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<\/p>\nLater, af\u00a0Klint claimed\u2014implausibly, according to some historians\u2014that Steiner had warned her that the world was not ready for what she was attempting to reveal, and that, discouraged, she stopped painting for eight years. When she resumed, she said, she worked at great scale and intensity. But she decreed that the works were to remain unseen for twenty years after her death, protected from ignorant audiences. Only decades later would it become evident that Hilma af\u00a0Klint had produced one of the most significant creative innovations of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was delicious,\u201d Louise Belfrage, a scholar and a colleague of Almqvist\u2019s, said. \u201cYou have this woman genius, a prophet, making abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on! It\u2019s just so attractive.\u201d Belfrage spoke of af\u00a0Klint\u2019s story like someone who had just been caught swiping icing off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. \u201cIt\u2019s almost irresistible,\u201d she said, and laughed.<\/p>\n
Soon after encountering af\u00a0Klint\u2019s work, Belfrage and Almqvist began to organize more seminars on her through the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, the research and education nonprofit that Almqvist heads. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they featured an impressively interdisciplinary selection of scholars, whose lectures touched on everything from early-twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, af\u00a0Klint became the magnifying glass through which a remote age could come alive. Almqvist and Belfrage compiled the talks into luxuriously produced books; Almqvist himself contributed essays and introductions.<\/p>\n
When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited \u201cHilma af\u00a0Klint: Paintings for the Future,\u201d \u201cit was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,\u201d Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon afterward, said. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house her works which af\u00a0Klint had once imagined. The show became one of the most visited in the Guggenheim\u2019s history, and its paintings became a permanent backdrop on social media. In the Times, Roberta Smith wrote that af\u00a0Klint\u2019s paintings \u201cdefinitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the past decade, Hilma af\u00a0Klint\u2019s life has been reimagined as historical fiction, a children\u2019s book, and a graphic novel. It has inspired at least two operas, a documentary, a bio-pic, a virtual-reality experience, and a six-hundred-square-foot permanent mosaic inside the New York City subway system.<\/p>\n
To Voss, this is the promise of art history: that death can confer the glory that life refuses, that what looks like failure might in fact be redemption deferred. \u201cIt\u2019s soothing, I think, to see something so great and so beautiful that was not successful in its own time,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Almqvist has come to believe that the resurrection of af\u00a0Klint has also produced fantasies. In the nearly thirteen years since his first encounter with the artist, Almqvist has instated himself as a kind of one-man Greek drama\u2014chorus and actor both, once the herald of plot and now its complicator. His own writing on af\u00a0Klint, he told me, has turned out to be riddled with mistakes. \u201cWhen you have someone like Hilma, where there are just so many holes to fill in, it opens things up for, well, conspiracy theories, quite frankly,\u201d Almqvist said. \u201cMost of what one knows about, or what one encounters in the literature about Hilma, is actually just myth.\u201d<\/p>\n
But even myths require caretakers. In recent years, the question of who those caretakers should be\u2014and what, exactly, they are protecting\u2014has become something of a national debate in Sweden. As af\u00a0Klint\u2019s fame has grown, so have the questions\u2014about what she believed, whom she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak in her name. The disputes play out in boardrooms and court filings and newspaper columns. They are often framed as debates about af\u00a0Klint\u2019s life and her past, but what is really at stake is her afterlife\u2014her legacy, what it means, and who should get to define it in the future.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The voices of astral beings suggested to af\u00a0Klint that she should paint not reality as it seemed but a truer version, which lay beyond the material world.Photograph from Science History Images \/ Alamy<\/p>\n
In the autumn of 1944, when af\u00a0Klint was eighty-one, she fell while getting off a streetcar in Stockholm; a few weeks later, she died from her injuries. In her will, she named her nephew, Erik af\u00a0Klint, as her heir. Erik, an admiral in the Navy, was too busy to administer his aunt\u2019s body of work, so Olof Sundstr\u00f6m, a close friend of hers, catalogued the archive. But Erik remained involved. \u201cIt is my opinion that, at least for the time being, the work should only be seen by people who understand its value and can feel reverence for it,\u201d he wrote to Sundstr\u00f6m, in 1946. Journalists, he added, \u201care, of course, not allowed to come near it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was not until Erik had retired from the military that he began to tackle the question of what to actually do with the massive corpus of material\u2014more than twelve hundred paintings and drawings and a hundred and twenty-four notebooks. He considered it his responsibility to find a permanent home for the works, but he was unsure how best to proceed and consulted various scholars and museums. To one, he spoke of a desire to \u201corganize an exhibition to generate interest in it among a wider audience\u201d; to another he said that the work should be displayed only \u201cwithin closed societies,\u201d and warned that \u201creleasing it to the public can never lead to anything good.\u201d In 1970, Erik met with people from Moderna Museet and the national museum to discuss a large-scale exhibition, but the idea was eventually abandoned. Ultimately, the Anthroposophical Society of Sweden agreed to house the archive, and in 1972 Erik established the Hilma af\u00a0Klint Foundation. Its statutes prohibit the sale of af\u00a0Klint\u2019s most significant works\u2014so as to safeguard them for, in the words of the four-page document, \u201cspiritual seekers\u201d\u2014and require that the board be chaired by a member of the af\u00a0Klint family, with the remaining seats occupied by members of the Anthroposophical Society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Later, af\u00a0Klint claimed\u2014implausibly, according to some historians\u2014that Steiner had warned her that the world was not ready for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,9548,4974,111,139,69,9547,93998,17910],"class_list":["post-137872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-inverted","tag-magazine","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-onward-and-upward-with-the-arts","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}