About the Book
A groundbreaking study of visionary artist Hilma af Klint.
When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than a thousand paintings and works on paper that she kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint’s radically abstract painting practice – one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction.
Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States, Hilma af Klint represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of the artist’s life and work. 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. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars, and curators considers af Klint’s sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art – a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda, the site of the forthcoming exhibition.
About the Author :
Tracey Bashkoff is Director, Collections and Senior Curator, at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York. Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and
lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud
University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm. Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College
London. Vivien Greene is a Guggenheim curator. David Max Horowitz is Curatorial
Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Andrea Kollnitz is Assistant
Professor at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. Helen
Molesworth is the Chief Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Julia Voss is a writer and art critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Review :
In the wake of the acclaimed documentary Beyond the Visible comes an extensive catalogue of the Swedish artist, whose revolutionary work as the first abstract painter was dismissed because she was a woman.
The project of Hilma af Klint and her female colleagues was the result of great maturity, of confidence and collective efforts, performed both in work and in life.
The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like news that is new again.
The current celebration of af Klint's paintings suggests the primacy of visual communication should be backdated. The retrospective also underscores the important role that women played in its emergence.
The Guggenheim Museum offers a revisionary chapter about the start of modern abstraction in its current headliner, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” introducing works that this Swedish artist and mystic made in 1906-7.
af Klint's contribution, arrayed here in all its abundant originality, threatens to reduce to a footnote the mostly male history of esoteric abstraction.
Af Klint's ascendancy feels inevitable: She could be viewed as a heroine for our current moment, an artist who rejected commercial success, resisted the pull of self-publicity, and challanged the myth of individual authorship.
The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like news that is new again.
The mother of all revisionist shows of Modernism.
Profoundly moving. ... It is as though, in our apocalyptic time, we need af Klint’s work now more than ever, and the purity of vision and intent it represents.
A week after I saw [af Klint's paintings], their pulsing loveliness remains undimmed in my mind, like a self-replenishing sense memory of summer.
[The paintings are] talismanic, vibrating with hidden mystical meaning. ... they represent the enduring evolution of the entire cosmos, the triumphant union of dualities.
The paintings tap into the buzzy zeitgeist of occult spirituality.
The show feels like both a transmission from an unmapped other world and a perfectly logical correction to the history of Modern art.
The canvases are massive and their idiosyncratic shapes, squiggles, and colors provide the viewer with an overwhelming sense of wonder.
The art, fearfully esoteric and influenced by its creator’s séances and spiritualism, matches a present mood of restless searching.
Klint's biomorphoc compositions call to mind horticultural diagrams conveived on psychedelics - and showcase a level of mysticism not found in successors like Kandinsky.
Demands that we rethink, re-evaluate and revise the lineage of art history.
Af Klint set about composing for posterity an alluring eye-music that echoed back the complex psyche of her age.
Though she looked conservative, af Klint was nothing if not radical.
The case of Hilma af Klint is among the most fascinating in art history.
[A] superb catalog.
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.
Without precedent in the history of art.
Somewhat like the biomorphic forms of a later artist like Joan Miró, many of these pieces play with geometry and floral shapes that frequently overlap as they seem to swim across the canvas.
[af Klint's] striking artwork expresses a vision of non-figurative art that was ahead of her time and establishes her as a pioneer of abstract art.
One of the most overlooked artists of the 20th century.
She had a penchant for the occult – a “commission” from a spirit at a seance inspired her to create her most striking paintings...
Gorgeous book…. The implications of these works are not only gargantuan, but also infinitely pleasurable to look at. And as written about in this wonderful volume, great to read about. By the time you put down this book, Hilma af Klint will be embedded in your visual library forever.
[af Klint's] art’s power is in its secrecy, its marking-off of sacred space. Its period of gestation, of waiting for humanity to catch up, is a demonstration of its sincerity.
Klint created her own optical language with visual, chromatic, structural, and narrative syntax. Her artistic ship sails some of the deepest waters around.
Af Klint did not ask for her work to be destroyed, only delayed. She did not wait for the world to discover her paintings. The world had to wait for them.
[The exhibition] remains as radical as ever and offers a welcome retort to modernism's male-centric narrative.
'Paintings for the Future' endorses Klint’s mystical conviction that the spiral symbolizes the dualities of the universe—good and evil, male and female, known and unknown—slowly reaching equilibrium.
