Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, brightly colored forms seemed to swirl and spread. It was February, 2013, the evening of the opening of “Hilma af Klint—A Pioneer of Abstraction” at Moderna Museet, in Stockholm. Among the attendees was Kurt Almqvist, a white-haired man in his mid-fifties. Though Almqvist considered himself something of an expert on fin-de-siècle intellectual history—he had written a book on Carl Jung—he was seeing af Klint’s paintings for the first time.
Almqvist, the C.E.O. of a nonprofit foundation that had financed a seminar to accompany the exhibition, had been to other shows at Moderna Museet—“smashed bottles and things like that,” as he put it to me—and found the frank beauty of af Klint’s work a relief. Many of the canvases, painted a century earlier, were enormous; some towered over his head. Odd but familiar shapes pulsed from their surfaces: eggs, petals, celestial bodies. Almqvist was standing in front of a series of small geometric paintings of ornamented circles—some looked like beach balls, others a bit like lunar phases—when he was approached by a flummoxed-looking woman. Did he understand them? she wondered. Could he explain them to her? “I really don’t know anything,” Almqvist recalled telling her. “I suppose it’s all symbolic for . . . something. Perhaps it has to do with religion?”
In the following months, the exhibition drew a record number of visitors. There were the usual suspects—art students, well-read retirees in statement eyewear—but also, in the diplomatic words of one museum employee, “other kinds of people.” Diaphanously costumed dancers. Self-described psychics. A Finnish man came every day for weeks, stayed until closing, and spoke to no one. The show proved especially popular with women, many of whom reported feeling a mysterious warmth spread through their lower bodies, accompanied by an irrepressible urge to weep.
“It is, without a doubt, one of the most extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen,” a co-editor of the contemporary-art magazine Frieze wrote. Much of the press coverage emphasized the fact that af Klint had begun painting her nonrepresentational works in 1906, four years before the attempts of Kandinsky, long considered the father of abstract art. Soon, Sweden’s postal service issued stamps bearing images of af Klint’s paintings. Posters of her work began to replace decorative Buddha statues as stock interior décor in Stockholm’s real-estate listings. There was an Ikea collaboration.
The paintings were gorgeous, and so was the story of their creation, every element of which seemed lifted from a fairy tale. It began with af Klint’s birth, in 1862, to a noble family, in a palace just outside Stockholm. The building had been converted into a military academy, where her father taught naval cadets. As she got older, she began to see visions she could not explain—empty coffins, floating numbers. She went to school, where she learned to paint. At first, she was diligent about portraying the world as others saw it: she made portraits of important people, landscapes of recognizable terrain, careful illustrations of botanical and zoological life. But, in time, she became unsatisfied.
“Wow—the horses are really little tonight.” Cartoon by Michael Maslin
When she was in her early thirties, she joined a circle called the Five; together, they took down messages from spirits and from the dead. The voices of astral beings suggested to af Klint that she should paint not reality as it seemed but a truer version, which lay beyond the material world. She obeyed, covering canvas after canvas with images of hidden forces, portrayed in strange shapes and vivid colors. In middle age, she showed the work to Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian occultist whose syncretic theories about everything from agriculture to education and the afterlife came to be known as anthroposophy.
Later, af Klint claimed—implausibly, according to some historians—that 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 Klint had produced one of the most significant creative innovations of the twentieth century.
“It was delicious,” Louise Belfrage, a scholar and a colleague of Almqvist’s, said. “You have this woman genius, a prophet, making abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on! It’s just so attractive.” Belfrage spoke of af Klint’s story like someone who had just been caught swiping icing off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she said, and laughed.
Soon after encountering af Klint’s 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 Klint 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.
When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon afterward, said. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house her works which af Klint had once imagined. The show became one of the most visited in the Guggenheim’s history, and its paintings became a permanent backdrop on social media. In the Times, Roberta Smith wrote that af Klint’s paintings “definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.”
In the past decade, Hilma af Klint’s life has been reimagined as historical fiction, a children’s 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.
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. “It’s soothing, I think, to see something so great and so beautiful that was not successful in its own time,” she said.
Almqvist has come to believe that the resurrection of af Klint 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—chorus and actor both, once the herald of plot and now its complicator. His own writing on af Klint, he told me, has turned out to be riddled with mistakes. “When 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,” Almqvist said. “Most of what one knows about, or what one encounters in the literature about Hilma, is actually just myth.”