Hitching them together does neither any favours: Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian, at Tate Modern, reviewed

In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World Conference on Spiritual Science in London. It was a moment the 65-year-old Hilma af Klint had waited a long time for, but her confident prediction 20 years earlier that ‘the experiments I have undertaken will astound humanity’ was not fulfilled. So deafening, in fact, was the critical silence that greeted her work that she left instructions for it to remain under wraps until 20 years after her death. The world wasn’t ready for her ‘future pictures’.

What a difference a century makes. When the New York Guggenheim took a punt on a solo exhibition of Af Klint’s work in 2018 it attracted more than 600,000 visitors, an attendance record. Now she has been given joint billing at Tate Modern with the greatest and most abstract of abstract painters, Piet Mondrian.

Although their forms of abstraction could not look more different – Mondrian’s all straight lines and primary colours, Af Klint’s all biomorphic curves in rainbow hues – the reasoning behind their pairing is that both artists arrived at abstraction through the study of nature combined with esoteric beliefs in a higher reality. Both started out as traditional representational painters – Mondrian’s ‘Evening Landscape with Cows’ (1906) in the opening room is a perfect match for Af Klint’s ‘Spring Landscape from Lomma Bay’ (1892), down to the distant cattle – and both became theosophists, Af Klint in 1904, Mondrian (ten years younger) in 1909. A room of flower paintings shows them continuing to work in tandem, though Af Klint’s watercolours of native weeds and grasses are botanical studies and Mondrian’s paintings of single cultivated flowers are far more expressive, his dying ‘Chrysanthemum in a Bottle’ (after 1921) not just wilting but weeping.