IN 2020 THE GERMAN ART CRITIC Julia Voss published the first biography of Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), the Swedish originator of European abstraction. Titled Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen, a difficult-to-translate phrase lifted from af Klint’s writing that I might tentatively render as To Astonish Humanity, Voss’s 571-page account is the result of more than a decade’s research that included teaching herself Swedish. A bestseller in Germany, it is written in Voss’s welcoming, patient, and sparing style. Voss spent countless hours in af Klint’s archive, making her way through tens of thousands of notebook pages and sketches, and the biography bears traces of its author’s long suspension in this mass of journals, papers, and illustrations. Her sentences possess a fascinating exploratory quality, continually pondering the possible meanings of af Klint’s remarkable oeuvre—a corpus of paintings and drawings produced “mediumistically,” sometimes via collaboration with a collective of female friends—which seems to have been at least a decade ahead of modernism elsewhere in Europe. It is likely that the runaway success of Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen has much to do with Voss’s ability to clearly narrativize the archival documents in question, placing them in dialogue with finished artworks, even as she deftly guides the reader into open-ended reflection regarding the larger import of the traces af Klint left of her spiritually rigorous practice.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.