The Friday Night Club: A Novel of Artist Hilma af Klint and Her Creative Circle
The Friday Night Club is absorbing and unique historical fiction. The novel features parallel storylines: the artistic and spiritual life of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint in the early 20th century, and a second narrative tracking the efforts of art curator Eben Elliot to get Hilma’s work featured in a major exhibit at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2018.
Like the best of “hard” historical fiction, the novel is meticulously factual, save in those areas where details remain unknown, which are filled in with fitting and plausible storyline. It is also fitting—and perhaps synchronistic—that it’s a collaboration. Hilma’s work itself reflected the magical and aesthetic work of “the Five,” her secretive weekly gathering with her intimate friends Anna, Cornelia, Sigrid, and Mathilda. The group’s fearless marriage of art and esoteric spirituality was as innovative as the style which emerged. While male artists and theorists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian are credited as the originators of western abstractionism, there seems little doubt that the non-objectivist vision was first expressed in Hilma’s geometric progressions, merging bold color and fine two-dimensional boundaries several years before her male counterparts. Despite a notional meeting between Kandinsky and Hilma represented in the novel, what may be less clear is whether Hilma influenced him, or whether both were influenced by the neo-hermetic movement of the time.
Hilma was clearly deprived of credit, as were many female writers and creators of her time, and the novel’s 21st-century storyline tracks the mission of Eben to set this right by exhibiting a corpus of Hilma’s surviving work. Eben’s ex-girlfriend, a historian of Hilma’s art with a deeply spiritual bent, reappears in his life just as he is arranging the showing, and this is among the many synchronicities that ultimately challenge his skeptical perspective.
Highly recommended, and don’t fail to google images of Hilma’s art as you read.
