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
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.
