Photograph: Alamy
The voices in her head told Hilma af Klint she would be a great artist. They weren’t wrong. Born in 1862, she was unusual from an early age. Growing up in austere Lutheran Sweden, Af Klint studied art at university: a rare feat for a woman. Even less common was her insistence on practising as a professional after graduation. In the face of a society – and an art world – riddled with extreme misogyny, a quiet, conventional career in portraiture seemed the best she could hope for. But then, as Julia Voss reveals in her new biography, Af Klint started to receive messages from another world – and her life in this one was irrevocably altered.
In 1906, she began the construction of an extraordinary series of 1,200 paintings, which she continued until her death in 1944. Reproduced in colour in Voss’s book, the work is still novel, a century or so on. Which wouldn’t have surprised Af Klint. Her visions told her that she was making art for people of the future.
