NEW YORK — For me, the 2018-19 art season will always belong to Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). I say this simply as a measure of the psychic and historical shift caused by the Guggenheim Museum’s extraordinary full-dress retrospective of her nearly 40-year career.
The exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” demonstrated that the genesis story of Western modernist abstraction was not an all-male adventure conducted in the mid-1910s by the revered triumvirate of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. A woman had gotten there first, largely on her own.
Important revisionism, rediscoveries and resurrections concerning female artists have taken place across the history of art since the 1970s. But wresting early abstraction from exclusively male hands was a different order of magnitude.
Before the show opened, the Guggenheim doubled the length of its run from three to six months, imbuing the season with an exhilarating sense of art historical justice. No wonder it has been one of the museum’s most attended exhibitions. (The museum will be open until 8 p.m. April 19-23, the day the exhibit closes.)
The show’s biggest reveal came early, in the museum’s High Gallery: a series of 10 paintings from 1907, seven or eight years before the above-mentioned masters. Measuring about 10 feet high and named “The Ten Largest,” they were unprecedented in scale, palette and biomorphic design. They traced the life cycle from childhood through youth and adulthood to old age with two paintings per phase except adulthood, which, as only seems fair, merited four. The earlier paintings in this series received most of the attention, including “No. 7, Adulthood,” whose dominant deep yellow on lavender-pink floral motif appeared on the catalog’s cover.
But “No. 9, Old Age” will always stay with me as the most liberated of “The Ten.” I especially love the messy pile of dark pink brushwork at its bottom edge. Containing two pairs of matching sprout-like motifs, this area functions as fertile soil for the three pairs of increasingly complex geometric outlines that rise above it, culminating in two elaborate rose-window-like circles. Touchingly, these crisp linear elements are cosseted by soft brushwork, especially by the grid of pink and white cloudlike blocks across the middle.
I always think back to “No. 9, Old Age” at the show’s end, while looking at the small wet-on-wet watercolors rife with clouds, splashes, waves and wisps of watery color that af Klint made toward the end of her life. Despite their modesty, they are in some ways the most radical paintings in the show. At the time, af Klint was living and working in increasingly reduced circumstances. They make you wonder what she might have done had she had access to the large sheets of paper basic to “The Ten Largest.” Hello, Helen Frankenthaler.
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Exhibit Information
“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” runs through April 23 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; 212-423-3500, guggenheim.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.