hilma af klint: a biography

before reading this book, i knew nothing about hilma af klint. i missed the show at the guggenheim, and while i hungrily looked at images from afar, i never sat down and searched for information about her personally. i'm glad now that i didn't, because it meant that i went into julia voss's biography of her (translated by anne posten) (affiliate link) completely blind. because i have a degree in art history, i have at least some small background in most major artists. and as much as i love learning about a person by whom very little art remains, it was exciting to learn about someone entirely new who left SO MUCH art.



i really appreciated both the author and translator's notes at the beginning of the book, because they highlighted 1) what a monumental undertaking this book was, and 2) how scholarship about af klint is still very much a developing field. voss went into the project with assumptions based on how years of historians had interpreted af klint's life: as very isolated, her work primarily inspired by this one esotericist. after accessing af klint's archive, voss quickly realized that wasn't the case at all and started over from zero. "I learned Swedish and made this biography my primary occupation," she says laconically. posten notes that in the time between the biography being released in german and the publishing of the english translation, new information has emerged, which she and voss collaborated on incorporating into the book. if you're the sort of person who finds research exciting, all of this will be very thrilling for you.

( hilma af klint left behind a copious archive, which you would think would be a researcher's dream )