The Visionary Practice of Hilma af Klint
This is a photograph of three paintings from Hilma af Klint’s series Paintings for the Temple, completed in 1915, which I took at the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2016. This show followed a major retrospective organized by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and the Picasso museum in Málaga. Most recently, her work traveled to the Guggenheim. This exhibition drew over 600,000 visitors, making it the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history. Pretty impressive, from an artist that very few people had heard of prior to 2013. These exhibitions opened to the world, for the first time, the artistic production of Hilma af Klint, which includes over 1000 oil paintings, hundreds of works on paper and some 125 notebooks that were never exhibited during her lifetime.
Much of the art world press surrounding Hilma af Klint has focused on the fact that starting in 1906, she was making fully realized, fully abstract paintings a full 5 years before the Kandinsky watercolor that often gets credit for being the “first abstract European painting.” These authors tend to see the history of art as a canon of progress, and want to make sure that Hilma af Klint is awarded her appropriate place in it.
