Later, according to some historians, Klimt claimed – unbelievably – that Steiner had warned him that the world was not ready for what he was attempting to reveal, and, disappointed, he stopped painting for eight years. “When they started working again, they worked on a larger scale and with intensity,” he said. But he decided that the work would be kept safe from unseen audiences for twenty years after his death. Only decades later would it become clear that Hilma af Klint had created one of the most important creative innovations of the twentieth century.
“It was delicious,” said Lewis Belfrage, a scholar and colleague of Almquist. “Do you have a brilliant, prophetic woman who was making abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on But! it’s like that AttractiveBelfrage described Clint’s story as that of a man who had just been caught scraping the ice off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. ,It’s almost irresistible,, she said, and laughed.
Soon after encountering Clint’s work, Belfrage and Almquist began organizing more seminars on them through the Axel and Margaret X:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, a research and education nonprofit that Almquist heads. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they included an impressive interdisciplinary selection of scholars whose lectures covered everything from scientific breakthroughs of the early twentieth century to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, AF Klimt became a magnifying glass through which a distant era could be lived. Almquist and Belfrage compiled the conversations into brilliantly produced books; Almquist himself contributed the essay and introduction.
When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” “It was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” said Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist came out soon after. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked like a temple to house his works, which Klimt once imagined. The show became one of the most viewed shows in the Guggenheim’s history, and its paintings became a permanent fixture on social media. In TimesRoberta Smith wrote that Klimt’s paintings “definitely explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.”
Over the past decade, Hilma af Klint’s life has been re-imagined 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 six-hundred-square-foot permanent mosaic inside the New York City subway system.
For Voss, this is the promise of art history: that death can grant the glory that life denies, that what looks like failure can actually postpone redemption. He said, “I think it’s nice to look at something great and beautiful that wasn’t successful in its time.”
Almqvist believes that the revival of Klimt has also aroused imaginations. In the nearly thirteen years since his first meeting with the artist, Almqvist has established himself as a kind of one-man Greek drama—both chorus and actor, once the harbinger of the plot and now its complicator. He told me that his own writing on Clint had turned out to be full of mistakes. “When you have someone like Hilma, where there are so many holes to fill, it opens things up for conspiracy theories,” Almquist said. “Whatever anyone knows about Hilma, or finds in literature, is really just myth.”
But myths also need caretakers. In recent years, the question of who those caregivers should be—and who exactly they are protecting—has become the subject of a national debate in Sweden. As Clint’s fame has grown, so have the questions – about what she believed, who she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak in her name. Controversies play out in boardrooms and court filings and in newspaper columns. These are often presented as debates about Clint’s life and his past, but what is really at stake is life after his death – his legacy, what it means, and who should get the right to define it in the future.
The voices of astral beings suggested to Clint that he should not depict reality as it appears, but rather a truer version, one that lies beyond the physical world.Science History Images/Photo from Alamy
In the autumn of 1944, when Klimt was eighty-one, she collapsed while getting off a streetcar in Stockholm; A few weeks later, he died of his injuries. In his will, he named his nephew, Eric af Klint, as his successor. Eric, an admiral in the navy, was too busy managing his aunt’s work, so Olof Sundström, a close friend of his, cataloged the collection. But Eric remained involved. In 1946 he wrote to Sundström, “My opinion is that, at least for the time being, the work should be seen only by those who understand its value and can feel reverence for it.” He added, “Journalists, of course, are not allowed to come near it.”
It was not until Eric retired from the army that he began to grapple with the question of what exactly to do with the vast storehouse of material – over twelve hundred paintings and drawings and one hundred and twenty-four notebooks. He considered it his responsibility to find a permanent home for the works, but he was unsure how to proceed and consulted various scholars and museums. From one, he spoke of his desire to “organize an exhibition to generate interest in it among a wider audience”; To another he said that the work should be displayed only “within closed societies”, and warned that “no good can ever come of releasing it to the public.” In 1970, Eric met with people from the Modern Museum and the National Museum to discuss a large-scale exhibition, but the idea was eventually abandoned. Ultimately, the Anthroposophical Society of Sweden agreed to house the collection and in 1972 Eric established the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Its statutes prohibit the sale of Klimt’s most important works—in order to preserve them, in the words of the four-page document, for “spiritual seekers”—and require that the board be chaired by a member of the Klimt family, with the remaining seats held by members of the Anthroposophical Society.