we've been featuring her here on Open Culture since 2017, first in the context of whether she counts as the first abstract painter. Just a few years before that, practically no one in the world had ever heard her name, let alone beheld any of her more than 1,200 paintings and drawings. In fact, it was only in 2013, with the show Hilma af Klint - A Pioneer of Abstraction at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, that she first became publicly known.
Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, brightly colored forms seemed to swirl and spread. It was February, 2013, the evening of the opening of "Hilma af Klint-A Pioneer of Abstraction" at Moderna Museet, in Stockholm. Among the attendees was Kurt Almqvist, a white-haired man in his mid-fifties. Though Almqvist considered himself something of an expert on fin-de-siècle intellectual history-he had written a book on Carl Jung-he was seeing af Klint's paintings for the first time.