The plot has thickened in a power struggle over Hilma af Klint‘s legacy, with her great-grandnephew, the chair of the late artist’s eponymous foundation, now seeking to keep her paintings in a private temple accessible only to spiritual seekers.
Af Klint’s great-grandnephew, Erik af Klint, publicly opposed to an agreement between the Hilma af Klint Foundation and mega-gallerist David Zwirner last year, saying that the deal went against the artist’s own wishes not to commercialize her art. The partnership is currently stalled, and the legal dispute is still ongoing, with Erik filing a new petition with the Stockholm District Court.
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His stance opposing recent exhibitions and commercial partnerships is not shared by the foundation’s trustees, however, and that has caused even greater friction between them, resulting in new legal filings. He claimed that his stance is “not about what I want, it’s about what the statutes of the foundation dictate,” as he told the Swedish press on Monday.
Internal tension is hardly new for the af Klint foundation, which has been embroiled in legal battles since it was set up nearly 30 years ago. In recent years, there have been a number of cases and accusations of attempting to profit from af Klint’s rise to fame.
This time, the foundation’s statute in question dictates that the board of directors must “keep the work available to those who seek spiritual knowledge or who can contribute to fulfilling the mission that Hilma af Klint’s spiritual principals intended.”
In an effort to follow this rule, Erik is reportedly trying to end all future exhibitions of the work, with access restricted only to “spiritual seekers.” He also alleges that no previous institutional promotion of af Klint’s paintings should have been allowed.
”When a religion ends up in a museum, it is dead,” Erik told Dagens Nyheter. “This is not meant to be public. The exhibitions, the books, the pictures, the carpets, the socks—none of that is allowed.”
In recent years, however, her work has been shown in a number of high-profile exhibitions at such institutions as Tate Modern in London and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao, with another slated to open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in May.
For her part, af Klint identified more as a mystic than as an artist, at times claiming to channel the astral plane with her work.
Some scholars who have studied af Klint have denounced Erik’s proposition. ”It would be an unimaginable loss. It would lead to major protests across the art world,” German art critic and af Klint biographer Julia Voss told Dagens Nyheter. “How would one even reasonably determine who is a ‘spiritual seeker’ or not?”
Voss added that she does not believe that other family members share the same values: “After all, their members have themselves, for many years, been committed to Hilma af Klint’s art being exhibited.”