Review Essay
Hilma af Klint and the Need for Historical Revision
Janice McNab
The Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, Netherlands
HILMA AF KLINT: SEEING IS BELIEVING
Edited by Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage Stockholm:
Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2020
Pp. 152. CLOTH, $35.00.
HILMA AF KLINT: NOTES AND METHODS
Edited by Christine Burgin. CHICAGO, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 2018.
Pp. 288. Cloth, $31.25.
HILMA AF KLINT: VISIONARY
Edited by Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage Stockholm:
Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2020
Pp. 124. Cloth, $31.72.
HILMA AF KLINT: ARTIST, RESEARCHER, MEDIUM
Edited by Iris Müller-­Westermann and Milena Høgsberg.
Moderna Museet, Hatje Cantz Berlin, Germany: Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 2020
Pp. 280. Cloth, $42.28.
BEYOND THE VISIBLE: HILMA AF KLINT
Directed by Halina Dyrschka, produced by Eva Illmer and
Halina Dyrschka Zeitgeist Films, 2020. Blue-­ray, $19.99.
The work of Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint (1862–­
1944) was barely exhibited in her own lifetime and failed to be
written into art history. The story of abstraction instead evolved
in relation to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian,
František Kupka, and Kazimir Malevich. A century later, how-
ever, there is a public hunger for af Klint’s paintings that has
surprised even the organizers of recent blockbuster exhibitions,
and full-­color publications and a documentary have followed in
their wake. This review will note which new research material
can be found in each of the four key museum publications and
the documentary film, and discuss how these extraordinary
paintings, and the artist who made them, are being historicized
today.
Religious Studies Review, Vol. 0, No. 0, Month 2021
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***
Hilma af Klint left behind an archive of over 1300 paintings and
sketches, supplemented by a self-­edited 26,000 pages of notes.
These reveal a hard-­working artist fascinated by the intense
pace of scientific discovery going on around her, especially the
invisible world being revealed through electromagnetic and
early atomic research. They also reveal a fascination for how
these scientific findings might entwine with religious belief.
This led the artist toward Theosophy, which combined these
discoveries with a universalist religious ideal and a power
structure designed by and for women. Af Klint’s research, first
into Spiritualism and then Theosophy, throughout her twenties
and thirties, included an automatic drawing practice, many
years before Surrealism validated this as an artistic method
and route to self-­discovery.
It is from this grounded research into the ideas and beliefs
of her time that the artist’s spectacular 1906 transition into ab-
straction was possible. From that point on, her work is dedicated
to the creation of a new artistic language with which to record
her experience of what cannot be seen. This body of paintings
has taken a hundred years to find a ready audience. Af Klint
had no contemporary biographers, and she carefully edited her
own writings shortly before her death. These writings have not
yet been fully studied or translated into English, but what has
been made available so far reveals few day-­to-­day biographic de-
tails; the story of this artist’s life and work is still being written.
Contextualizing af Klint within the art history of the time, there-
fore, means that this history also needs to be rewritten.
Hilma af Klint, Seeing is Believing, edited by Kurt Almqvist
and Louise Belfrage, was published in conjunction with the ex-
hibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, at the Serpentine
Galleries, London in 2016. It includes the first full reproduc-
tion of seven painting series completed between January and
July 1920. These are the last paintings the artist made be-
fore she began studying at Rudolph Steiner’s Goetheanum in
Switzerland. After this point, her paintings become recogniz-
ably influenced by Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric
philosophy positing the existence of a spiritual world acces-
sible through direct human experience. The seven series of
paintings are beautifully reproduced in full-­page glossy color.
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There are also three insightful art-­historical essays by Briony
Fer, David Lomas, and Brandon W. Joseph, which are based on
the exhibition’s lecture series and contextualize the work from
a contemporary viewpoint.
Hilma af Klint, Notes and Methods focuses on af Klint’s
notebooks and works on paper. It is an invaluable research
resource, as these materials are particularly difficult to share
in exhibition format. The book contains the first complete re-
production and translation of The Blue Books, ten volumes in
which af Klint documented the complex series that made up
her pivotal work, The Paintings for the Temple. It also contains
the first reproductions of most of The Atom Series and the art-
ist’s handmade book Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens 1919–­20, as
copied by the artist in 1927, both with translated notes. Letters
and Words pertaining to Works by Hilma af Klint is translated
in its entirety. It is thought that the artist wrote this “code-­
book” to her paintings in the 1930’s. Each chapter of Notes and
Methods is introduced by Modera Museet director Iris Müller-­
Westermann, who also worked on the selection. The notebooks
are extensive, and one hopes that more editions will appear in
future years.
Hilma af Klint, Visionary developed out of seminars held in
conjunction with the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the
Future, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in
2018. The reproduced paintings do not add to what is already
in print, but important notebook pages and other historical
documents appear here for the first time. Five contextualizing
essays by Julia Voss, Tracey Bashkoff, Isaac Lubelsky, Linda
Dalrymple Henderson, and Marco Pasi provide valuable new
research findings.
High production values define Hilma af Klint, Artist
Researcher Medium’s extensive exhibition catalog, which ac-
companies the 2020 exhibition of the same name in Malmo,
Sweden, and is the most recent publication treated in this re-
view. The 1908 Evolution Series and the 1917 Atom Series are
here reproduced in full for the first time, alongside The Ten
Largest, most of The Eros series (both 1907), The Seven Pointed
Star series (1908), a selection from The Swan (1914), The Dove
(1914-­15), Parsifal (1916), and a number of botanical studies. A
detailed biographic time-­line collates most of the known details
of the artist’s life, and there is useful chart recording the dates
and number of works within each serial part of the confusingly
complex Paintings for the Temple. Five essays, by Iris Müller-­
Westermann, Hedvig Martin, Milena Høgsberg & Tim Rudbøg,
Anne Sophie Jørgensen, and Ernst Peter Fischer consider both
individual works and the wider historical period.
Beyond the Visible is a well-­researched documentary over-
view of the artist’s life is pieced together through interviews
with key af Klint scholars, whose findings can also be found in
the above publications. These interviews are interspersed with
selections from the artist’s notebooks and family interviews,
including 2001 archival footage with Ulla af Klint, wife of the
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artist’s nephew Erik, to whom af Klint bequeathed her entire
oeuvre. Erik, in turn, bequeathed the work to his son Johan
af Klint, who is also interviewed. As the artist’s biography re-
mains incomplete, recordings of these first-­ generation and
second-­generation family memories are invaluable.
At one point in Beyond the Visible, a tracking shot follows
Iris Müller-­Westermann into a hi-­tech restoration workshop
where af Klint paintings have been unrolled for the first time
since the artist’s death in 1944. The oeuvre was protected by
the family in its entirety and donated to the foundation they
established for it in 1972. As a condition of the 2013 Moderna
Museet exhibition, the museum agreed to take on the burden
of restoring works that had never been circulated on the art
market. A number of interviewees in this absorbing documen-
tary reflect on the ways this lack of financial traction may have
contributed to the art world’s still limited acknowledgment of
these important paintings.
***
Three of the four books reviewed reproduce significant serial
works for the first time. Many of these paintings are, therefore,
new to the world, and there is still an active debate over which
frames of reference are most useful for approaching them. This
sort of high-­quality image material and notebook translation is,
therefore, essential in supporting the wider scholarship now
needed into the radiant Modernism of a previously ignored
woman artist.
The Artist Was Not a Recluse
The Blue Books reproduced in Notes and Methods look like
the hand-­painted prototypes of a contemporary artist’s web-
site. Black-­and-­white photographs of The Paintings for the
Temple are glued into satchel-­sized notebooks and accompa-
nied by a watercolor of the overall composition and enlarged
inserts of key details. The dedication needed to complete this
work is staggering. The artist has created a portable archive
that both Müller-­Westermann, and af Klint biographer Julia
Voss, in Visionary, argue must have been designed as a trav-
eling presentation tool. Voss has uncovered exhibition pam-
phlets, personal postcards, and other material that trace the
artist’s visits to kindred spirits in the art world, in Dornach,
Amsterdam, and finally London, where some of The Paintings
for the Temple were exhibited as part of the 1928 World
Conference on Spiritual Science. Voss points out that it is
only in a notebook of 1932, and at the age of seventy, that af
Klint decides to gift her work to the future, and to edit her
notebooks in the management of her legacy.
This is the story of a professional artist seeking to share
her work with the world, and they are important findings as
 Religious Studies Review  •  VOLUME 0  •  NUMBER 0  •  Month 2021
they demolish a somewhat misogynistic myth that has grown
up around this work–­–­that Hilma af Klint was a willful and
dreamy recluse who refused to share her work because she
had no idea what she was doing. In his afterword to Seeing is
Believing, however, Daniel Birnbaum sees a “school of af Klint”
developing, though with an unusual hundred-­year delay, and
suggests the key question today is actually not to try to figure
out what the artist thought she was doing, but to focus on what
she actually did—­that is, to consider the cultural value of the
paintings themselves.
Af Klint Was an Artistic Researcher
The Atom Series (1917) reproduced in Artist Researcher Medium
reveals the clear-­headed and systematic approach to artistic
practice that the Blue Books show in relation to the wish to
share her work. Twenty watercolors with handwritten notes re-
veal themselves as the remains of a process of visual thinking
that the artist may have struggled to define in words, but which
we can now appreciate as the systematic unfolding of a set of
formal relationships within a complex and self-­generating set
of artistic conventions. Historian of science Ernst Peter Fischer
finds parallels to this visual thinking in the diagrams of atomic
structures being produced by Neils Bohr at the same time, just
across the Swedish border in Denmark. Such an ongoing visual
exploration, across multiplying serial projects that the artist
understood to be a single unified work, constituted a radical
approach to art-­making that the curators relate to our contem-
porary understanding of artistic research.
In the earlier Seeing is Believing, Briony Fer also saw the
artist assimilating a diagrammatic mode belonging to an indus-
trial or mechanical worldview, before completely refiguring it as
an artistic structuring system. Fer concentrates on the themes
and variations within the 144-­sheet Parsifal series of 1916. She
reads the contingencies of watercolor paint marks and pencil
lines as esthetic possibilities brought out by a set of strict pa-
rameters, revealing the work of a professionally trained artist
absorbing an image-­world her peers were simply not looking at.
Fer argues that it is the way af Klint has researched the
diagram, the “how” of her work rather than the “why,” that de-
fines it as an artistic practice. It is the nature of a diagram to
be abstract and yet representational; it is a way of coding infor-
mation pictorially that is not dependent on naturalism. Fer sug-
gests that af Klint’s early experience as a scientific illustrator
may have suggested this method, which she could then call on
to create diagrams of a visionary process, of an ecstatic, rather
than rationalist, paradigm. Fer thus situates this work within an
ecstatic tradition going back to William Blake, remarking that
both artists necessarily worked within “a complex of available
cultural and artistic forms” from their time. For af Klint, these
forms would have been both scientific and occult diagrams in
3
conjunction with imagery from nineteenth-­century color the-
ory and Theosophist artist Annie Besant’s Thought-­Forms.
A Complex of Available Cultural and Artistic Forms
The four books and one film reviewed here all address the sub-
structure of occultism that ran alongside scientific develop-
ments in the first years of the twentieth century and the ways
both were involved with invisible realities beyond the reach of
the human eye. Atomic and electromagnetic research is shown
to have inspired artists, novelists, and mystics to imagine new
responses to questions of belief that the discovery of a uni-
verse built on invisible forms and vibrations seemed to raise.
Af Klint’s painting is situated within the tumult of this new
thought, and much current research focuses on unfolding the
particular influences that can be traced in relation to it.
Theosophy is explored in relation to women’s liberation, as
on the one hand, it posited that all religions were basically the
same and, on the other hand, that it offered women the opportu-
nity to participate in the rituals and power structures that this
amalgamated version of the world’s theological thought had to
offer. This is essentially an anti-­authoritarian and liberation-
ist worldview, masked as tradition. Anne Sophie Jørgensen, in
Artist Researcher Medium, makes the further point that while
the artist clearly drew from the imagery of the world’s reli-
gions, her work is not in service of any spiritual tradition, even
Theosophy. Echoing both Fer and Birnbaum, Jørgensen asks for
the work to be seen as art, as esthetic presence. This approach
might seem obvious to some readers, but as I discuss below, it is
a key sticking point in its integration into art history.
In Visionary, Linda Dalrymple Henderson notes that af
Klint’s interest in painting as a revelatory practice was some-
thing she shared with the artists, whom history currently
associates with early abstraction: Mondrian, Kandinsky,
Malevich, and Kupka. Henderson traces some of these artists’
shared networks of thought, then focuses on Charles Howard
Hinton’s influential writing on “astral vision,” which imagines
being able to see all sides as well as the inner reality of forms
­simultaneously—­a sort of all-­seeing x-­ray vision unconstrained
by a specific point of perspective.
Hinton is shown to have influenced a number of
Theosophists; Henderson finds Rudolph Steiner quoting Hinton
in lectures from 1905 on. Like the Theosophists, Hinton used
diagrams to illustrate his ideas, especially the “hypercube” or
tesseract. Henderson then discusses af Klint’s use of a simi-
lar diagram throughout The Swan Series. The astral plane that
Hinton describes is an idea af Klint also directly refers to in
many drawings and notes. This astral plane is where af Klint
believed male and female gender identifications might fuse into
one. Although this idea is not pursued further in any of these
volumes, nearly all of the post-­1906 work has some iteration
 Religious Studies Review  •  VOLUME 0  •  NUMBER 0  •  Month 2021
of this deconstruction of gendering through the creation of a
new visual language for lived experience. Af Klint continues to
occasionally include naturalistic body imagery, but her work, in
breaking away from social gendering, was part of a revolution-
ary movement toward the visualization of a post-­gender world
that is also only now finding its audience.
In the film Beyond the Visible, viewers find one flat painting
surface diffusing into a cup of coffee, while another turns into
ripples on a lake. An “inner eye” suggested by an abstract or-
ange screen, the color we see when looking at the sun through
closed eyelids, bleeds into the orange background of The Ten
Largest, Youth. No 4. There is a clear but unvoiced suggestion
of an artist in close visual connection with her world, but who,
in seeking to paint “what lies beneath,” found a way to pro-
cess this input into an esthetic language that had never before
been seen. These ideas are left hanging, but the film’s creative
bridges to rainbows and sunsets remind us of the material
thinking that happens within the act of painting, an expression
of an artist’s embodied esthetic knowledge mingling with direc-
tional thought.
In Visionary, Voss also touches on innate knowledge when
she notes the possible influence of map-­making on af Klint’s
work. Af Klint grew up in a naval family. Her grandfather,
Gustaf, whose portrait hung in the artist’s studio, charted the
seas that surround Sweden. Af Klint’s schooling included map-­
making and astronomy, a history recounted by Johan af Klint,
in Beyond the Visible, as he opens a portfolio of the original sea
maps on the family dining table. Maps, like diagrams, represent
the world with graphic codes independent of naturalism. More
detailed research on this relationship to maps is still needed,
but Voss offers one way forward, noting the way maps of water
also make the invisible visible.
Notes and Methods reproduces rarely seen 1904 medium-
istic drawing experiments made collectively by af Klint and
her four companions in the Spiritualist group De Fem (The
Five). Detailed background to this period in the artist’s life is
to be found in a considered essay by Hedvig Martin in Artist
Researcher Medium. Notes and Methods also includes the first
translation of Letters and Words Pertaining to Works by Hilma
af Klint, the code-­book the artist wrote for her paintings in the
last years of her life. Seeing these works together in a single
volume presents us with the tension that lay at the core of all
af Klint’s work: a need for order in a practice the artist herself
could not fully conceptualize. To take only one example from
Letters and Words, H A H, in various capitalizations, is given
nine different meanings. In an interview in Beyond the Visible,
Müller-­Westermann argues that we will not come closer to the
power held within these paintings by trying to make sense of
this system, but only through our experience of each work’s
overall esthetic. “Hilma af Klint works are not intellectual
maps to be understood rationally. You need your whole body to
4
receive these works in a way in which the intellect only plays a
small role, certainly not everything.”
In Artist Researcher Medium, Müller-­Westermann and cu-
rator Milena Høgsberg argue that only by acknowledging that
af Klint was an artist, researcher, and medium, can we hope to
understand her work today. These writers approach the artist’s
mediumship in a quite particular manner. They argue that the
notebooks clearly record af Klint’s conviction that it was her
contact with what she believed to be external consciousnesses
that inspired her painting, that “this became the very crux of
her artistic enquiry, which she would return to throughout her
life, trying to understand its significance.” This is undoubtedly
true, but they go on to say that for us to experience the work
as fully as possible today, it is necessary to take the artist’s
understanding of her own work seriously, and to find inroads to
this difficult idea of a fully external impulse. They ask us to en-
tertain the idea that the paintings contain vibrational messages
that we need to tune into in order to read on the level of energy.
The terms the writers use derive from Theosophy, but ap-
proached with a little intellectual leeway, removing the cloak of
religious language, they are not far from mainstream writing on
esthetic affect. The curators themselves do not make this move,
and in an essay in the same book, by Anne Sophie Jørgensen,
we read that “we may have the experience that the work is not
two dimensional … some of the paintings even open up the
dimension of time.” Our flickering appreciation of both illu-
sionistic space and the flat surface of a canvas, alongside our
awareness of time as held within handmade marks, are essen-
tial aspects of painting that are also more commonly addressed
with recourse to esthetics. Whether we adopt this perspective,
or instead view the paintings primarily as guidebooks to an art-
ist’s journey into esoteric belief systems, continuing to employ
the language of this journey in discussion, is where the writers
in these books part ways.
In Seeing is Believing, Fer takes a quite different approach
to mediumship, placing the external voices that af Klint be-
came aware of within the séance squarely within the artist’s
own mind. Fer discusses the Parsifal series as a graphic sys-
tem created to make diagrams of a visionary process, but as
a re-­imagining of artistic process. If the artist believed herself
to be recording external messages, “the normal protocols of
painting” need not apply. The artist’s occult belief can then be
understood as an essential key unlocking artistic license, as she
was “getting it down on the page […] in an improvisational man-
ner suited to her task.” The artist was steeped in visual forms
outside of the fine-­art tradition and the lines and washes that
we now see are the traces of a making process that allowed
all of this knowledge to be re-­directed into fine art. Fer argues
that this makes af Klint a recording instrument, not of external
voices, as the artist herself stated, but of her own esthetic sen-
sibilities. The outsider voices were those of the outsider within
 Religious Studies Review  •  VOLUME 0  •  NUMBER 0  •  Month 2021
herself, and her practice as a medium was the instrument with
which she took ownership of an artistic voice very different
from the one that was trained in a late nineteenth-­century art
academy.
The problem concerning which conceptual framework we
might choose is one that is visited by Fischer in Beyond the
Visible, when he repeats physicist Werner Heisenberg’s reali-
zation that “at the very core of the world, humans obviously
encounter themselves. The orbits of electrons in an atom only
exist because humans describe them in that way.” So what
these paintings might “be” rather depends on who is doing the
telling.
A Question of Influence
In Seeing is Believing, Joseph considers the argument that one
of the key sticking points to this work being included in art
history is that the paintings were created as occult objects,
designed for a temple, and therefore not autonomous works
of self-­reflexive Modernism—­art for art’s sake. His arguments
against this reading are supported by Fer, and by Voss in
Visionary, where she points out that the temple af Klint de-
signed to house her great cycle was a classic Theosophical
merger of science and art. It was to be built on the island
of Ven, where sixteenth-­century Danish astronomer Tycho
Brahe had once built an observatory. Voss’s detailed study
of the temple plans in the 1930/31 notebooks reveals that af
Klint’s spiraling gallery for her paintings also culminated in
an observatory. Af Klint had been taught astronomy in her
youth. According to the design of the temple she imagined,
after contemplating her paintings, one would look to the
stars.
In the same publication, an essay by Tracey Bashkoff
reveals that the idea of a “temple” for art was not an occult
diversion, but an idea very much of the time. She first traces
the importance of the spiral to Theosophical thought and then,
makes a compelling parallel with the thinking of woman artist
Hilla Rebay in New York in 1930. Rebay and af Klint would not
have known about each other, but they were both influenced
by the same Theosophical worldview. Rebay was a friend of
Wassily Kandinsky, and she advised Solomon Guggenheim on
his collection. In 1930 she began to imagine a museum for this
collection, a “temple of non-­objectivity and devotion.” Bashkoff
has tracked down both a 1937 Rebay sketch for a temporary
pavilion for the collection, which reveals a circular structure
reminiscent of af Klint’s sketches, and a 1943 letter to Frank
Lloyd Wright about building a permanent “temple of spirit—­a
monument,” a plan that would eventually become the spiraling
Guggenheim Museum.
Beyond the Visible pursues the other problem art histo-
rians encounter in af Klint’s work: historical influence. Julia
5
Voss argues in an interview that our current conception of early
twentieth-­century abstraction is the creation of Alfred Barr at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1930s and based
on the art historical notion of influence—­in other words, that
one artist looked at the work of another, and that this flow of
influence is what art history is. Müller-­Westermann and art-
ist Josiah McElheny continue this line of thought by proposing
that, if history is composed of a stream of influence, an art-
ist whose work was not acknowledged in their own lifetime
cannot retrospectively become part of the story—­an approach
that neatly excises value from the work of all but the most in-
tersectionally privileged. These interviews are accompanied
by a series of images that position an af Klint painting next
to a series of strikingly similar compositions by Albers, Klee,
Twombly, Warhol, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. The filmmaker
thereby makes an important point about the writing of history,
one taken up in different ways by all of the publications under
review here. In Seeing is Believing, both Fer and Joseph make
the seemingly simple suggestion that an artist’s image-­world
might be wider than that of art, and that if we shift focus onto
the historical conditions within which af Klint was working, we
can easily see influences shared by many others in the avant-­
garde of the time.
There is still no “school” of af Klint, however, and Birnbaum
suggests, in his introduction to Visionary, that rather than strug-
gling to fit this work into an existing schema of early twentieth-­
century Modernism, which it in some ways resists, the more
important question might be to consider the ways it challenges
this approach. “There is no obvious spot waiting to be filled by
her radiant imagery in the formalist scheme created by Alfred
Barr […] Rather than present a domain of static mathematical
truths or platonic forms, af Klint seems to enact a realm of vi-
brant life, of spiritual evolution and immanence […] compatible
with the processes of teeming nature rather than the precision
of heavenly geometries.”
In Seeing Is Believing, Joseph perhaps takes the repercus-
sions of this argument furthest, stating that the requirement
of influence is an impossible one to ask in these historical
circumstances. The artist was a relatively successful painter
in Stockholm at the time, but no one within that community
would have encouraged the painting of huge abstract works,
as abstraction itself would only be “invented,” according to
The Museum of Modern Art, three years later. So since “no-
body on earth” was in a position to legitimize af Klint’s in-
tentions, she sought to realize them within a spiritual realm.
Joseph points out that she was not alone in doing this, and
there is a growing body of literature that examines the ways
Spiritualism helped women in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to find a public voice, legitimized as the
voice of an “other.” It is easy today to think of these voices
as irrational, but Voss, in Visionary, questions any quick
 Religious Studies Review  •  VOLUME 0  •  NUMBER 0  •  Month 2021
categorizations like this when she reminds us that while af
Klint was participating in drawing séances, the successful
Austrian neurologist Richard Krafft-­Ebbing was thought to
have proved that education could cause fatal nerve damage
in women.
Joseph’s take on these legitimizing spirits is, like Fer’s, to
see them as fundamentally an artistic method for the produc-
tion of new imagery. He presents a Foucauldian idea of the mod-
ern subject, formed by the folding inward of forces and drives
we now see as belonging to the unconscious, but which, prior
to this twentieth-­century Freudian paradigm, were believed to
be generated by, or certainly in traffic with, a realm outside
of the Self. Af Klint’s phantasmatic “others” might best be un-
derstood today as a hyperproductive form of self-­estrangement.
Joseph argues that will, or desire, is often decoupled from
knowing when it is required as an agent pushing for a change
in the given order. All knowledge is created within networks of
dominant opinion and hierarchical values of voice. Rebellious
knowledge must find its power beyond such a system. He thus
argues that af Klint’s estrangement of her own intent through
mediumship was a necessary movement for a woman artist
with the wish to make images that no one had ever seen before.
Because this way of working goes against the grain of a
self-­reflective Modernism based on an Enlightenment notion of
intentional knowledge, Joseph situates his argument in relation
to the agency of any subaltern subjects who believe themselves
to be rebelling in the name of God. The question then becomes
how to take the subaltern viewpoint seriously, as Müller-­
Westermann and Høgsberg wish to do, while also conferring
agency on this subject in a way that conforms to a contempo-
rary Western viewpoint. Joseph proposes that it is with this
question that we take difference seriously. Differences in time
and life experience create the possibility of belief in different
forms of knowledge and so in different forms of life. Respecting
this tension of comprehension is an accepted aspect of decolo-
nizing our political histories. But by extension, it is also a way
of approaching the gender bias within art history. Joseph pres-
ents af Klint’s work as a Derridean supplement to the current
writing of art history, but suggests that it is art history itself
that needs to make way for the alterity her work presents.