POSSESSION

Who owns Hilma af Klint's legacy—the art world or spiritual seekers?

- BY ALICE GREGORY

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.

Almqvist, the C.E.O. of a nonprofit foundation that had financed a seminar to accompany the exhibition, had been to other shows at Moderna Museet—“smashed bottles and things like that,” as he put it to me—and found the frank beauty of af Klint’s work a relief. Many of the canvasses, painted a century earlier, were enormous; some towered over his head. Odd but familiar shapes pulsed from their surfaces: eggs, petals, celestial bodies. Almqvist was standing in front of a series of small geometric paintings of ornamented circles—some looked like beach balls, others a bit like lunar phases—when he was approached by a flummoxed-looking woman. Did he understand them? she wondered. Could he explain them to her?

“I really don’t know anything,” Almqvist recalled telling her. “I suppose it’s all symbolic for . . . something. Perhaps it has to do with religion?”

In the following months, the exhibition drew a record number of visitors. There were the usual suspects—art students, well-read retirees in statement eyewear—but also, in the diplomatic words of one museum employee, “other kinds of people.” Diaphanously costumed dancers. Self-described psychics. A Finnish man came every day for weeks, stayed until closing, and spoke to no one. The show proved especially popular with women, many of whom reported feeling a mysterious warmth spread through their lower bodies, accompanied by an irrepressible urge to weep.