Ep. 17 Mystical Malarkey & the Bureau of Fishies

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This episode Megan & Milena cover the first modern abstract painter, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint & the mother of modern environmentalism, American biologist, science writer, and conservationist Rachel Carson

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint is a curious one. Born in 1862 Sweden, the first few decades of her artistic professional career was spent on traditional, respectable oil paintings featuring landscapes and local plant life. Then shit got weird.
At a weekly seance held with four other women, collectively known as The Five, it was revealed to Hilma that the High Spirit Amaliel has commissioned her for a series of paintings on the astral plane and the unity of everything.
Yup. Little weird. This episode we explore how in the hell that even came about, what happened after Hilma was granted the task and how the resulting artwork has since shaken up Western notions of who really was the first Western modern abstract painter.

Alter created by The Five, Jesus leading the way
Selected Work
Early Paintings
Oil on canvas from 1888
Another oil on canvas from the late 1890’s
Hilma was interested in botany, creating a series of watercolors documenting the plants around her, like this illustration from the 1890’s
Now this is where things get weird…
Seance sketch from 1905 next to a painting derived from those seance ‘communications’
Alterpiece, Group 10, number 1 from 1915, oil on canvas
Painting Picture of the Starting Point, Series 8 from 1920
Exhibition shot from the Guggenheim Museum Hilma’s retrospective this year, 2019, depicting some of her large 10 paintings, the largest from her Paintings for the Temple series
  • Royal Academy of Fine Arts – School in Sweden where Hilma was part of the first generation of women graduates
  • Anna Cassel – Fellow artist and best friend to Hilma
  • Western Esotericism – Ugh…essentially a blanket term for religious philosophical BS beliefs like alchemy and numerology
  • Mondrian – Pioneering modern painter in abstraction
  • Kandinsky – Also a pioneering modern painter in abstraction
  • Rudolf Steiner – Hot shot leader within esoteric movement of the late 1800’s, early 1900’s
  • Iris Müller-Westermann – Curator of the Hilma retrospective, as well as director of, the Modern Museum in Stockholm
Suggested Reading

Rachel Carson

This is Rachel Carson. She’s kind of a big deal. While she wasn’t involved in the hard science, Carson was able to ring the alarm against the use of dangerous pesticides on our streets and expose their harmful side effects.

Carson started her life as a Marine Biologist. She was able to secure a career as a writer at the Bureau of Fisheries. But Carson wanted more than a government job. There was too much to be said to the public, and she wanted the freedom to choose her own subjects.

Carson first wrote a trilogy about the ocean, the lives swimming in it, and the history of it. She used the money from Bestseller lists and movie deals to attain financial security. She met her best friend, Dorothy Freeman, who would prove to be her emotional rock.

BBF <3

Megan and I can relate.
Carson would eventually turn her head towards writing about conservation. Pesticides were being abusively used by the government, spraying harmful chemicals onto privately owned spaces. Carson decided that people needed to know what was up. So she started on a 4 year writing journey that would expose the spraying practices of the United States Government, as well as explain the consequences of pesticide overuse.

Her 4th book, Silent Spring (1962) created an uproar. The general public could now read, in plain English, what was happening in their own backyards. Carson had used extensive scientific data to back up her writing. And the Government and private pesticide companies were not having it. Campaigns like the one below were put in place to convince the general public that pesticides were actually more helpful than harmful.

Carson and her publishing crew were put under heat. Big companies tried to question her credentials, paint her as an alarmist, and even classify her as a communist.
Joke’s on them, as this woman became known as the Mother of Modern Environmentalism

As always, music by EeL