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

"Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, brightly colored forms seemed to swirl and spread. It was February, 2013, the evening of the opening of "Hilma af Klint-A Pioneer of Abstraction" at Moderna Museet, in Stockholm. Among the attendees was Kurt Almqvist, a white-haired man in his mid-fifties. Though Almqvist considered himself something of an expert on fin-de-siècle intellectual history-he had written a book on Carl Jung-he was seeing af Klint's paintings for the first time."

"Odd but familiar shapes pulsed from their surfaces: eggs, petals, celestial bodies. Almqvist was standing in front of a series of small geometric paintings of ornamented circles-some looked like beach balls, others a bit like lunar phases-when he was approached by a flummoxed-looking woman. Did he understand them? she wondered. Could he explain them to her? "I really don't know anything," Almqvist recalled telling her."

"In the following months, the exhibition drew a record number of visitors. There were the usual suspects-art students, well-read retirees in statement eyewear-but also, in the diplomatic words of one museum employee, "other kinds of people." Diaphanously costumed dancers. Self-described psychics. A Finnish man came every day for weeks, stayed until closing, and spoke to no one. The show proved especially popular with women, many of whom"

Hilma af Klint's paintings, created a century earlier, feature enormous canvases filled with odd but familiar shapes—eggs, petals, and celestial bodies. An exhibition at Moderna Museet in February 2013 drew record crowds and introduced many viewers to the work for the first time. Attendees ranged from art students and retirees to dancers, self-described psychics, and solitary visitors who spent hours in the galleries. A foundation executive reacted with uncertainty, suggesting symbolic or religious meanings without firm interpretation. The exhibition's popularity, especially among women, intensified questions about af Klint's spiritual beliefs, her collaborators, and those entitled to speak for her legacy.

Read at The New Yorker