The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star
Af Klint later claimed – implausibly according to some historians – that Steiner had warned her that the world was not ready for what she was trying to reveal and that, discouraged, she stopped painting for eight years. When she started again, she says, she worked on a large scale and with great intensity. But she decreed that the works must remain invisible for twenty years after her death, hidden from the ignorant public. Only a few decades later, it would become clear that Hilma af Klint produced one of the most significant creative innovations of the 20th century.
“It was delicious,” said Louise Belfrage, a researcher and colleague of Almqvist. “You have this woman of genius, a prophet, who was doing abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on on! It’s just so attractive.” Belfrage spoke of Klint’s story like someone who had just been caught stealing frosting from a cake: helpless, half-sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she says, laughing.
Soon after discovering Klint’s work, Belfrage and Almqvist began hosting more seminars on her through the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for the Public Good, the nonprofit research and education organization headed by Almqvist. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they brought together an impressive interdisciplinary selection of scholars, whose lectures touched on everything from early 20th century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, Af Klint became the lens through which a distant era could come to life. Almqvist and Belfrage compiled the discussions into lavishly produced books; Almqvist himself wrote essays and introductions.
When the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” in 2018, “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” said Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon after. The choice of location seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple housing his works, designed by Klint. The exhibition became one of the most visited in the Guggenheim’s history, and his paintings became a permanent backdrop on social media. In the TimesRoberta Smith wrote that Klint’s paintings “definitely explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a masculine project.”
Over the past decade, Hilma af Klint’s life has been reimagined as historical fiction, children’s books, and graphic novels. It has inspired at least two operas, a documentary, a biography, a virtual reality experience, and a permanent six-hundred-square-foot mosaic inside the New York City subway.
For Voss, this is the promise of art history: that death can bestow the glory that life denies, that what looks like failure can actually be redemption delayed. “It’s calming, I think, to see something so big and so beautiful that wasn’t successful in its time,” she said.
Almqvist came to believe that af Klint’s resurrection also produced fantasies. In the nearly thirteen years since his first meeting with the artist, Almqvist has established himself as a kind of Greek drama all his own, chorus and actor at once, once the herald of the plot and now its accomplice. His own writings on Af Klint, he told me, turned out to be riddled with errors. “When you have someone like Hilma, where there are so many holes to fill in, it opens the door to conspiracy theories, frankly,” Almqvist said. “Most of what is known or found in literature about Hilma is actually myth. »
But even myths need guardians. In recent years, the question of who these guardians should be – and what exactly they are protecting – has become something of a national debate in Sweden. As Af Klint’s fame grows, so do the questions: what she believed, who she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak on her behalf. Conflicts take place in boardrooms, in court files and in newspaper columns. They are often presented as debates about Af Klint’s life and past, but what is really at stake is his afterlife: his legacy, what it means, and who should define him in the future.
The voices of astral beings suggested that Af Klint paint not reality as it seemed, but a truer version, located beyond the material world.Photograph taken from Images d’histoire des sciences / Alamy
In the fall of 1944, when Af Klint was eighty-one, she fell while getting off a tram in Stockholm; a few weeks later, she died from her injuries. In her will, she named her nephew, Erik af Klint, as her heir. Erik, a naval admiral, was too busy to administer all of his aunt’s work, so Olof Sundström, a close friend of hers, cataloged the archives. But Erik remained involved. “In my opinion, at least for the moment, the work should only be seen by people who understand its value and can feel respect for it,” he wrote to Sundström in 1946. Journalists, he added, “are of course not allowed to approach it.”
It was only when Erik retired from the army that he began to address the question of what to actually do with this enormous body of material – over 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 he was unsure how best to proceed and consulted various researchers and museums. To one of them he spoke of the desire “to organize an exhibition to arouse the interest of a wider public”; at another, he said the work should only be exhibited “in closed societies” and warned that “its release to the public can never lead to anything good.” In 1970, Erik met with people from the Moderna Museet and the National Museum to discuss a large-scale exhibition, but the idea was ultimately abandoned. Eventually the Anthroposophical Society of Sweden agreed to host the archive, and in 1972 Erik established the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Its statutes prohibit the sale of af Klint’s most significant works – to protect them, in the words of the four-page document, from “spiritual seekers” – and require that the board of directors be chaired by a member of the af Klint family, with the remaining seats occupied by members of the Anthroposophical Society.
