Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Despite her many notebooks, she left behind no personal diaries, and we know little about her thoughts beyond her art and spiritualist interests. Voss does a good job of filling in the gaps with detective work and speculation, although in places the conditional does a lot of heavy lifting. Her biggest achievement is to establish a context for af Klint’s work, upending popular assumptions that she was a mystical outsider who floated free of her historical and social milieu.”
* London Review of Books *
“Voss has produced an extraordinarily rich portrait of a radically unusual, but not eccentric, modern artist. . . . Voss’s biography makes af Klint so much more than an artist simply to be inserted into a more gender-inclusive canon of ‘abstract art’. It saves af Klint from art history while sending us deeper into her world. Reading it was a revelation, and it has changed my understanding of the artist, the woman, and her times.”
* Literary Review *
"It would be easy, in our rationalist times, to think of af Klint as a kook. One of the many praiseworthy things about Julia Voss’s excellent new biography of her is that it does not even entertain the thought."
* Times Literary Supplement *
"The woman who emerges in Voss's exacting portrait is strong-willed, purposeful, and confident—ahead of her time and perhaps ours too. What's interesting, the author suggests, isn't that af Klint, in a century awash with spiritual fads, heard voices. It's that, as far as her genius was concerned, those voices weren't wrong." * Observer (UK) *
"Julia Voss’s biography of Af Klint is the first full life of the painter and shows her growth from working in the traditional genres of portraiture and landscape into far more radical fields. She explains not just Af Klint’s beliefs, but her relations with the occultist and reformer Rudolf Steiner and her efforts to exhibit some of her work to fellow spiritualists. Af Klint thought of her paintings as dictations from the astral plane. Voss’s scholarship shows how remarkable the woman was who transcribed them."
* New Statesman *
"[A] pioneering biography. . . . Voss marshals as much of the personal detail as the painter’s surviving notes would divulge and has filled out an account that will surely remain the standard for years to come." * Art Newspaper *
"Julia Voss’s dazzling and timely biography of Hilma af Klint explores not only the life of this extraordinary artist but highlights the important contributions of both mysticism and women artists—so long excluded from the art-historical canon—to the story of modern art. I couldn’t put it down."
-- Jennifer Higgie
"Julia Voss’s biography is
the indispensable resource for anyone interested in pioneering artist Hilma af Klint. With her thousands of pages of notebooks in Swedish, af Klint remained beyond the reach of scholars without the ability to read Swedish. By mastering Swedish and doing superb archival research on af Klint and the women around her, Voss reveals a Hilma we did not know, including a gender fluidity that underlies many of her motifs. Voss has also recovered the cosmopolitan culture of Stockholm in this period—from art exhibitions and science expositions to the robust interest in spiritualism that parallels that in Berlin. Written in lively prose, Voss’s book is a pleasure to read in the translation by Anne Posten."
-- Linda Henderson, University of Texas at Austin
"A fascinating book on the exhilarating life and work of Hilma af Klint. Julia Voss has been instrumental in bringing her story to the forefront and tells her life with such sensitivity, generosity, and insight. A must read!"
-- Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art without Men
"As well as shining a light on an exceptional talent, this book provides a rare window on the struggle of a woman artist to find a new language in a world where idealism was fading fast." * World of Interiors *
"A rich and illuminating portrait of the artist." * Air Mail *
Table of ContentsA Note from the Translator
Chronology
Introduction
Part I. Family, Childhood, and Youth in Stockholm
1. Mary Wollstonecraft Visits Sweden and Is Upset
2. Birth
3. School and Religion
4. An Exhibition in London
5. Bertha Valerius and the Dead
6. Kerstin Cardon’s Painting School
7. Hermina’s Death
Part II. Study at the Academy and Independent Work
1. The Academy
2. Guardian Spirit
3. The Prize
4. Anna Cassel
5. “My First Experience with Mediumship”
6. The Young Artist
7. Dr. Helleday and Love
8. The Five
9. Art from the Orient
10. Rose and Cross
11. At the Veterinary Institute
12. Children’s Books and Decorative Art
13. Italy
14. Genius
Part III. Paintings for the Temple
1. Old Images
2. Revolution
3. Primordial Chaos
4. Eros
5. Medium
6. The Ten Largest
7. “I Was the Instrument of Ecstasy”
8. Rudolf Steiner Visits Sweden
9. The Young Ones
10. Sigrid Lancén
11. The Association of Swedish Women Artists
12. Frank Heyman
13. Island Kingdom in Mälaren
14. First Exhibition with the Theosophists
15. Tree of Knowledge
16. The Kiss
17. Singoalla
18. The Baltic Exhibition
19. War
20. Saint George
21. Kandinsky in Stockholm
22. Parsifal and Atom
23. The Studio on Munsö
24. Thomasine Anderson
Part IV. Dornach, Amsterdam, and London
1. The Suitcase Museum
2. Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens
3. First Visit to the Goetheanum
4. “Belongs to the Astral World According to Doctor Steiner”
5. The Fire and the Letter
6. Amsterdam
7. London
Part V. Temple and Later Years
1. The Temple and the Spiral
2. +x
3. A Temple in New York
4. The London Blitz
5. Future Woman
6. National Socialism
7. Lecture in Stockholm
8. “Degenerate” Art in Germany and Abstract Art in New York
9. Tyra Kleen and the Plan for a Museum
10 Last Months
11. Conclusion
Afterword by Johan af Klint
Afterword by Ulrika af Klint
Appendix 1. Hilma af Klint’s Travels and Places of Residence
Appendix 2. The Library of Hilma af Klint
Acknowledgments
Illustration Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
