Af Klint later stated (implausibly, according to some historians) that Steiner warned her that the world was not ready for what she was trying to reveal, and that, discouraged, she stopped painting for eight years. When she resumed work, she said, she worked at a larger scale and intensity. But she decreed that the works should remain unseen for twenty years after her death, protected from the ignorant public. It was only decades later that it became clear that Hilma af Klint had created one of the most significant creative innovations of the twentieth century.
“It was amazing,” said Louise Belfrage, a scientist and colleague of Almquist. “You have this woman genius, a prophetess, creating abstract paintings before Kandinsky? on! It's just like that attractive” Belfrage told the story of Af Klint as a man who had just been caught brushing the icing off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she said and laughed.
Soon after discovering Af's work, Klint Belfrage and Almquist began organizing more seminars about her through the Axel and Margaret Exxon Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, a research and education nonprofit that Almquist heads. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they featured an impressively interdisciplinary array of scholars whose lectures covered everything from early twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almquist, af Klint became a magnifying glass through which a distant era could be brought to life. Almquist and Belfrage compiled the conversations into lavishly published books; Almquist himself wrote the essays and introductions.
When the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings of the Future” in 2018, “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” said Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared shortly after. The choice of location seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling rotunda eerily resembled the temple that housed her work, which Clint had once represented. The exhibition became one of the most attended in the history of the Guggenheim, and its paintings became a constant background on social networks. IN TimeRoberta Smith wrote that Clint's paintings “finally destroy the idea of modernist abstraction as a male project.”
Over the past decade, the life of Hilma af Klint has been reimagined as historical fiction, a children's book, and a graphic novel. It has inspired at least two operas, a documentary, a biopic, a virtual reality experience, and a permanent six-hundred-square-foot mosaic in the New York City subway system.
For Voss, this is the promise of art history: death can grant the glory that life denies, and what looks like failure can actually be redemption delayed. “I think it’s nice to see something so great and beautiful that wasn’t successful in its time,” she said.
Almqvist concluded that the revival of af Klint also gave rise to fantasies. In the nearly thirteen years since his first meeting with the artist, Almqvist has established himself as a kind of one-man Greek drama – chorus and actor, once the herald of the plot, and now its complicator. His own articles about Clint, he told me, were riddled with errors. “When you have someone like Hilma, who has so many holes to fill, it opens the door for, well, conspiracy theories, frankly,” Almquist said. “Most of what is known or found in the literature about Hilm is in fact just a myth.”
But even myths need guardians. In recent years, the question of who these caretakers should be – and what exactly they are protecting – has become something of a national debate in Sweden. As Clint's fame grew, so did the questions—about what she believed, who she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak on her behalf. The arguments play out in courtrooms, in court documents and in newspaper columns. It's often framed as a debate about Af Klint's life and past, but what's really at stake is her afterlife – her legacy, what it means and who should determine it in the future.
The voices of astral beings prompted Af Klint to draw not reality as it seemed, but a more truthful version of it, lying beyond the boundaries of the material world.Photo from Science History Images/Alamy
In the autumn of 1944, when Af Klint was eighty-one, she fell while getting off a tram in Stockholm; she died from her injuries several weeks later. In her will, she named her nephew Erik af Klint as heir. Erik, a navy admiral, was too busy to manage his aunt's work, so Olof Sundström, her close friend, cataloged the archive. But Eric continued to participate. “I believe that, at least for the time being, this work should only be seen by people who understand its value and can feel respect for it,” he wrote to Sundström in 1946. Journalists, he added, “are of course not allowed to approach her.”
Only after leaving the army did Eric begin to decide what to actually do with the huge array of materials – more than a thousand thousand paintings and drawings and one hundred and twenty-four notebooks. He considered it his responsibility to find a permanent home for the works, but did not know how best to proceed, and consulted with various scientists and museums. To one he spoke of his desire to “organize an exhibition in order to arouse interest in it among a wider audience”; to another he told that the works should only be shown “in closed societies” and warned that “nothing good could ever come of releasing them to the public.” In 1970, Eric met with representatives of the Moderna Museet and the national museum to discuss a large-scale exhibition, but the idea was ultimately abandoned. Ultimately, the Anthroposophical Society of Sweden agreed to host the archive, and in 1972 Erik founded the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Its charter prohibits the sale of af Klint's most significant works – to protect them for, in the words of the four-page document, “spiritual seekers” – and requires that the board be chaired by a member of the af Klint family, with the remaining seats held by members of the Anthroposophical Society.
