Zing Tsjeng on Swedish painter Hilma af Klint

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was barely known during her lifetime but an exhibition of her work at the Guggenheim Museum in 2018 shattered attendance records. it was called Paintings for the Future, and the giant abstract work astounded visitors who had not heard of her before. Joining journalist Zing Tsjeng in the studio to discuss her life is Jennifer Higgie, who wrote in her book, The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and The Spirit World, "For Hilma af Klint, the very air throbbed with unseen energies. The question was - how to interpret them? How to give them shape?" The artist often used seances for inspiration. If curious about where creativity begins, this is a story you may want to hear.

Zing Tsjeng is a former editor-in-chief of Vice UK and presenter of Good Bad Billionaire. She is author of the Forgotten Women series of books.

The producer for BBC Studios Audio in Bristol is Miles Warde

Future programmes include Anneka Rice on Jane Morris, wife of William Morris; Jo Brand on blues singer, Bessie Smith; and Conn Iggulden on the emperor Nero.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Rory Stewart and I want to talk about ignorance. I will die without having read
0:08.2	everything that was written in classical Latin. Because ignorance isn't simply the opposite of knowledge.
0:14.7	It's part of what it means to be human.
0:17.5	Just about every game I can think of involves ignorance.
0:22.1	There's no adventure without ignorance. There's no there's no narrative.
0:25.0	The long history of ignorance from Confucius to Kianan
0:29.0	with me Rory Stewart,
0:31.0	listen on BBC Sounds.
0:35.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:39.0	Today's guest is Zing Singh, journalist, editor and co-presenter of Good Bad Billionaire.
0:45.6	She was editor-in-chief of Vice UK, the Digital Media Group until quite recently, and her many publications
0:52.4	include The Forgotten Women series of books.
0:55.2	Zinn specializes in arts, culture and current affairs and welcome to great lives.
1:01.6	Thanks for coming to talk to us today. Whom have you picked and why?
1:05.9	So I have picked the Swedish painter Hilmer aff Clint because I am so fascinated by her work and
1:12.4	by her life which is pretty extraordinary as we'll find out.
1:16.0	She's had quite the Renaissance in recent years. She was unknown for most of the 20th century I would say,
1:22.0	but I'm not a Hilma
1:23.4	Afklin expert by any means and it was in fact only really recently that I saw her
1:27.9	paintings in real life for the first time when I went to the Moderna
1:31.8	Museum in Stockholm and I saw these two paintings, the Dove Number 12 and Number 13,
1:37.7	and just standing there in front of them, they're very large paintings, I think they're about four or five foot tall. You just feel completely I guess
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.