Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Who Really Invented Abstract Art

In 1914, Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky showed work in the same building in Malmö. He had five paintings in the grand galleries and a reviewer comparing them to bacteria. She had one conventional landscape in a women's section near the fire exit, and ten enormous abstract canvases she'd finished seven years earlier sitting somewhere else entirely.A century later, that coincidence has turned into a contest: the Swedish mystic who got there first, and the well-connected man who took the credit. But af Klint never used the word abstract, Kandinsky spent years insisting he wasn't ready to abandon the visible world, and nobody in 1912 could agree on what to call any of it.This episode is about what af Klint actually made and who helped her make it, the twenty years she spent trying to find an audience for it, and why the story of a new idea always seems to need one name attached. Featuring séances in Stockholm, a museum that fit inside a suitcase, a conference in London where almost nothing happened, and the question of what we close off when we hand her the title we took from him.Buy Me a Coffee: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://buymeacoffee.com/versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Me on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@versopod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email me: [email protected] Reading:Bashkoff, Tracey, ed. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2018.Dickerman, Leah, ed. Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012.Voss, Julia. Hilma af Klint: A Biography. Translated by Anne Posten. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.Voss, Julia, and Daniel Birnbaum. Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future. New York: David Zwirner Books, 2026