MoMA Curator Jodi Hoptman on Never-Before-Seen Hilma af Klint Botanical Drawings

The discovery of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint  (1862–1944) took the art world by storm with the blockbuster exhibition “Paintings for the Future,” featuring her 1906 canvases, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2019. These bold and colorful paintings predate any efforts towards abstraction made famous by such male Modernists as Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. Perhaps even more striking is af Klint’s claims to have communicated wi