Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint

Two large Klint canvases

Three great abstract artists died in 1944, this revelatory German documentary from 2019 tells us. Two of them haunt the gift shops of the world’s museums of modern art: Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. The third deserves to be in there with them, according to Beyond the Visible – Hilma af Klint (Jenseits des Sichtbaren – Hilma af Klint) – which goes on to make an even bigger claim. That this obscure artist working in relative isolation in Sweden was not just one of the greats but the very first abstract artist, and so one of the major figures in 20th century painting. Piet and Wassily need to budge up. When MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction … Read more