Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

Hilma af Klint's daring abstractions exert a mystical magnetism, and this book represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art.

In Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, 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 found a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda.

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 Wassily 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.

Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
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.
Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Stockholm University.
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.
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.
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.

• Artist Hilma af Klint
• Dimensions 29.3 x 22.3 x 2.6 cm
• Material Responsibly sourced paper
• ISBN 9780892075430