Komposition (Composition)

Tyra Kleen was a truly remarkable and pioneering Swedish artist, illustrator, author and mystic. To this could be added, in her own words, ‘a vagabond by birth and unrestrained habit’. The child of a diplomat, she spent much of her upbringing abroad, and the family’s frequent moves exposed her to different cultures and philosophies during her childhood. Indeed, her entire life was characterised by journeys and sojourns in foreign countries and faraway lands. Her formative years, as an artist, were also spent abroad, where studies at several art schools in Germany between 1892 and 1894 were followed by longer stays in metropolitan centres like Paris and Rome.

Kleen was inspired by the fin-de-siècle ambience in Paris, and her ambulatory, as well as open-minded and inquisitive, lifestyle paved the way for artistic greatness. Not only did she, early on, come in contact with continental symbolism (at a time when few artists or authors in Sweden had picked up on these ideas), but she also took great interest in the esoteric undercurrents of the times. When Millesgården in Stockholm presented the exhibition Painting and Spirituality. Hilma af Klint. Tyra Kleen. Lucie Lagerbielke (5 October 2019 - 9 February 2020), the catalogue stated:

At the turn of the 20th century, there was great interest in spiritual seeking and it was also an important point of departure for many artists. Europe was undergoing an industrial revolution: people abandoned the countryside and moved to cities, old social structures were dismantled. The Church, which had exerted great power over peasant society, lost its grip on people’s lives. Looking for new contexts and alternatives to traditional Christianity, many people turned to spiritual movements. This was not least true for artists and writers. Séances, meditation and hypnosis were different ways of establishing contact with worlds beyond our physical universe, as well as with an inner, individual reality. Many of the artists who depicted their spiritual experiences began employing various degrees of abstract imagery filled with symbols, as it was no longer a case of portraying the visible world. Hilma af Klint was one of the first artists to produce entirely abstract paintings. The year was 1906. […] The many diaries, letters and texts in Tyra Kleen’s estate testify to how she embraced various religions and philosophies, looking for answers that she could not find in Christianity. The new currents of thought, such as theosophy, provided opportunities for women to gain influence and take up leading positions, which was not possible in Christianity. Thus the alternative spiritual movements of the turn of the century appealed to many women. In Paris, Tyra Kleen participated in spiritualist séances and later became a member of the Theosophical Society in Rome in 1904.

As can be deduced from the Millesgården exhibition title above, Kleen was not the only spiritually inclined female painter from Sweden at the turn of the 20th century. Much has been written in the last decades about Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944), the Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first major abstract works in Western art history (a considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian). Inspired by Theosophy, her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.

From letters and diaries we know that Kleen and Hilma af Klint were in contact with each other. In preserved correspondence between them (written in the years between 1940 and 1943), Kleen put forward ideas on how Hilma af Klint’s (nowadays) celebrated abstract suite The Paintings For the Temple should be displayed and even proposed a number of solutions that she was willing to finance. One suggestion being to house the work in a new building (that Kleen was involved in planning) at the Sigtuna Foundation, north of Stockholm. Hilma af Klint however, who wasn’t convinced, politely declined, and the contact between them petered out shortly thereafter.

The fact that Kleen was one of the, comparatively, few who intimately knew about Hilma af Klint’s remarkable suite is interesting when discussing Kleen’s Composition in Firestorm Foundation. Hilma af Klint’s The Paintings for the Temple, created between 1906 and 1915, comprises 193 paintings and drawings, divided into series and groups. The overall theme of the series is to convey different aspects of human evolution, instigated by polarity. The Paintings for the Temple also thematise different stages of development that every human being goes through during life on earth. The temple in the title refers not only to a physical building, which Hilma af Klint imagined would house the work, but also to the body as a temple for the soul.

Given that Composition, in many respects, occupies a unique position in Kleen’s production (where the works are generally characterised by, at least, some kind of figuration), it cannot be entirely ruled out that the painting is, in fact, partly inspired by Hilma af Klint and her groundbreaking works. Whether Composition is an abstracted vision of the universe or an attempt to depict the inside of ‘the body as a temple for the soul’ is, however, best left for each individual viewer to ponder over and decide.

That Kleen, in her art, sometimes verged upon Hilma af Klint’s abstract universe, however, is evident when faced with watercolours like Min hjärna är ett spektrum (My brain is a spectrum), which was painted by Kleen in 1915. The exact date of Composition has not yet been determined by experts. A more or less educated guess could be the 1920s or later. Some elements of the painting are recognisable from other works by Kleen. The pearl-like spherical objects at the centre of the motif, for example, seem to be modelled on earlier paintings like the watercolour Dementia senilis from1916. With a little imagination, the red strands (nerve fibres?) can also be seen as abstracted offshoots of the undulating lines in the lithograph Orchids from 1907.

Signed and inscribed: ‘Tillkommet på skoj av Tyra Kleen’
(Created for fun by Tyra Kleen).

Provenance

Earlier in the collections of Swedish psychiatrist Poul Bjerre (1876-1964, credited for introducing psychoanalysis and Freudian psychiatric concepts into Swedish medicine in 1911), Vårstavi, Sweden.

Uppsala auktionskammare, Stockholm, Important Sale, 13 - 15 May 2025, lot 901.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibitions

Norrköping Museum of Art, Norrköping, Sweden, Rebeller & Mademoiseller - Toll, Kleen, Rudbeck, 23 October 2021 - 24 April 2022.

Bror Hjorths Hus, Uppsala, Sweden, Rebeller & Mademoiseller - Toll, Kleen, Rudbeck, 4 June - 4 September 2022.

Literature

Matilda Eliasson, Anna-Lena Jönsson and Karin Ström Lehander, Rebeller & Mademoiseller - Emma Toll, Tyra Kleen, Märta Rudbeck, 2021, illustrated full page.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation