Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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In 2013 the institution sponsored Pioneer of Abstraction, the largest exhibition of her work to that point, and sent the show on tour through Europe.

Neon lights will be delivered in 2-4 weeks, as they are made in small batches and shipped separately from other items. One of the many praiseworthy things about Julia Voss’s excellent new biography of her is that it does not even entertain the thought. Julia Voss’s biography of Af Klint is the first full life of the painter and shows her growth from working in the traditional genres of portraiture and landscape into far more radical fields. Af Klint was not part of the larger abstract art movement so populated by men, but many of her paintings—vibrant, strange paintings inspired by her deep interest in Spiritism and Theosophy—predate those famous as pioneers of the style. In the catalogue and exhibition, a relationship was suggested between abstraction and the various spiritual movements that spread through the Western world around the turn of the twentieth century.The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the institution. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the museum/institution.

Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. Essays explore the social, intellectual, and artistic milieu of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. The resulting feat of detective work pieces together life and art, visions and the visionary; the person Af Klint was and the friendships that shaped and strengthened her.The fact is that profound changes in the fine arts often meet with vehement rejec­tion, and the resistance to af Klint’s reappraisal was evident the first time her work was presented to a wide audience.

It was a major show, and landmark works of abstraction were loaned by museums in Munich, Paris, Moscow, and New York. Around the age of seventy, Hilma af Klint began to separate the documents and artworks she would preserve from those she would destroy. It contains the rarely seen “Blue Notebooks,” hand-painted and annotated catalogues af Klint created of her most famous series “Paintings for the Temple,” and a dictionary compiled by af Klint of the words and letters found in her work. Her work remains conceptually open enough for viewers to draw their own conclusions, insert their own meaning and feel transported to other glorious worlds.Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early twentieth century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. Throughout her lifetime, the prolific Swedish artist created more than 1,600 works, an impressive output now collected in Hilma af Klint: The Complete Catalogue Raisonné: Volumes I-VII. A moving biography, told in vivid illustrations, this graphic novel features key moments in the life of Swedish artist and pioneer of abstract painting Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). She explains not just Af Klint’s beliefs, but her relations with the occultist and reformer Rudolf Steiner and her efforts to exhibit some of her work to fellow spiritualists.