I was blown away last evening watching this documentary movie from our library. I have zero background education in art history, and had never heard of this woman. Apparently I am not alone in that regard. After watching the movie I went to the Wikipedia entry, where it was explained that "The family surname is 'af Klint', af being a Swedish nobiliary particle." She was of noble (but not royal) lineage, born in a palace and educated at the Royal Academy in the fine arts, beginning with landscape paintings and botanical illustrations:
When she was about twenty years old, something happened that altered her perception of the world. Details at the link and in the movie, but basically by the time she was 40, she began pouring out an immense number of totally abstract paintings, such as these (cellphone camera images from the movie on my TV):
"The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke."
And the final startling fact is that she was creating this art in the early 1900s (before WWI, for reference, and at the time of my grandparents), and that there was no precedent for this style of artistic expression. Most textbooks date the onset of abstract art to the works of Kandinsky and Mondrian, who followed (?imitated) her. This lady's paintings were never exhibited in her lifetime because she was a woman and because the style and content of the images were considered "improper" at that time.
Enough from me. You already know whether you want to see this movie or not. It is not currently streaming on any service that I am aware of. I found the DVD in our South Central Wisconsin library system (a huge system that normally has dozens or hundreds of copies of popular movies had only 2 copies of this one). It can also be ordered directly from Kino Lorber.
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