Hilma af Klint - Notes and Methods

Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods / Lovely 288-page hardcover edited by Christine Burgin / ISBN 9780226591933 / University of Chicago Press

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“The remarkable, welcome thing about Burgin’s Notes and Methods is that it lets af Klint speak for herself. . . . In book form, unified in size and material, and made intimate and flippable, the paintings reveal themselves differently than they do when hung on a wall and interrupted by architecture: they take on an overall rhythm, and the shifts between abstraction and figuration become fluid rather than clunky.”― New York Review of Books

At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian. Many consider her the first trained artist to create abstract paintings. With Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, we get to experience the arc of af Klint’s artistic investigation in her own words.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.