Janice McNab, head of the Master Artistic Research Department at the KABK, The Hague, has published an article in the Wiley Online Library on Swedish painter Hilma af Klint: "Hilma af Klint and the Need for Historical Revision".
Summary
The work of Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was barely exhibited in her own lifetime and failed to be written into art history. The story of abstraction instead evolved in relation to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, František Kupka, and Kazimir Malevich. A century later, however, there is a public hunger for af Klint's paintings that has surprised even the organizers of recent blockbuster exhibitions, and full‐colour publications and a documentary have followed in their wake. This review will note which new research material can be found in four key museum publications and a recent documentary, and discuss how these extraordinary paintings, and the artist who made them, are being historicized today.
You can read the article here.
