Hilma af Klint: A Biography

Inspired by her first encounter with the artist's work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research Hilma af Klint's life. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic.

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was 44 years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained. While her naturalistic landscapes and botanicals were shown during her lifetime, her body of radical, abstract works never received the same attention. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint produced the earliest abstract paintings by a trained European artist. But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a successful woman artist, but she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a non-representational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today.

Julia Voss is a German art historian, art critic, and former art editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Anne Posten is a literary translator based in Berlin.

• Dimensions 16.1 x 23.7 x 3.4 cm
• Author Julia Voss
• ISBN 9780226689760
• Hardback Yes
• Number of illustrations 44 colour plates, 49 halftones
• Publisher The University of Chicago Press
• No of pages 448