Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future Details
Review The project of Hilma af Klint and her female colleagues was the result of great maturity, of confidence and collective efforts, performed both in work and in life. (Women's Art Journal)The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like news that is new again. (Peter Schjedahl New Yorker)The current celebration of af Klint's paintings suggests the primacy of visual communication should be backdated. The retrospective also underscores the important role that women played in its emergence. (Nancy Princenthal Art in America)The Guggenheim Museum offers a revisionary chapter about the start of modern abstraction in its current headliner, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” introducing works that this Swedish artist and mystic made in 1906-7. (Roberta Smith New York Times)af Klint's contribution, arrayed here in all its abundant originality, threatens to reduce to a footnote the mostly male history of esoteric abstraction. (Artforum)Af Klint's ascendancy feels inevitable: She could be viewed as a heroine for our current moment, an artist who rejected commercial success, resisted the pull of self-publicity, and challanged the myth of individual authorship. (Julia Bryan-Wilson Bookforum)The concentrated spirituality- egoless consciousness- that is delivered by the best pictures here, so fresh that they might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now, feels like news that is new again. (Peter Schjeldahl New Yorker)The mother of all revisionist shows of Modernism. (New York Times)Profoundly moving. ... It is as though, in our apocalyptic time, we need af Klint’s work now more than ever, and the purity of vision and intent it represents. (Ann McCoy Brooklyn Rail)A week after I saw [af Klint's paintings], their pulsing loveliness remains undimmed in my mind, like a self-replenishing sense memory of summer. (Sebastian Smee Washington Post) Read more About the Author Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. In 2014, she was a fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership.Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her postdoctorate project funded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, brings together medieval art and the modern avant-garde, focusing on the reception of and the construction of medieval art in modernity, specifically in Surrealism.Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Stockholm University. He was the Co-Curator of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Birnbaum has held the position of Rector at the Städelschule Fine Arts Academy at Frankfurt at Maim in Germany and has also actively written for Art Forum.Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art. She has written extensively on 20th- century and contemporary art. Fer has also curated numerous exhibitions, such as the recent show of Gabriel Orozco at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013.Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. She most recently organized the exhibitions Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014) and The Avant-Gardes of Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon, and Their Contemporaries (2013). She has a Ph.D. in art history, with a focus on 19th-century European art.David Max Horowitz is Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.Andrea Kollnitz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on German and Austrian Modernism in Swedish Art Criticism. Read more
Reviews
This hard bound book is an excellent historical work on the art of Hilma af Klint now on view at the Guggenheim. True to every exhibition and publication presented by the Guggenheim, this is "top notch". This book is rich with detail both in the color reproductions of Hilma af Klint's art and the scholastic writing that elucidate the historical significance of this exhibition. There is a perfect companion book, HILMA AF KLINT Notes and Methods, that I got at the same time as the Guggenheim publication. What I magnificent artist being honored in these two newly published books.
