The American critic Hilton Kramer wrote: “Hilma af Klint’s paintings are essentially colored diagrams. All collections are from our warehouse in Melksham, Wiltshire (address found at the bottom of the page). Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe. Long underrecognized, af Klint is amid a sensational rediscovery that continues to take art audiences by storm.

Childhood" (1907) is reproduced from the Guggenheim Museum's landmark exhibition catalog, Paintings for the Future, a staff pick for Women's History Month. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art. With her thousands of pages of notebooks in Swedish, af Klint remained beyond the reach of scholars without the ability to read Swedish.The invention of the telegraph and telephone made it possible to communicate over long distances, and spiritualists believed it was possible to speak with the dead. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it remain unseen for another 20 years. A wild ride [that] pulls readers into the story making them yearn to discover more about this spiritual, artistic young woman… A welcome and riveting tale of an often overlooked artist, interesting enough to engage any age, from elementary to high school. FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/11/2018 'Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future' opens tomorrow at the Guggenheim! In recent years, her colorful, spiritually-minded body of work has reshaped art historical timelines, supplanting male artists like Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers, who have long been regarded as the pioneers of the 20th-century movement.

She is Professor of History of Art at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy. 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. Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture. With Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods , we get to experience the arc of af Klint’s artistic investigation in her own words.

Referencing Julia Voss’s new biography of af Klint, Deines presents an accessible and lively introduction for many ages.

The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art—a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, the site of the exhibition.Julia Voss has been instrumental in bringing her story to the forefront and tells her life with such sensitivity, generosity, and insight. Highlighting how she came to her distinctive paintings, her spiritual quest, and the friends who helped her, this is a story of the strength it took af Klint to continue as an artist against all odds. He was the Co-Curator of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

It is as though, in our apocalyptic time, we need af Klint’s work now more than ever, and the purity of vision and intent it represents.This rarely seen series of works on paper renders orbital, enigmatic forms, visual allegories of unification and separateness, darkness and light, beginning and end, life and death, and spirit and matter. Deeply interested in spiritualism and philosophy, af Klint developed an iconography that explores esoteric concepts in metaphysics, as demonstrated in Tree of Knowledge. Elsewhere, though, she floundered; she was sidelined by male artists and struggled for exhibition space, living in near total anonymity. Both artists engaged with science and esoteric thought as tools for exploring the underlying structures of nature and how they give meaning to art and life.