The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star

Later, af Klint claimed—implausibly, according to some historians—that Steiner had warned her that the world was not ready for what she was attempting to reveal, and that, discouraged, she stopped painting for eight years. When she resumed, she said, she worked at great scale and intensity. But she decreed that the works were to remain unseen for twenty years after her death, protected from ignorant audiences. Only decades later would it become evident that Hilma af Klint had produced one of the most significant creative innovations of the twentieth century.

“It was delicious,” Louise Belfrage, a scholar and a colleague of Almqvist’s, said. “You have this woman genius, a prophet, making abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on! It’s just so attractive.” Belfrage spoke of af Klint’s story like someone who had just been caught swiping icing off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she said, and laughed.

Soon after encountering af Klint’s work, Belfrage and Almqvist began to organize more seminars on her through the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, the research and education nonprofit that Almqvist heads. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they featured an impressively interdisciplinary selection of scholars, whose lectures touched on everything from early-twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, af Klint became the magnifying glass through which a remote age could come alive. Almqvist and Belfrage compiled the talks into luxuriously produced books; Almqvist himself contributed essays and introductions.

When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon afterward, said. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house her works which af Klint had once imagined. The show became one of the most visited in the Guggenheim’s history, and its paintings became a permanent backdrop on social media. In the Times, Roberta Smith wrote that af Klint’s paintings “definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.”

In the past decade, Hilma af Klint’s life has been reimagined as historical fiction, a children’s book, and a graphic novel. It has inspired at least two operas, a documentary, a bio-pic, a virtual-reality experience, and a six-hundred-square-foot permanent mosaic inside the New York City subway system.

To Voss, this is the promise of art history: that death can confer the glory that life refuses, that what looks like failure might in fact be redemption deferred. “It’s soothing, I think, to see something so great and so beautiful that was not successful in its own time,” she said.

Almqvist has come to believe that the resurrection of af Klint has also produced fantasies. In the nearly thirteen years since his first encounter with the artist, Almqvist has instated himself as a kind of one-man Greek drama—chorus and actor both, once the herald of plot and now its complicator. His own writing on af Klint, he told me, has turned out to be riddled with mistakes. “When you have someone like Hilma, where there are just so many holes to fill in, it opens things up for, well, conspiracy theories, quite frankly,” Almqvist said. “Most of what one knows about, or what one encounters in the literature about Hilma, is actually just myth.”

But even myths require caretakers. In recent years, the question of who those caretakers should be—and what, exactly, they are protecting—has become something of a national debate in Sweden. As af Klint’s fame has grown, so have the questions—about what she believed, whom she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak in her name. The disputes play out in boardrooms and court filings and newspaper columns. They are often framed as debates about af Klint’s life and her past, but what is really at stake is her afterlife—her legacy, what it means, and who should get to define it in the future.

In the autumn of 1944, when af Klint was eighty-one, she fell while getting off a streetcar in Stockholm; a few weeks later, she died from her injuries. In her will, she named her nephew, Erik af Klint, as her heir. Erik, an admiral in the Navy, was too busy to administer his aunt’s body of work, so Olof Sundström, a close friend of hers, catalogued the archive. But Erik remained involved. “It is my opinion that, at least for the time being, the work should only be seen by people who understand its value and can feel reverence for it,” he wrote to Sundström, in 1946. Journalists, he added, “are, of course, not allowed to come near it.”

It was not until Erik had retired from the military that he began to tackle the question of what to actually do with the massive corpus of material—more than twelve hundred paintings and drawings and a hundred and twenty-four notebooks. He considered it his responsibility to find a permanent home for the works, but he was unsure how best to proceed and consulted various scholars and museums. To one, he spoke of a 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 “releasing it to the public can never lead to anything good.” In 1970, Erik met with people from Moderna Museet 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 archive, and in 1972 Erik established the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Its statutes prohibit the sale of af Klint’s most significant works—so as to safeguard them for, in the words of the four-page document, “spiritual seekers”—and require that the board be chaired by a member of the af Klint family, with the remaining seats occupied by members of the Anthroposophical Society.