The mother of all abstraction

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2019

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thanks to a new exhibit at the Guggenheim, the art world is rediscovering Hilma af Klint. How was this Swede so ahead of her time, and will she finally get her due? Lee Israel’s memoir about forging letters by famous writers, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” is now a terrific movie starring Melissa McCarthy. Israel died in 2014, but here she is in an interview with Kurt Andersen in 2008, where she talks about how — and why — she decided to start impersonating the likes of Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. When Shane McCrae was a depressed teen in the ’90s, he found inspiration and hope in the strangest of places: the poetry of the famously tragic Sylvia Plath.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX
0:03.4	This is Studio 360.
0:10.0	I'm Kurt Anand.
0:10.7	And I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
0:13.0	This first level of garden.
0:14.4	This is Thomas Jefferson's vegetable garden.
0:16.2	I like to have the roasted chicken base.
0:17.9	Very well done.
0:19.1	Editing is all about timing.
0:20.8	I try to get a little bit away from the actual subject.
0:23.4	You must get sick of your own voice, right?
0:25.7	Studio 360.
0:27.8	It's good.
0:28.4	Anderson.
0:36.3	The basic modern history of abstract art is that it starts in the 19-teens.
0:42.6	And typically, it's credited to three pioneer painters.
0:46.8	Kandinsky and Malavich in Russia, Mondrian in the Netherlands,
0:49.8	each of whom abandoned conventional picture-making in different ways and then wrote manifestos about
0:57.6	themselves and their ideas, and thus the canon and history was all set.
1:03.3	But an exhibition now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is completely overturning that
1:10.0	truth universally acknowledged.
1:12.2	The show is called Hilma of Clint, Paintings for the Future, consisting of abstract paintings
	...

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