Hilma af Klint’s Art Belongs in Museums, Not a Temple

It’s tough to remember there was a time when museums didn’t show Hilma af Klint’s work widely, when she wasn’t the subject of retrospectives and biopics and merchandise. And it remains tougher still to remember that there very nearly was an entire museum for af Klint’s work during her lifetime.

In 1940, the Swedish painter deepened her friendship with Tyra Kleen, a Symbolist artist whose rich life led her from Sweden to Java and back again. Kleen proposed a collaboration and even visited af Klint’s studio. Af Klint found the proposition off-putting: “You wish to work together, or more accurately, to combine our work?” she wrote to Kleen. “In what way and how?”

Kleen’s answer arrived in 1943, when she proposed a building for af Klint’s work to be created in the Swedish town of Sigtuna. Using funding from her father’s foundation, this space would be part of an educational center facilitated by the Lutheran Church. It would house af Klint’s bewitching abstractions, which conjure realms beyond our own using cryptic symbols, and only those works, with nothing else on view. Here’s Kleen, writing to af Klint: “You wish your work to be arranged as a museum. There was never a question of other artworks occupying the same building.”

It was not to be. “Hilma did not understand” Kleen’s project, “or wish to,” as art historian Julia Voss writes in her 2020 af Klint biography. Af Klint feared that the Lutheran Church’s sponsorship could be “problematic,” given that her work had more to do with Anthroposophy, not Protestantism, and fretted about whether her paintings “may be more of a burden than a pleasure for the bishop.” The inner voices she heard concurred. The Sigtuna museum never happened.

And so, 82 years on, we still have no af Klint museum. Most of her works are not held by institutions, even as retrospectives for her continue to draw great interest, with a big one having just closed at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain last month. Now, her family seems interested in keeping it that way—and potentially even making the situation worse.

On Monday, speaking to the Swedish publication Dagens Nyheter, Erik af Klint, the artist’s great-grandnephew and the chairman of her foundation, suggested that exhibitions like the Guggenheim Bilbao one may soon cease altogether. “When a religion ends up in a museum, it is dead,” he said. “This is not meant to be public.”

He instead claimed that her art should really be shown in a place enterable only by “spiritual seekers,” since that was what af Klint would’ve wanted. “It is a message from the spirit world,” Erik said. “Period.”

Voss, also speaking to Dagens Nyheter, said that the notion of a “spiritual seeker” is itself squishy and even claimed that af Klint herself never intended for any of this. She warned that “major protests” would follow. Voss is the world’s greatest af Klint expert at this point, so it’s worth heeding her words.

Consider what a loss it would be to not see af Klint’s work in the Guggenheims and Moderna Museets of the world. Surveys at both of those institutions have helped situate af Klint within the Western canon, which previously did not count her as a pioneering abstractionist alongside many modernist men of her era, from Pablo Picasso to Kazimir Malevich. If Erik’s wishes come true, it could mean excluding af Klint once more. Nobody should want that—not the art world, not the general public, not historians, not her foundation.

Erik af Klint has previously tried to limit who can buy her art, claiming that Hilma didn’t produce her work for the market. It’s so difficult to buy a work by Hilma af Klint that it’s big news anytime any pieces by her are made available for sale. When the mega-gallery David Zwirner exhibited paintings from her 1913–15 “Tree of Knowledge” series in 2021, it was virtually unprecedented. Glenstone, the private museum of collectors Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales, wisely snatched up the entire show, making that the first institution in the US ever to acquire af Klint’s art.

The possibility of forging an enduring relationship with David Zwirner has roiled the board of the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Last year, Erik af Klint and Johan af Klint, the artist’s great nephew, raised hell over the prospect that such a relationship would lead to the “commercialization” of her art. (Board members resigned in 2023 over the foundation’s approach, and Sweden’s court system has gotten involved.) Zwirner, the eponymous dealer, told the Guardian that the af Klints were “operating against the best interests of Hilma af Klint.”

It’s not hard to see why so few museums own af Klint’s art, then. The Guggenheim, whose New York museum attracted a record-breaking 600,000 visitors to its 2018 retrospective, has no af Klints in its collection. New York’s Museum of Modern Art didn’t either until 2022, when it acquired 47 watercolors depicting plants that will make their MoMA debut this May. If Erik af Klint has his way, few others will ever be allowed to follow in MoMA’s footsteps. The consequences could be dire.

When MoMA opened its rehung and expanded galleries in 2019, it did show an af Klint abstraction (on loan from her foundation) alongside works by Umberto Boccioni, Robert Delaunay, and Diego Rivera. It was a powerful gesture that suggested af Klint was an equal to these juggernauts of the 20th century—that art-historical inclusion for af Klint had fully arrived. But if the descendants’ plan comes to fruition, it could undo all that progress, potentially relegating af Klint to obscurity once more.

Erik af Klint wants to put Hilma’s work in a temple, presumably in reference to a never-realized structure that she began sketching out in 1931. But if he succeeds—and no other board member wants him to, he claims—this will not be a come-all-ye-faithful moment. It will wall out a lot of people who aren’t the “spiritual seekers” he’s looking for, since his criteria are unclear at best and restrictive at worst. And besides, you can still have a spiritual experience seeing an af Klint painting in a museum. I did, anyway, at the Guggenheim’s 2018 retrospective, and I suspect I’m not alone.

“Artists do not want to work in isolation,” wrote artist R. H. Quaytman in an essay on af Klint, whose work she surveyed at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) back in 1989, long before nearly anyone else had done so. She’s right. Most artists—or, at least, most artists I’ve met—eagerly await viewers for their work. Sometimes, those viewers come during their lifetime. Other times, as in the case of af Klint, they arrive posthumously. But better late than never.

Af Klint finally has her audience, and her great-grandnephew’s propositions would only do harm to it. Af Klint’s art is for everyone. It should remain that way.