiritual pursuits, and, especially, our fondness for marginalized figures. I mean, who doesn’t like to root for the underdog? Mr. Hallström certainly does: Hilma af Klint’s struggles, he writes, evince an “unwavering search for the truth about humanity and the universe.”Two actresses were tasked to play the title role, the mother-and-daughter team of Lena Olin and Tora Hallström. Mr. Hallström is their respective husband and father.The story begins with the death of Hilma’s younger sister and then takes us through the death of her father, the encroaching blindness of her mother, and the subsequent estrangement by her brother. She attends art school, becomes entranced by the spiritualist theories of Madame Blavatsky, and seeks approval from a dismissive Rudolf Steiner (played here by Tom Wlaschiha, a dead ringer for the Austrian “esotericist”). As part of the The Five, a group of like-minded women, af Klint communes with “The High Masters,” otherworldly entities with names like Amaliel, Ananda, and Gregor. They charge her with building a temple for her art. This ambition isn’t achieved during af Klint’s lifetime, but it eventually appears on, yes, Manhattan’s 88th Street and Fifth Avenue.How true to historical fact is “Hilma”? The jury is out, I think, on whether af Klint was a lesbian or gender-bender, and though she might have been familiar with the paintings of Munch, af Klint’s meeting with the man himself seems a dramatic contrivance. Did Hilma really stiff her colleagues in terms of authorship when claiming their collaborative efforts as her own? The latter is a fillip that runs contrary to the aura of integrity powering af Klint’s public image.Then again, how much verisimilitude might you expect of a movie in which 19th-century Stockholm is rendered in broad painterly passages via CGI or af Klint is seen riding down Fifth Avenue in a Swedish trolley car instead of the M1 bus? As it is, “Hilma” is a well-meaning and rather fluffy biopic that, on the whole, doesn’t illuminate the nature of one woman’s artistic achievement so much as capitulate to the myth that artists are, at bottom, narcissistic contrarians.

Unfortunately, Hilma af Klint’s Work Doesn’t Really Fit the Big Screen

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