Hilma AF Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future

An important exploration of the lives and art of Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, two pioneers of abstraction at the turn of the twentieth century

The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint is one of the art world’s major rediscoveries of the twenty-first century. While the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky has famously been credited for creating the first abstract artwork, this designation has been called into question with the resurfacing and renewed study of af Klint’s non-figurative paintings. In this captivating volume, the af Klint biographer and scholar Julia Voss and the curator and writer Daniel Birnbaum convey in depth the two artists’ nearly parallel development away from figuration and into the liberating, mystical vision of art.

In this engrossing account of the affinities and divergences between af Klint and Kandinsky’s lives and work, supported by more than 100 illustrations, we are invited to witness the conditions in which the art world was forever changed.

Julia Voss is an art historian, art critic, and curator who was the visual arts editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for ten years. She learned Swedish in order to write the best-selling Hilma af Klint: A Biography (2022), which has been translated into four languages and was short-listed for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

Daniel Birnbaum is a writer and curator based in London and Stockholm. He is professor of philosophy at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the artistic director of Acute Art in London, a laboratory exploring art and technology.