Why It Matters

Af Klint's work upends the tidy story of how abstract art began:

• She was painting abstract compositions years before Kandinsky's first abstractions
• The 193 Paintings for the Temple form one of modern art's most ambitious single projects
• She fused spiritualism and modernism, a mix that still unsettles many historians
• She did not fail to win fame — she chose to skip it, trusting a later audience to catch up