Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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Her major museum exhibitions include: Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, and Work Ethic. It contains the rarely seen “Blue Notebooks,” hand-painted and annotated catalogues af Klint created of her most famous series “Paintings for the Temple,” and a dictionary compiled by af Klint of the words and letters found in her work. Biography, art history, and contemporary narrative style merge and complement each other in this magnificent visual world. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/11/2018 'Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future' opens tomorrow at the Guggenheim!

She was heavily influenced by spiritual ideologies and claimed that she painted on instruction from the spirit world, for the future. When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than a thousand paintings and works on paper that she kept largely private during her lifetime. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Essays explore the social, intellectual, and artistic milieu of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements.

Measuring almost eleven feet tall by eight feet wide, Hilma af Klint's "Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. With her thousands of pages of notebooks in Swedish, af Klint remained beyond the reach of scholars without the ability to read Swedish.

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Af Klint was not part of the larger abstract art movement so populated by men, but many of her paintings—vibrant, strange paintings inspired by her deep interest in Spiritism and Theosophy—predate those famous as pioneers of the style. The woman who emerges in Voss's exacting portrait is strong-willed, purposeful, and confident—ahead of her time and perhaps ours too. Published to accompany the most widely reviewed exhibition of 2018—with major features in more than 30 major outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, Artforum, Hyperallergic, New York, the New Yorker, the BBC and WNYC—this is a "gorgeous book," according to Vulture's Jerry Saltz.Af Klint was not part of the larger abstract art movement so populated by men, but many of her paintings―vibrant, strange paintings inspired by her deep interest in Spiritism and Theosophy―predate those famous as pioneers of the style. Mixing psychology, Christianity and Buddhism, historical fantasy and science fiction, “new age” ideals were amazingly popular, particularly among educated women, who used those ideologies to carve themselves new social niches outside the suffocating strictures of church and family. Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. Curator Leah Dickerman of the Museum of Modern Art in New York wrote: “[Af Klint] painted in isolation and did not exhibit her works, nor did she participate in public discussions of that time. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021 and David Zwirner, London, in 2022, this book features a text by the art historian Susan Aberth examining af Klint’s spiritual and theosophical influences.