Hilma af Klint. The Paintings for the Temple (1906–1915)

“We can only hope that the art of this remarkable woman painter will one day be shown in Paris,” we wrote when the Guggenheim Museum in New York devoted a memorable retrospective to Hilma af Klint in 2018 (see the article). It would take almost another decade, and several further European initiatives, including a monographic exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and a thematic exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (see the article), before that wish was fulfilled. Initiated by the Grand Palais and the Centre Pompidou, and curated by Pascal Rousseau, Professor of Contemporary Art History at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and a specialist in the avant-garde, Paris is at last hosting a major monographic exhibition, although it is by no means a retrospective. Only one decade of the Swedish artist’s career is presented: the cycle of the Temple Paintings, executed between 1906 and 1915, in two phases separated by a four-year interruption between 1908 and 1912. This central and prolific body of work marked a turning point in the artist’s career when, in her forties, she embarked — supposedly under the dictation of “Higher Beings” — on a mediumistic production that ran parallel to her botanical illustrations and her highly successful academic portraits and landscapes, a body of work that would establish her as one of the pioneers of abstraction.

We learn nothing here about her conventional work, nor about the later series Parsifal, The Atom, the geometric series, or the late watercolours. This omission is compensated by the already substantial corpus assembled for the occasion: more than…