Hilma af Klint: Painting the Beyond

Born in 1862 to a prominent Swedish family (her great-grandfather had been ennobled for services as a naval officer), Hilma af Klint was a skilled painter of portraits and landscapes who in the first decades of the twentieth century began making hundreds of strange pictures articulating the fluid relations between spirit and matter. Many have no basis in the visible world, and their early dates—in some cases years before such benchmark abstract paintings as Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII (1913) or Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915)—have led to excited claims for af Klint as the unknown woman who pipped all the famous men to the post. Despite this setback, af Klint returned to The Paintings for the Temple, but their character changed: instead of moving her hand directly, the spirits now presented her with a mental image to execute, and the paintings took on a crisper, more formal demeanor.

Source: www.nybooks.com