Edited with text by Tracey Bashkoff. Contributions by Tessel M. Bauduin, Daniel Birnbaum, Briony Fer, Vivien Greene, David Max Horowitz, Andrea Kollnitz, Helen Molesworth, Julia Voss.
Hilma af Klint's daring abstractions exert a mystical magnetism
When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice—one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colorful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalizing world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.
Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context 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. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. 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.
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.
Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. In 2014, she was a fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her postdoctorate project funded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, brings together medieval art and the modern avant-garde, focusing on the reception of and the construction of medieval art in modernity, specifically in Surrealism.
Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Stockholm University. He was the Co-Curator of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Birnbaum has held the position of Rector at the Städelschule Fine Arts Academy at Frankfurt at Maim in Germany and has also actively written for Art Forum.
Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art. She has written extensively on 20th- century and contemporary art. Fer has also curated numerous exhibitions, such as the recent show of Gabriel Orozco at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013.
Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. She most recently organized the exhibitions Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014) and The Avant-Gardes of Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon, and Their Contemporaries (2013). She has a Ph.D. in art history, with a focus on 19th-century European art.
David Max Horowitz is Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Andrea Kollnitz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on German and Austrian Modernism in Swedish Art Criticism.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Artforum
Canada Choate
'Paintings for the Future' endorses Klint’s mystical conviction that the spiral symbolizes the dualities of the universe—good and evil, male and female, known and unknown—slowly reaching equilibrium.
Elle
[The exhibition] remains as radical as ever and offers a welcome retort to modernism's male-centric narrative.
Garage
Prudence Peiffer
Af Klint did not ask for her work to be destroyed, only delayed. She did not wait for the world to discover her paintings. The world had to wait for them.
Vulture
Jerry Saltz
Klint created her own optical language with visual, chromatic, structural, and narrative syntax. Her artistic ship sails some of the deepest waters around.
Sabat Magazine
[af Klint's] art’s power is in its secrecy, its marking-off of sacred space. Its period of gestation, of waiting for humanity to catch up, is a demonstration of its sincerity.
Vulture
Jerry Saltz
Gorgeous book…. The implications of these works are not only gargantuan, but also infinitely pleasurable to look at. And as written about in this wonderful volume, great to read about. By the time you put down this book, Hilma af Klint will be embedded in your visual library forever.
The Economist
She had a penchant for the occult – a “commission” from a spirit at a seance inspired her to create her most striking paintings...
Galerie
One of the most overlooked artists of the 20th century.
Barnebys
[af Klint's] striking artwork expresses a vision of non-figurative art that was ahead of her time and establishes her as a pioneer of abstract art.
NYC City Guide
Merrill Lee Girardeau
Somewhat like the biomorphic forms of a later artist like Joan Miró, many of these pieces play with geometry and floral shapes that frequently overlap as they seem to swim across the canvas.
Abitare
Cristiana Campanini
Without precedent in the history of art.
Observer
Monica Uszerowicz
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 New York Times
Roberta Smith
[A] superb catalog.
WNYC
Deborah Solomon
The case of Hilma af Klint is among the most fascinating in art history.
Paris Review
Nana Asfour
Though she looked conservative, af Klint was nothing if not radical.
BBC
Kelly Grovier
Af Klint set about composing for posterity an alluring eye-music that echoed back the complex psyche of her age.
Wall Street Journal
Lance Esplund
Demands that we rethink, re-evaluate and revise the lineage of art history.
Cultured
Klint's biomorphoc compositions call to mind horticultural diagrams conveived on psychedelics - and showcase a level of mysticism not found in successors like Kandinsky.
New York Magazine
Peter Schjedahl
The art, fearfully esoteric and influenced by its creator’s séances and spiritualism, matches a present mood of restless searching.
Hyperallergic
Zachary Small
The canvases are massive and their idiosyncratic shapes, squiggles, and colors provide the viewer with an overwhelming sense of wonder.
Artnet
Ben Davis
The show feels like both a transmission from an unmapped other world and a perfectly logical correction to the history of Modern art.
Huffington Post
Priscilla Frank
The paintings tap into the buzzy zeitgeist of occult spirituality.
4Columns
Ania Szremski
[The paintings are] talismanic, vibrating with hidden mystical meaning. ... they represent the enduring evolution of the entire cosmos, the triumphant union of dualities.
Washington Post
Sebastian Smee
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.
Brooklyn Rail
Ann McCoy
Profoundly moving. ... It is as though, in our apocalyptic time, we need af Klint’s work now more than ever, and the purity of vision and intent it represents.
New York Times
The mother of all revisionist shows of Modernism.
New Yorker
Peter Schjeldahl
The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like news that is new again.
Bookforum
Julia Bryan-Wilson
Af Klint's ascendancy feels inevitable: She could be viewed as a heroine for our current moment, an artist who rejected commercial success, resisted the pull of self-publicity, and challanged the myth of individual authorship.
Artforum
af Klint's contribution, arrayed here in all its abundant originality, threatens to reduce to a footnote the mostly male history of esoteric abstraction.
New York Times
Roberta Smith
The Guggenheim Museum offers a revisionary chapter about the start of modern abstraction in its current headliner, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” introducing works that this Swedish artist and mystic made in 1906-7.
Art in America
Nancy Princenthal
The current celebration of af Klint's paintings suggests the primacy of visual communication should be backdated. The retrospective also underscores the important role that women played in its emergence.
New Yorker
Peter Schjedahl
The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like news that is new again.
Women's Art Journal
The project of Hilma af Klint and her female colleagues was the result of great maturity, of confidence and collective efforts, performed both in work and in life.
Globe and Mail
Nathalie Atkinson
In the wake of the acclaimed documentary Beyond the Visible comes an extensive catalogue of the Swedish artist, whose revolutionary work as the first abstract painter was dismissed because she was a woman.
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When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind a prolific body of work. It remained largely unseen until two landmark exhibitions—in 2013 at the Moderna Museet Stockholm and in 2018 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York—thrust af Klint onto the world's stage. Predating modernist abstraction, the works were a revelation to many and called for a revision of the art historical narrative. Now a new film, Beyond the Visible (Zeitgeist Films), introduces this visionary artist to a wider audience, cementing her status as a phenomenon that extends beyond the art world. continue to blog
Featured images are reproduced from the Guggenheim Museum's landmark exhibition catalog, Paintings for the Future, a staff pick for Women's History Month, and ideal reading for springtime in general. "The cycle focuses on the stages of life and humanity's connection to the universe," curator Tracey Bashkoff writes. "The mix of floral, geometric, and biomorphic forms with letters and inverted words creates a vocabulary of complex and shifting meanings, with which af Klint herself appears to have grappled. In these works a plant tendril may become a spiral, which in turn unfolds into a coiling line that then scribes a calligraphic letter—codes and words from an unknown language. Two pulsing orbs are, at the same time, microscopic eggs and intersecting solar systems. These forms continue to evade singular or stable interpretations—evolution, continuity, growth and progress all coexist with a return to the beginning of the oneness of the spirit. Science and spirit, mind and matter, the micro and the macro are simultaneously present." continue to blog
Measuring almost eleven feet tall by eight feet wide, Hilma af Klint's "Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood" (1907) is reproduced from the Guggenheim Museum's landmark exhibition catalog, Paintings for the Future, a staff pick for Women's History Month. 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. "The implications of these works are not only gargantuan, but also infinitely pleasurable to look at. And as written about in this wonderful volume, great to read about. By the time you put down this book, Hilma af Klint will be embedded in your visual library forever." Amen, Jerry! continue to blog
Curated by Tracey Bashkoff, the first major American museum exhibition of the visionary Swedish painter Hilma af Klint opens tomorrow at the Guggenheim, and all the art world's abuzz. "The exhibition makes an airtight case for Klint’s being the first modernist artist to paint entirely abstract," Jerry Saltz writes in New York Magazine's culture site, Vulture, going on to describe "over 160 of some of the most beguilingly uncanny and imaginative works of the last century. They amount to cosmic sonograms of unseen forces in Klint’s very large, iridescently colored canvases with their biomorphic shapes, auras, algae blooms of color, arabesque jellyfish tentacles coiling, geometric configurations, all to — as she put it — 'awaken humanity' to unseen astral-transcendental otherness." We cannot recommend the accompanying exhibition catalog highly enough. Featured image is "Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 1" (1915) from the SUW/UW Series. continue to blog
"The Current Standpoint of the Mahatmas" (1920), Hilma af Klint's small canvas from the Series II group of paintings, is reproduced from Paintings for the Future, published to accompany the acclaimed af Klint retrospective currently on view at the Guggenheim. "Despite its consistently diminutive scale," essayist David Max Horowitz writes, "af Klint's output from these years is some of her most incisive. She had by then fully claimed her own artistic voice—a distinctly spiritual one that continued to strive for receptivity over mastery. Spiritualism had positioned her to do so, even in the face of patriarchal social mores that had limited her artistic agency. The liberating potential of her esoteric commitments is aptly, if inadvertently, alluded to in af Klint's notes, when the High Masters declare, 'The world keeps you in fetters; cast them aside.'" continue to blog
August 11-13, ARTBOOK | D.A.P. presents a curated selection of this season's best and brightest books on art and culture at SHOPPE OBJECT, New York’s new semi-annual independent home and gift show, debuting to the trade this year! Our satellite first-floor bookstore will host signings with Nina Freudenberger, Martyn Thompson, Julie Carlson and Margot Guralnick. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.5 x 11.25 in. / 244 pgs / 220 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 GBP £55.00 ISBN: 9780892075430 PUBLISHER: Guggenheim Museum Publications AVAILABLE: 10/23/2018 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Edited with text by Tracey Bashkoff. Contributions by Tessel M. Bauduin, Daniel Birnbaum, Briony Fer, Vivien Greene, David Max Horowitz, Andrea Kollnitz, Helen Molesworth, Julia Voss.
Hilma af Klint's daring abstractions exert a mystical magnetism
When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice—one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colorful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalizing world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.
Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context 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. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. 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.
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.
Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. In 2014, she was a fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her postdoctorate project funded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, brings together medieval art and the modern avant-garde, focusing on the reception of and the construction of medieval art in modernity, specifically in Surrealism.
Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Stockholm University. He was the Co-Curator of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Birnbaum has held the position of Rector at the Städelschule Fine Arts Academy at Frankfurt at Maim in Germany and has also actively written for Art Forum.
Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art. She has written extensively on 20th- century and contemporary art. Fer has also curated numerous exhibitions, such as the recent show of Gabriel Orozco at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013.
Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. She most recently organized the exhibitions Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014) and The Avant-Gardes of Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon, and Their Contemporaries (2013). She has a Ph.D. in art history, with a focus on 19th-century European art.
David Max Horowitz is Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Andrea Kollnitz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on German and Austrian Modernism in Swedish Art Criticism.
