Hilma af Klint Comes to the Guggenheim

As early as 1906, the Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint was filling canvases with circles, spirals and areas of pure color. While her contemporaries Kandinsky and Mondrian became lionized, she made similar breakthroughs in relative obscurity. She ordered that her work not be shown publicly for 20 years after her death, hoping it would reach a more receptive audience.

Many decades after she died, in 1944, the Guggenheim Museum in New York is opening the first major retrospective of her work in the U.S., “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.”

Highlights of the exhibition include “Paintings for the Temple” (1906-1915), a series of 193 works, some of them 10 feet high, that Af Klint made at what she said was the urging of a spectral voice called Amaliel.

“The subject is the cycle of life, from birth to old age, a monumental theme that she has undertaken on this monumental scale,” says Tracey Bashkoff, the Guggenheim curator who organized the show. Af Klint, she says, created art “to offer people a spiritual pathway” to a higher plane.

Among the exhibition’s 160 artworks and notebooks are many reconciling science with the abstract, including “Evolution” (1908), a series of paintings with organic shapes, and “The Atom Series” (1917), watercolors of cubes, triangles and stars.