What’s Behind the Art World’s Obsession with Hilma af Klint?

Six years ago, not many people had heard of Hilma af Klint. Today, following a pivotal and record-breaking exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2018) and another huge show at Tate Modern in London (2023), not to mention a new definitive biography (Julia Voss’s Hilma af Klint: A Biography, 2022) and a film dramatizing her life (Hilma, 2022), it feels like she’s impossible to avoid. In October, another blockbuster exhibition of her work opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Even if people still confuse her name with another famous European painter, Gustav Klimt, her swirling, pastel-hued, large-scale abstractions – which she believed to be the work of spirits communicating through her brush – have become instantly recognizable. It’s a huge amount of attention for a previously unknown esoteric 19th-century Swedish artist. What makes her so eminently marketable, and what does her star power say about the choices facing curators today?  

The art world’s appetite for women artists continues to be voracious. But, even as institutions and collectors are seeking to rebalance the art-historical scale towards gender equity, many museums still stick to blockbuster names: Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Yayoi Kusama – and now, Hilma af Klint. Like most artists who have become iconic names, Af Klint is defined by her innovation. She has been billed as the forgotten true pioneer of European abstraction: possibly the first person ever to make completely abstract art in the West. According to these exhibitions, she broke the mould and made art that was different from what had ever been made before – although some scholars have since questioned whether calling her the first abstract artist is a completely accurate characterization.

Af Klint can be marketed as unique, but she is also legible within an existing history of abstraction that includes, among many others, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay and Kazimir Malevich. The comfort of placing her within a pre-existing canon makes her easier to understand, but her unique-ness offers viewers a sense of spectacle. Her colossal paintings, made for a temple to a mystical religion she couldn’t fully explain, are real showstoppers.  They feel contemporary, sliding into current tastes very neatly: the Guggenheim’s 2018 exhibition catalogue became an it-girl item, appearing on influencers’ coffee tables throughout my Instagram feed and you can currently buy a poster of her work at H&M.

It helps that Af Klint’s work is apolitical – or at least, it can be presented that way. Unlike women artists of the 1970s and later, who explicitly reckoned with second-wave feminism and the women’s movement, Af Klint and other historic women artists who have recently been getting renewed attention – including Julia Margaret Cameron, Angelica Kauffman, Artemisia Gentileschi and Gwen John – can be presented to visitors without the baggage of a political movement that is still alive today. Of course, the conversations we are having about women artists and equality of representation can never actually be divorced from feminism, nor did those historic artists exist outside the realities of sexism and politics in their historical moments. But museum marketing teams can present them with the comfortable distance of time, all-to-often flattening the nuance of their lived realities in favour of a celebratory ‘rediscovery’ narrative.

The current scale of interest in Af Klint not only reflects the paradoxes of an art world that seeks novelty and comfort in equal measure, but also one that is increasingly squeezed by a lack of funding. Most museums can’t afford to take the risk of hosting a large-scale exhibition by a little-known artist, and certainly not on a regular basis. When we talk about the representation of women artists, or the broader conversation about increasing diversity and equity in the arts, we’re often speaking in an echo chamber. Big museum exhibitions must appeal to huge numbers of visitors to break even, many of them people who don’t read art magazines or care who wrote the catalogue. Instead, they’re after a stimulating day out looking at art that moves them, and perhaps the clout of having seen an exhibition that everyone is talking about. The competing demands on curators to both maximise ticket sales and increase diversity and equity means that an artist like Af Klint, who is proven to draw crowds, is a gold mine.

As we get deeper into our current wave of feminist art history,  a few exhibitions taking a more complex, and less trendy, approach to telling new stories about women artists have emerged, like Tate Britain’s recent ‘Now You See Us,’ which included dozens of artists who are completely unknown to most people, or Charleston’s ‘Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece,’ which shared the fascinating and previously unknown story of the way these two women collaborated. But while both these exhibitions received critical acclaim, they still weren’t drivers of ticket sales the way a blockbuster name would be.

In London, where I live, you can currently see exhibitions of Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, and two separate shows on Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. The tendency of museums to host exhibitions focused on the most famous, recognizable names is obviously not limited to women. So, while I’m always eager to see more innovative exhibitions that tell new stories or question existing assumptions, it’s undeniable that Hilma af Klint fever makes a very productive dent in the historic erasure of women artists. Her current moment of fame may be a response to marketing trends and a flattening of cultural taste, but it's still one more step in the direction of a more equitable history of art.

‘Hilma Af Klint’ is on view at Guggenheim Bilbao until 2 February 2025

_{Main image: Hilma af Klint, The Evolution, The WUS/Seven-Pointed Star Series, Group VI, No. 16, 1908, oil on canvas, 1 × 1.3 m. Courtesy: © The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm}