Lost and Found

Af Klint died in 1944, and her paintings sat in storage for decades. Serious interest only began in the 1980s, when scholars started studying what she had left.

Her first big retrospective came in 2013 in Stockholm. Then her 2018 show in New York drew over half a million visitors — the best-attended exhibition in that museum's history.

What makes her rise so striking is the silence that came before it. For most of the twentieth century, the woman who may have painted the first abstract art was a footnote — known, if at all, as a spiritualist hobbyist.

Her comeback is a reminder: the canon is not fixed. Sometimes the pioneer was there all along, just waiting to be looked at.