A Private Temple for Public Art? Hilma af Klint’s Legacy Hangs in the Balance

Art thrives in the liminal: that fugitive zone where the veil thins and something ineffable shimmers just beneath the surface. Few have captured that shimmering better than Hilma af Klint, the Swedish mystic who whispered visions into existence decades before Kandinsky claimed the crown of abstraction. Her works don’t depict the spiritual—they are the spiritual.

But now, her art—those radiant spirals, cosmic geometries, and esoteric diagrams—is at the center of a new kind of séance: a battle not of spirits but of control.

Who Gets to See the Invisible?

Enter Erik af Klint, great-grandnephew and chairman of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, bearing a torch not of illumination, but restriction. His proposal? Withdraw her art from public exhibitions. End future museum loans. Reserve the experience for “spiritual seekers” alone.

“When a religion ends up in a museum, it is dead,”
he intoned, as if sealing a crypt.

To Erik, her canvases—once instructions for communion with higher realms—have been flattened by mass appeal. Commercialization, he argues, is desecration. And museums? Mausoleums. But this vision, cloaked in reverence, may choke the very light Hilma spent her life conjuring.

The Commercial Afterlife

This isn’t Erik’s first clash with the art world. In 2023, he vehemently opposed a high-profile partnership between the Foundation and David Zwirner, one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. The concern: that af Klint’s luminous legacy would be bartered, packaged, and sold like perfume or NFTs.

But this time, the stakes are existential. With talks of halting exhibitions—even as MoMA prepares a major show—the Foundation’s mission seems poised to invert: not to share her art with the world, but to sanctify it out of reach.

A Spiritual Vanguard, Buried Again?

Let’s not forget: Hilma af Klint worked in secrecy. Her notes requested that her art not be seen for twenty years after her death. She believed her creations were dictated by higher beings, and that humanity wasn’t yet ready. Irony abounds, then, that now—just as the world begins to grasp her genius—her heirs would return the work to silence.

Yet isn’t visibility the final vindication? Her 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim, Paintings for the Future, drew more than 600,000 visitors, eclipsing blockbuster shows by Picasso and Pollock. Her influence now threads through art magazines, fashion, even exclusive art exhibitions across the globe.

Julia Voss, German critic and af Klint’s biographer, warns that limiting access could be “devastating…an unimaginable loss.” Who, she asks, gets to define a “spiritual seeker”? Is a wide-eyed teenager wandering MoMA not as worthy as a seasoned theosophist?

The Ghost in the Gallery

Art lives in paradox. It is both private revelation and public ritual. And while museums sometimes mummify, they also magnify. They give context, conservation, and cultural anchoring. Without them, af Klint might still be a footnote, her paintings sleeping in Stockholm.

To withdraw her work now is not to protect it—it is to unmake it. An artist’s legacy, once shown, cannot be reburied without consequence. Ownership becomes theology. And theology, when institutionalized, often forgets the ecstasy that birthed it.

The Artist vs. the Afterlife

Is it possible to honor both Hilma’s mysticism and her monumental contribution to art history? To allow reverence without regression? Museums, collectors, and critics are scrambling to answer that question—not just for af Klint, but for every artist whose work flirts with the divine.

The court case trudges on. So does the debate. But somewhere—maybe in a studio in Brooklyn, or a gallery in Berlin—a young artist touches a canvas, thinking not of Kandinsky, but of Hilma. Not of doctrine, but of wonder.