Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

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Throughout her lifetime, the prolific Swedish artist created more than 1,600 works, an impressive output now collected in Hilma af Klint: The Complete Catalogue Raisonné: Volumes I-VII.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. These clairvoyant experiences impacted much of her work, which the books explore in her most famous series, The Paintings for the Temple, in addition to her geometric studies, watercolor pieces, and more occasional portraits and landscapes. Until recently overlooked by art historians, she is now lauded around the world, and was the subject of the highest-attended single exhibition in the Guggenheim’s history, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint produced the earliest abstract paintings by a trained European artist. Guggenheim Museum's 2018 survey of af Klint's work was the first major solo exhibition in the United States devoted to the artist, offering an unprecedented opportunity to experience af Klint's long-underrecognized artistic achievements.

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. It is a go-to place for museum lovers whether they want to read up on an exhibition they are about to visit; read more about an exhibition being held far afield or revisit an old favourite show.She was heavily influenced by spiritual ideologies and claimed that she painted on instruction from the spirit world, for the future. A week after I saw [af Klint's paintings], their pulsing loveliness remains undimmed in my mind, like a self-replenishing sense memory of summer. Although they never met, Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian shared a deep dynamic connection to the natural world and began their careers as landscape painters.

A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars, and curators considers af Klint’s sources and relevance to art in the 21st century.Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early twentieth century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. 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.

Af Klint’s paintings will be exhibited at Tate Modern next April, but it’s taken a long time for the art world to catch up with the visionary Swede. 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.

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. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.