Outside in World | Browse Books

Use our Book Finder to search for books by Title (or part of the title), Author, ISBN, Age Range, Keyword, or Continent/Country. Then simply click the magnifying glass to start your search.

If a title starts with 'The', leave this out as this is added to the end of the title in brackets. funny pictures funny images funny photos really funny pictures

‘We need the literature of other countries to expand our
horizons and stimulate our ideas. Without it, we are not only
diminished, we are starved’
(The Times, Magnus Linklater 29/06/05)

Please email us to sign up to our Newsletter

Art and Life of Hilma Af Klint (The) by Ylva Hillstrom

Title: Art and Life of Hilma Af Klint (The)

Author: Ylva Hillstrom

Translator: B.J. Epstein

Illustrator: Karin Eklund

Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Date Published: 2022

Format: Hardback

Genre:

Book Category: Picture Book

Age Range: 9-11

Original Title: First published in Swedish, Alfabeta Bokforlag AB, Sweden, 2020

Country of Origin: Sweden

Art and Life of Hilma Af Klint (The)

by Ylva Hillstrom
Age Range: 9-11

The Art and Life of Hilma af Klint is an excellent introduction to an overlooked pioneering abstract artist. Hilma af Klint created the first-ever abstract paintings showing people the invisible world. She lived at a time when people were fascinated by what they couldn’t see and spiritualists believed it was possible to speak with the dead.

“According to the position of the stars and planets on the day that she was born, Hilma’s life would be filled with magic and mystery.” The atmospheric descriptions of Hilma’s life and work, both as an artist and a spiritualist, by Swedish author Ylva Hillström, a curator at the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm and translated by B. J. Epstein, is echoed too, in the bright and colourful illustrations by Karin Eklund pulling the reader into Hilma af Klint’s world.

When Hilma first began to hear spirit voices, she found a new purpose for her paintings. Hillström skilfully weaves together both af Klint's art, along with fascinating details such as her use of hundreds of eggs to make up her paints, and her spiritualism together with the scientific discoveries of the time that led to inventions such as the telegraph and the telephone.

Eklund’s vibrant artwork also captures af Klint’s seeing and hearing beyond the physical world, a particular example is when her sister Hermina died and af Klint believed she heard her voice calling her. "It felt as though she was close by, perhaps standing behind a curtain." Eklund’s ghostly image shows the artist sitting at a desk, brush in hand while a silhouette of her sister appears in the train of her long flowing blue skirt. The colours and shapes in the illustrations are complementary to af Klint’s style of artwork, of which there are 15 reproductions interspersed throughout the book.

Hilma af Klint was born in Sweden in 1862 and studied art at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. With a lifelong interest in spiritualism and theosophy af Klint was creating abstract paintings long before, as the author notes, Wassily Kandinsky who was proclaimed the inventor of abstract art. During af Klint’s lifetime, her paintings were not taken seriously including by the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner, (on whose educational philosophy Waldorf/Steiner education is based), who dismissed her work. Af Klint died in 1944 leaving instructions in her will that her paintings and drawings were not to be looked at until 20 years after her death. In the 1970s the Hilma af Klint Foundation was set up so now her artwork can be enjoyed by people from all over the world.

Hillström’s book is a significant contribution to the history of women artists and a fascinating biography of an artist who was ahead of her time.

buy now from amazon