Since the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 – held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986 – vindicated Hilma af Klint as a pioneer and prominent representative of abstract art, there has been a constant succession of actions that claim for her a place of honor in the history of art, at least, alongside Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich or Mondrian. Born in Solna, Stockholm county, in 1862, and died in Danderyd, also a county in the Swedish capital, in 1944, from her childhood she had visions and heard voices inside her, which brought her closer from an early age to groups whose members experienced in communication with higher forces. Belonging to a family of Navy officers – her great-grandfather and grandfather are responsible for a famous project to map the seas surrounding Sweden that would make them enter the nobility – scientific education was as important as spiritual education for her.
She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and was part of the Association of Swedish Women Artists, as well as traveling through Dornach, Amsterdam, London and Florence. Her first spiritualist session at the age of 17, the founding of her own occult group – with four friends: De Fem (The Five) – with Rosicrucian roots in 1896, her fascination with theosophy and her frustrated approach to Rudolf Steiner, founder of the anthroposophy, are other data that give an idea of ??the interests that he expressed in a pictorial work ahead of his time, visionary judging by the enthusiasm that he arouses now. After some disappointments, such as the exhibition of his productions in London within the framework of the World Conference of Spiritual Science in 1928, in 1932 “he decided to bequeath his work to the future” – according to the doctor in Art History Julia Voss – and pointed out a set of pieces that were not to be opened until twenty years had passed since his death.
At this time of review of the canons and the criteria that compose them, the Atalanta publishing house joins the recovery of the painter by offering a careful illustrated edition of some of her works, but, above all, delving into the beliefs, knowledge and experiences that fostered a symbolic universe like theirs and, therefore, that of the first abstract art.
Outside the academy and also the avant-garde, he configured a language of colors, structures, symbols and sacred beings capable of uniting the visible and the invisible and representing the spirals of forces and vibrations that form true nature even though we are incapable of perceiving them. .
The reproductions of the artist’s overwhelming work accompany in this volume the studies of specialists from different disciplines – in addition to the aforementioned Voss, Daniel Birnbaum, Tracey Bashkoff, Isaac Lubelsky, Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Marco Pasi – presented at the seminar 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, coinciding with a major exhibition dedicated to the artist called to challenge and revolutionize artistic canons so long after her birth and death.
Daniel Birnbaum, Julia Voss, Tracey Bashkoff, Isaac Lubelsky, Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Marco Pasi. Hilma by Clint, visionary. Translation by Francisco Lopez Martin. Atalanta. 160 pages. 46 euros