THE ART AND LIFE OF HILMA AF KLINT

This Swedish import introduces young readers to a long-obscure spiritualist painter who has only recently been recognized as a pioneering abstract artist.

In language that underscores the mystical character of Hilma's art (“According to the positions of the stars and planets on the day that she was born, Hilma’s life would be filled with magic and mystery”), Hillström traces her Swedish subject’s nearly lifelong devotion to spiritualism and theosophy, which led her to create nonrepresentational “maps of the spirit world” in paint well before (the author notes) Wassily Kandinsky proudly proclaimed himself the inventor of abstraction. As she was repeatedly brushed off by leading theosophist Rudolph Steiner and, just before dying in 1944, directed that her work be packed away, not to be looked at until 20 years after her death, she long remained little known. But Eklund’s appropriately pale, ghostly scenes of an otherworldly figure practicing her art or gazing intensely inward are interspersed with 15 reproductions of actual works (several with descriptive commentary), an interpretive chart of select symbols and colors in af Klint’s art, and a tantalizing suggestion that viewers may find meanings of their own in their mysterious shapes and spaces. Human figures have skin the white of the page. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Focused less on this world than the other but a significant contribution to the history of women artists.