Revisiting colour problems

Emily Vanderpoel, Hilma af Klint,

Becca Albee, Claire Milledge

Amelia Wallin
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In 1902 American artist, scholar and

historian Emily Noyes Vanderpoel
published Colour Problems: A
Practical Manual for the Lay Student
of Colour, an extensive analysis of
the proportions and harmonies of
colour. Her study derived from objects,
many of which were from her own
collection, including Persian rugs,
pottery, and enamelware. Marketed
to dressmakers, interior designers and
watercolourists, Colour Problems
advised its readers to look to nature
to find essential harmonies between
complementary colours. Many pages
of Vanderpoel’s book are devoted
to hand-drawn rectilinear grids of
harmonious coloured squares with of the book was produced by two which denied entry to women,
captions such as Colour Analysis Brooklyn-based publishers, featuring Vanderpoel operated from a separatist
from a Butterfly and Colour Analysis an introduction by art historian Alan position, even as a white woman
from a Rose-Coloured Vase. Bruton. The new edition sought to of significant financial privilege.
These exercises in the methodical recast Vanderpoel as an overlooked As such, her work was denied the
cataloguing of the colours found modernist, “stumbling upon mid- chronological narrative of art history
in objects are accompanied by her century design and minimalism and forced to operate outside of it.
“colour notes”; a fleeting capture of decades prior to those movements.”1 One strategy to reckon with the
colour and light in moments of terrene The imagery of the book certainly gaps in art history as the result of
transitions, such as Colour Note brings to mind Albers’ Homage systematised sexism and racism has
from a Shadow on White Ground. As to the Square, which Vanderpoel been to reinsert women and other
well as recording colour, Vanderpoel predates by fifty years, but the value marginalised people back into the
was interested in documenting its of this study is more than precursory art-historical canon. Undeniably,
effect: concentric squares of green, aesthetics. Precisely because she it is imperative to review the art-
orange and purple vibrate on the was forbidden access to influential historical narrative that denied so
page in a study called Advancing and schools, such as the American many people the title of “artist”, and
Retiring Colours. In 2018 a facsimile Association of Watercolourists this important work has resulted in

30 | Artlink Issue 39:1 | March 2019

 Opposite: Below:
Emily Noyes Vanderpoel Hilma af Klint
(From left) Advancing and Retiring Colors, Plate V; Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece (Grupp X, nr 1,
Color Analysis from Celtic Ornament, Plate LXXII, 1901. Altarbild), 1915 from Altarpieces (Altarbilder)
Published in Color Problems: A Practical Manual for oil and metal leaf on canvas
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the Lay Student of Color. The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm

Images from facsimile edition, courtesy Sacred Bones Photo: Albin Dahlström, the Moderna
Records and The Circadian Press Museet, Stockholm

the resurfacing of many significant

artists. Yet the gendered division of
artistic and reproductive labour that
saw the work of women and people
of colour devalued is not remedied
through historical revision alone. “Is
it really as simple as reinserting them
into a chronological narrative that
hitherto hasn’t accounted for them?”
probes curator Helen Molesworth
on this very point. For Molesworth,
their absence from art history proper
should be accepted as the “historical
condition under which the work of
women artists is both produced and
understood.”2 Vanderpoel’s Colour
Problems lends itself to the title of
this essay, which follows the slippery
subjectivities of colour and experience
put forward by Vanderpoel and her
contemporary Hilma af Klint, to
problematise the vertical chronology
of modern art. I also consider how
contemporary artists Becca Albee and
Clare Milledge themselves engage in
a loose art-historical revisionism, with
quiet attention to overlooked historical
figures and the absence of women
from the art-historical canon. The
expansive practices of both Albee and
Milledge combine personal biography
and historical source material, such
as the legacies and histories of colour
theoreticians, shamans, spiritualist

Issue 39:1 | March 2019 Artlink | 31

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painters and radical feminists.
Just slightly later than Vanderpoel,
the Swedish painter and spiritualist
Hilma af Klint produced her swirling,
explosive masterpieces in near privacy,
likely on the floor of her studio, and
forbade them to be exhibited until
twenty years after her death. Since
the first posthumous exhibition of the
paintings in 1986, af Klint has been
hailed as the original abstract artist,
preceding Kandinsky. In 2018, a
major retrospective of her works was
presented at the Guggenheim in New
York under the subtitle Paintings for
the Future. The catalogue and wall
text that accompanied the exhibition
32 | Artlink Issue 39:1 | March 2019
advanced the narrative of af Klint as
a pioneer of abstract art. Critic Ania
Szremski is sceptical of framing af
Klint through the lens of Abstraction.
“The work presages something greater
than a litmus test of avant-garde
originality” persuades Szremski.3 Af
Klint painted direct representations
of her spiritual life and produced
chromatic diagrams and detailed
systems of annotation to decode her
rich symbolism. In this extensive
annotating and indexing of her life’s
work, af Klint took great pains to
ensure future audiences would receive
her message of a spiritual afterlife.
She studied closely the geometries
of nature and the morphologies of
plants. The paintings teem with
orbs of colour and swirling, organic
forms, that are superimposed, in
some instances, by rectilinear forms.
“Grids”, the art historian Rosalind
Krauss would later proclaim in a
1979 essay of the same name, “[are]
a staircase to the Universal”.4 In this
seminal essay, Krauss argues that
the grid contains dual meanings.
For Krauss, the structure of the grid
“allows a contradiction between
the values of science and those of
spiritualism to maintain themselves
within the consciousness of
modernism.”5 Both women produced

complex systems of categorisation
and annotation to communicate their
ideas. For Vanderpoel it was a desire
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to flatten, distribute, and communicate
harmonies of colour. The multiple
ways colour is revived by the human
eye makes this all but an impossible
task, but so too was af Klint’s
calling, received from the spirits she
communicated with as a mystic, to
“commence a task that will bring great
blessings on coming generations.”6
Australian artist Clare Milledge
has a longstanding interest in the
ways in which the role of the artist
is compared to that of the shaman.
Milledge understands both as
visionaries, who travel to other realms
to make visible what was previously
invisible. Her work offers “the gift
of sight” by undoing the rarified art
object and engaging the viewer in
the artistic process. Materially and
thematically, each artwork directly
flows into another. Her process-driven
work incorporates the excess material
of the artist, even paint shavings are
saved and recast in future installations
and incorporated alongside fabric,
hair, and vegetation gathered from
trips to the Australian bush, all of
which feature heavily throughout
her practice. A recent major work,
Strigiformes: Binocular, Binaural
(2017) combined data about bird
populations, phrases collected from
Tinder matches, expansive painting
and performance. A gauzy translucent
silk curtain, handsewn and arranged
chromatically, affixed with totems
From left: Clare Milledge Strigiformes: Binocular,
Binaural, installation view, 2017, Perth Institute of
Contemporary Arts. Photo: Dan Bourke
Clare Milledge I am the Queen: Of Every Hive,
2018, from Sacks of wind: A Rock Harder Than
Rock, oil on the reverse of recycled tempered glass
bronze close readers steel. Courtesy the artist and
Station Gallery, Melbourne. Photo: Jessica Maurer
including clothing items, masks
and hair formed the backdrop of the
performance. Wearing a wig as a mask,
Milledge embodied the persona of
a powerful, whip-cracking shaman,
flanked by two figures in bird masks.
The soundtrack conflated text from
tinder profiles of men she matched
with, with owl calls captured on field
trips with her environmental scientist
parents. Drawing inspiration from
the stark symbolism of filmmaker
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visually
psychedelic film Holy Mountain
(1973), the curtain existed as a
sculptural object after the event.
One of Milledge’s trademark
techniques is painting in reverse
behind glass (a method known as
Hinterglasmalerei), whereby Milledge
scratches the image into existence. As
Tom Melick points out in a catalogue bronze supports. Titled Sacks of Wind:
accompanying an earlier exhibition, A Rock Harder Than Rock, Milledge’s
“the medium [of Hinterglasmalerei] most recent exhibition advances the
attracts those who believe in the necessity of interspecies cooperation in
spiritual power of images. As Paul the face of the adverse changes to the
Klee tells us, ‘art does not reproduce climate we are currently experiencing.
the visible; rather, it makes visible’.”7 The ability to communicate between
This pictorial process can be traced the human and animal worlds is a
back to Byzantine and folk art unique feature of the shaman; here,
traditions, but also intercepts with Milledge looks back to paganism and
modernism via the Bauhaus school. animal-centric spirituality as models
Milledge activates this layered history of ecological co-existence that will
of image-making through her studio become a requirement for future life
processes, working intuitively with on earth. The exhibition departs from
unmixed paint, the image comes to her The Song of Amergin, each work is
automatically while she works. Each titled with a stanza from this ancient
glass painting in her 2018 exhibition mystical poem that tells of the defeat
at Station Gallery in Melbourne was of a storm through summoning and
affixed to the wall with hand-moulded uniting the power of the natural world.8
Issue 39:1 | March 2019 Artlink | 33
 Throughout the exhibition female
forms are entangled with plants and
animals. Milledge reclaims the subject
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matter circumscribed for women
artists for centuries: animals and
flowers. Both af Klint and Vanderpoel
were respected watercolourists of
botany and landscapes respectively.
For Milledge, rethinking the
historical figure of the shaman enables
her to reflect on the contemporary
ecological concerns. Becca Albee’s
recent work Prismataria looks
to the radical source material in
the form of women’s healthcare
information, in the wake of President
Trump’s inauguration, as women’s
bodies continue to be policed and
threatened. Exhibited in three different
iterations to date, and combining a
light installation, photographs, text,
and scent, Becca Albee’s ongoing
body of work Prismataria acquires
revisions and extensions with each
new presentation. The work takes
both name and source material from
colour theorist Hillaire Hiler’s design
for a women’s lounge situated within
a boathouse in San Francisco. Hiler,
who believed that as the “fairer sex”
women were more sensitive to colours,
used the opportunity to test his theses
on the emotional psychologies of
colour. His design included painting
the 120-colour spectrum he developed
on the ceiling of the circular room
of the building. Albee visited and
documented Hiler’s mural, which is
crumbling in parts, in what is now
known as the San Francisco Maritime
34 | Artlink Issue 39:1 | March 2019
Museum. In her installation, Albee
recreated one of Hiler’s unrealised
designs: a rotating light fixture which
alternated between cyan, magenta and
yellow light. Albee is interested in the
overlap between colour and consumer
culture, and her installation positioned
Hiler’s quackery in dialogue with
“Colour Me Beautiful” swatch books.
A not-quite-forgotten phenomenon
from the 1980s, “Colour Me Beautiful”
was popularised by megabrands such
as Clinique. The process involved
assessing women into “seasons” based
on skin, hair, and eye colour, and
assigning them booklets of colours
compatible with their season, which
could be consulted when purchasing
new clothes or makeup. Albee conflates
Hiler’s failed experiments into the
psychology of colour with her own
biography. Half the photographs in the
exhibition included covers and marked
passages from books which Albee
read whilst attending a progressive
College in Washington, USA: titles
included Radical Feminist Therapy,
The Black Women’s Health Book, and
A New View of a Woman’s Body. Albee
states; “I photographed the books with
coloured gels placed directly on them;
I found that by eliminating black,
white, and grey, I could maximize the
transformational effect of the light
fixture’s moving, coloured lights.”9
One work, titled Dedication, is an
image of the dedication page of A
New View of a Woman’s Body, reads
simply as a list of women’s first names,
arranged in alphabetical order.
Albee’s homage to the texts and
teachers that influenced her paint a
portrait of collectivity and community.
This can also be seen in af Klint’s
artistic process; she worked alongside
four other women, collectively known
as The Five, to receive messages from
spirits which they recorded through
automatic drawing. In this way, her
work from the period of 1915–17
is thought of as communal. When
reflecting why af Klint resonates so
strongly with our current context,
I agree with critic Anya Ventura
who suggests that it is because “she
represents values—female, spiritual,
ecological, collectivist—eroded by the
rise of industrial modernity, values we
desperately need to reclaim.”10 The four
artists, Vanderpoel, af Klint, Milledge,
and Albee, are drawn together by
an interest in the divine, material,
affective, aesthetic, historical, and
spiritual qualities of colour. Vanderpoel
and af Klint are experiencing a
posthumous revival in the form of a
republished book and a Guggenheim
retrospective, whilst Albee and
Milledge are animating overlooked
cultural moments and minor histories
to interrogate what is necessary in our
present moment. In acknowledging the
impossibility of an objective experience
of colour one accepts a multitude
of interpretations. Positioned in
dialogue with the revisionist approach
to Vanderpoel and af Klint, Colour
Problems recognises the work of
Albee and Milledge unearthing, rather
than revising, underlooked histories.
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1 See notes to the Kickstarter Campaign that supported the From top:
re-publication of this facsimile edition: https://www.kickstarter. Becca Albee
com/projects/1521679602/color-problems-a-book-by-emily- Prismataria, SITUATIONS, New York, NY.
noyes-vanderpoel__2 Helen Molesworth, “How to Install Art like Courtesy the artist
a Feminist,” Cornelia H. Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (eds),
Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, Becca Albee
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010__3 Ania Szremski, Dedication (A New View of a Woman’s
“Hilma af Klint”, 26 October 2018: http://4columns.org/szremski- Body), FFWHC + SG II prismataria,
ania/hilma-af-klint__4 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”, October, vol. SITUATIONS, New York, NY.
9, Summer, 1979, p. 52__5 Ibid, p. 55__6 Daniel Birnbaum, Photo: Bradford Robotham
Universal Pictures: The Art of Hilma af Klint, Artforum, January
2013__7 Tom Melick, A Speculative Dictionary* for Clare
Milledge, exhibition catalogue, The Commercial, Sydney, 2014:
https://claremilledge.com__8 Anna Dunhill, Clare Milledge: Sacks
of Wind: A Rock Harder than Rock, Art Guide Australia, preview,
3 December 2018: https://artguide.com.au/clare-milledge-sacks-
of-wind-a-rock-harder-than-rock__9 Becca Albee interview with
Johanna Fateman, 02 March 2017: www.artforum.com__10 Anya
Ventura, Secret Séances and High Masters: The Making of Mystic
Painter Hilma af Klint: https://frieze.com/article/secret-seances-
Amelia Wallin is an Australian curator
and-high-masters-making-mystic-painter-hilma-af-klint.
and writer and the Director of West

Space in Melbourne, Australia.

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