An Introduction to Hilma af Klint: Once a Forgotten Painter, Now a Celebrated Pioneer of Abstract Art

If pressed to pick the most inter­na­tion­al art fig­ure of the past dozen years, one could do much worse than the Swedish artist-mys­tic Hilma af Klint, despite her hav­ing been dead for more than 80 years now. As evi­denced by the links at the bot­tom of the post, we’ve been fea­tur­ing her here on Open Cul­ture since 2017, first in the con­text of whether she counts as the first abstract painter. Just a few years before that, prac­ti­cal­ly no one in the world had ever heard her name, let alone beheld any of her more than 1,200 paint­ings and draw­ings. In fact, it was only in 2013, with the show Hilma af Klint — A Pio­neer of Abstrac­tion at Stock­holm’s Mod­er­na Museet, that she first became pub­licly known.

From there, her can­on­iza­tion pro­ceed­ed rapid­ly. One uses that word advis­ed­ly, giv­en af Klin­t’s reli­gios­i­ty, whose inten­si­ty, eso­teri­cism, and rig­or con­sti­tute one of the themes of Alice Gre­go­ry’s recent New York­er piece on the artist’s work, lega­cy, and rel­a­tive­ly new­found pop­u­lar­i­ty, all of it col­ored by the fact that none of her pieces have ever been for sale.

The uncan­ni­ly mod­ern, before-its-time aes­thet­ic appeal of af Klin­t’s work is one thing; the dearth of wide­spread knowl­edge about the details of her life and thought, which has allowed many of her sud­den­ly avid twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry fans to imag­ine her into their pre­ferred artis­tic, philo­soph­i­cal, and social nar­ra­tives, is anoth­er. Yet key to the fas­ci­na­tion of her images is that, hav­ing been born in 1862, she was­n’t a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry woman.

Af Klint bare­ly even belonged to the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, or indeed to any world­ly time peri­od at all. The com­plex and seem­ing­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry world­view that inspired her art­work is prac­ti­cal­ly inac­ces­si­ble to us, even if we man­age to get through the 26,000 jour­nal pages she left behind. Gre­go­ry inter­views one such (and per­haps the only) ded­i­cat­ed indi­vid­ual, a non­prof­it CEO and af Klint schol­ar ded­i­cat­ed to explod­ing the myths that have so read­i­ly accret­ed around her. One is that she worked alone: evi­dence sug­gests that some paint­ings attrib­uted to her may actu­al­ly have been exe­cut­ed by oth­er mem­bers of her spir­i­tu­al­ist cir­cle, The Five. But even if she turns out not to have been a move­ment of one after all, her name will no doubt con­tin­ue to sell out muse­um exhi­bi­tions for years to come.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Hilma af Klint: Pio­neer­ing Mys­ti­cal Painter and Per­haps the First Abstract Artist

The Life & Art of Hilma Af Klint: A Short Art His­to­ry Les­son on the Pio­neer­ing Abstract Artist

New Hilma af Klint Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Life & Art of the Trail­blaz­ing Abstract Artist

A Short Video Intro­duc­tion to Hilma af Klint, the Mys­ti­cal Female Painter Who Helped Invent Abstract Art

The Com­plete Works of Hilma af Klint Get Pub­lished for the First Time in a Beau­ti­ful, Sev­en-Vol­ume Col­lec­tion

Who Paint­ed the First Abstract Paint­ing?: Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky? Hilma af Klint? Or Anoth­er Con­tender?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.