Hilma Af Klint (1862–1944)

The worst part (!) of quarantine for me has been not having access to interlibrary loan which means I can't ILL my favorite art books and instead have to make tough decisions about which to buy and which can wait. Anyway I'm so glad I bought this, it's luminous, I love it. Not a lot of text but what is there opens up so many doors to thinking and seeing things.

Once considered an outsider artist, after her show at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half-a-mil-lion visitors, Hilma af Klint firmly established her place in art history. She has also been the subject of documenta-ry films and biographies. In 2013, Iris Müller-Westermann organized the first institutional exhibition of af Klint’s work. Now she presents us with the latest information and research in an extensive survey show at the Moderna Museet in Malmö. Of crucial importance show more is the issue of spirituality in af Klint’s painting―how she managed to translate both the material and the immaterial world into a pictorial vision. The accompanying exhibition catalogue is the first to investigate, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by leading historians of theosophy and a quantum physicist, among others, provide enlightening insight into a world in which both the visualization of atoms and spiritual séances alike became artistic material―a world that fascinates us even more than ever. show less

I got this book from the library, and I was fascinated by a glossary of invented terms that were translated from the Swedish, which is supposed to explain her artwork. The problem was this book did not actually include the notebooks that would’ve had the abbreviations that the glossary referred to. This library, copy book was a little bit old and the picture color seem faded, but it may be that some of those original artworks have been fitted due to her nephew storing some of her works show more under less than pristine conditions before she became famous as the first female, abstract painter, or possibly even the first abstract painter, either male or female. show less

I got this book from the library. It’s a fairly expensive hardcover, art book with lots of pictures, but it doesn’t really explain that much about how she created the work and what her processes were.