The Guggenheim Museum's provocative new show is Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. First, a précis. Between 1906 and 1915, the Stockholm-based af Klint (1862–1944) created 193 paintings and works on paper to decorate a never-built multilevel temple. It's religious art. They're mostly abstract, with swirling, spiraling, and geometric forms painted in vivid colors.
These works, some ten feet tall, are a series conceived as a progression, more or less a storyline on the course of the soul, so at the Guggenheim we have a total program. So vast a conception and execution in itself is extraordinary. It has parallels in complex religious spaces decorated at the same time by the same artist or designed by a single art impresario and implemented by artists under his or her direction. Think Giotto's Arena Chapel, where everything is fixed and each vignette is part of a unified narrative.
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