The strange afterlife of Hilma af Klint, the star of the posthumous painting

Later, af Klint claimed – implausibly, according to some historians – that Steiner warned her that the world was not ready for what she was trying to reveal, and that she stopped painting for eight years out of frustration. She said that when she resumed her work, she worked on a large scale and with great intensity. But she decreed that the works would remain invisible for twenty years after her death, protecting them from the ignorant public. Only decades later did it become clear that Hilma af Klint had produced one of the most important creative innovations of the twentieth century.

“It was delicious,” said Louise Belfrage, a researcher and Almqvist’s colleague. “You have this genius woman, the prophetess, who was painting abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on.” on me! It is attractiveBelfrage spoke of Af Klint’s story like someone who had just been caught wiping a cake: helpless, only half sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she said and laughed.

Shortly after learning about af Klint’s work, Belfrage and Almqvist began organizing more seminars on it through the Axel and Margaret Ax Foundation: Son Johnson for the Public Benefit, a non-profit research and education organization of which Almqvist chairs. These conferences took place everywhere from Oslo to Israel, and included an impressive array of interdisciplinary scholars, whose lectures touched on everything from early twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, Af Klint became a magnifying glass through which a distant era could be brought to life. Almqvist and Belfrage compiled the conversations into sumptuously produced books; Almqvist himself contributed articles and introductions.

When the Guggenheim Museum exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” in 2018, “it was as if the abstract Vatican had canonized her,” said Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared shortly thereafter. The choice of location seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house the works that Af Klint once imagined. The exhibition became one of the most visited shows in the Guggenheim’s history, and its paintings became a permanent wallpaper on social media. in timesRoberta Smith writes that af Klint’s paintings “ultimately explode the idea of ​​modernist abstraction as a masculine project.”

In the past decade, The Life of Hilma af Klint has been reimagined as historical fiction, a children’s book, and a graphic novel. It has inspired no less than an opera, a documentary, a biographical picture, a virtual reality experience, and a permanent six-hundred-square-foot mosaic within the New York City subway system.

For Foss, this is the promise of art history: that death can grant the glory that life refuses, and that what looks like failure may actually be redemption deferred. “I think it’s a relief to see something so great and so beautiful that wasn’t successful in its time,” she said.

Almqvist came to believe that af Klint’s resurrection had also produced fantasies. In the nearly thirteen years since his first encounter with the artist, Almqvist has established himself as a kind of one-man Greek drama—chorus and actor together, once the harbinger and now the complicator of the plot. He told me that his writings about Af Klint were full of errors. “When you have someone like Hilma, where there are a lot of holes to fill, it opens things up to conspiracy theories, well, quite frankly,” Almqvist said. “Most of what one knows, or encounters in the literature about Hilma, is actually just a myth.”

But even legends require caretakers. In recent years, the question of who these caretakers should be – and what exactly they protect – has become a national debate in Sweden. As Clint’s fame grew, so did the questions about what she believed in, who she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak for her. Disagreements play out in boardrooms, court files and newspaper columns. They are often framed as discussions of Af Klint’s life and past, but what is really at stake is her afterlife—her legacy, what it means, and who should define it in the future.

The voices of astral beings suggested to af Klint that they should not paint reality as it appears, but rather a truer version, which lies beyond the physical world.An image of the history of science/scientific

In the fall of 1944, when Af Klint was eighty-one years old, she fell while getting off a tram in Stockholm; A few weeks later, she died of her injuries. In her will, she named her nephew, Erich af Klint, as her heir. Erik, a naval admiral, was too busy to manage his aunt’s business, so Olof Sundström, a close friend of hers, cataloged the archive. But Eric stayed involved. “It is my opinion that, at least for the time being, the work should be seen only by people who understand its value and feel respect for it,” he wrote to Sundström in 1946. He added: “Journalists, of course, are not allowed to approach him.”

It was only after his retirement from the army that Eric began to address the question of what to actually do with this enormous body of material—more than twelve hundred paintings and drawings and one hundred and twenty-four notebooks. He considered it his responsibility to find a permanent home for the works, but was unsure how best to proceed and consulted several scholars and museums. He told one of them that he wanted to “organize an exhibition to arouse interest among a wider audience”; He told another that the work should only be exhibited “within closed communities,” and warned that “publishing it to the public cannot lead to anything good.” In 1970, Eric met with people from the Moderna Museum and the National Museum to discuss a large-scale exhibition, but the idea was eventually abandoned. Eventually, the Swedish Anthropological Society agreed to host the archive, and in 1972 Erik established the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Its bylaws prohibit the sale of af Klint’s most important works — to protect them, in the words of the four-page document, to “spiritual seekers” — and require that the board of directors be chaired by a member of the af Klint family, with the remaining seats filled by members of the Anthropological Society.