Hilma!

This was the first of Hilma af Klint's 1907 Paintings for the Temple to transfix my friend J and me at the Guggenheim today. At the behest of spirits who spoke to a group of five women of whom she was one, the classically trained and gifted af Klint produced strange and stirring series of images which scoop the "fathers of abstraction." She'd insisted they not be shown for a quarter century after her death and it took even longer for them to be rediscovered. They offer, the curators note, "a rare opportunity to rethink art history." They're also trippy! The giant paintings which start the show depict the stages of the life cycle (many of her works are in series or cycles, offering journeys of evolution and transformation); the one above is the last of those showing adulthood.