Ahead of her time, this artist created hundreds of enigmatic paintings where the invisible became visible. Unseen for many years, her work has now vindicated her as one of the pioneers of abstract art
It was 1935, and Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote a letter to his New York gallery owner, where he claimed the authorship of his first abstract painting: a piece painted in 1911. “Without doubt, it is the first abstract painting in the world (...) it is, in other words, a historical painting”, said the letter.
Nonetheless, in Sweden, in 1906, a woman called Hilma af Klint had already been painting abstract compositions in which line, color, and geometrical shapes had been the main subjects. However, her story and her contribution to abstract art remained unknown until the 1980s, when an exhibition taking place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) finally vindicated her role.
Why doesn’t her name resonate when we think of this art movement? What happened that kept her prolific production unknown, unlike Mondrian, Malevich, or Kandinsky’s works? Here is the fascinating story behind one of the pioneers of abstraction.