# The Unexpected Rise of Hilma af Klint
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 important 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 beliefs. 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 ancient 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 triumphant 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