Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. 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.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began painting her abstract and highly symbolic images as early as 1906, long before Kandinsky and Malevich arrived at what has generally been regarded as the birth of modern abstract art. Artist Philipp Deines traces the story of now world-famous af Klint’s unique life and groundbreaking oeuvre through five chapters featuring her development as an artist, her family background, and her relationship to the spiritual. 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. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today.Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Voss’s biography makes af Klint so much more than an artist simply to be inserted into a more gender-inclusive canon of ‘abstract art’. She most recently organized the exhibitions Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014) and The Avant-Gardes of Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon, and Their Contemporaries (2013). Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, broke all attendance records, attracting more than 600,000 visitors—more than any exhibition since the museum’s founding. As well as shining a light on an exceptional talent, this book provides a rare window on the struggle of a woman artist to find a new language in a world where idealism was fading fast.

Her biography of Hilma af Klint was on the shortlist of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2020 and became a bestseller. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. This series of 193 paintings began with af Klint receiving communication from an otherworldly figure during a séance. Her biggest achievement is to establish a context for af Klint’s work, upending popular assumptions that she was a mystical outsider who floated free of her historical and social milieu. Despite her many notebooks, she left behind no personal diaries, and we know little about her thoughts beyond her art and spiritualist interests.It will elucidate and invigorate our understanding of two ground-breaking artists, and is sure to get synapses firing.