Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

Product Information

The current celebration of af Klint's paintings suggests the primacy of visual communication should be backdated.

Julia Voss’s biography of Af Klint is the first full life of the painter and shows her growth from working in the traditional genres of portraiture and landscape into far more radical fields.

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. The experiments I have undertaken,” she wrote as she set off on this new path, “will astound humanity. Reading it was a revelation, and it has changed my understanding of the artist, the woman, and her times.

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. 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. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. The American critic Hilton Kramer wrote: “Hilma af Klint’s paintings are essentially colored diagrams.Essays explore the social, intellectual, and artistic milieu 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. It contains the rarely seen “Blue Notebooks,” hand-painted and annotated catalogues af Klint created of her most famous series “Paintings for the Temple,” and a dictionary compiled by af Klint of the words and letters found in her work. Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. She explains not just Af Klint’s beliefs, but her relations with the occultist and reformer Rudolf Steiner and her efforts to exhibit some of her work to fellow spiritualists.