The Afterlife of Hilma Af Klint, Painting's Posthumous Star

Summary

Later, af Klint claimed—implausibly, according to some historians—that Steiner had warned her that the world was not ready for what she was attempting to reveal, and that, discouraged, she stopped painting for eight years. When she resumed, she said, she worked at great scale and intensity. But she decreed that the works were to remain unseen for twenty years after her death, protected from ignorant audiences. Only decades later would it become evident that Hilma af Klint had produced one of the most significant creative innovations of the twentieth century.“It was delicious,” Louise Belfrage, a scholar and a colleague of Almqvist’s, said. “You have this woman genius, a prophet, making abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on! It’s just so attractive.” Belfrage spoke of af Klint’s story like someone who had just been caught swiping icing off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she said, and laughed.Soon after encountering af Klint’s work, Belfrage and Almqvist began to organize more seminars on her through the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, the research and education nonprofit that Almqvist heads. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they featured an impressively interdisciplinary selection of scholars, whose lectures touched on everything from early-twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, af Klint became the magnifying glass through which a remote age could come alive. Almqvist and Belfrage compiled the talks into luxuriously produced books; Almqvist himself contributed essays and introductions.When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon afterward, said. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house her works whi...