Hilma af Klint's First Solo France Show Opens at Grand Palais
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- Grand Palais and the Pompidou Centre are co-organizing af Klint's first solo exhibition in France (May 6–August 30), showcasing her magnum opus "Paintings for the Temple" (1906–1915), which she produced as a member of the spiritualist group "the Five" within the Theosophical Society.
- Hilma af Klint is now credited with creating abstract art decades before Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich, with her international breakthrough coming at a 2013 Stockholm show of 230 works and a 2016 Serpentine-to-Guggenheim exhibition that drew roughly 600,000 visitors.
- Af Klint ordered more than 1,200 paintings and 126 illustrated sketchbooks sealed for 20 years after her 1944 death and never sold, believing the world was not ready for the spiritual works; curator Pascal Rousseau said she believed in angels, reincarnation, and messages from other worlds.
- MoMA excluded af Klint from a 2012 abstract art exhibition, a snub art expert Caroline Levisse called "crazy"; a biography was published in 2022 and she was the subject of an Oscar-nominated film the following year.
- The exhibition includes "The Ten Largest," a series of fragile paintings on paper mounted on canvas, each measuring around 3.3 x 2.4 metres, which Rousseau warned may not be shown again for years due to restoration needs.
Why it matters: The Grand Palais show formalizes af Klint's place as the true pioneer of abstraction, forcing art history to reckon with how women artists were systematically excluded from foundational movements — a reckoning curator Pascal Rousseau explicitly frames as part of an "international re-evaluation." With "The Ten Largest" potentially off-view for years, this may be the last chance for the public to see her most ambitious works intact.
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