India, Aug. 30 -- Hilma af Klint led a double life as an artist. By day, she created serene Swedish landscapes and detailed botanical illustrations, perfectly traditional works in style and subject. By night, she covered canvases in large geometric shapes, floating heads, and a range of other abstractions (see image 6). The Swedish artist is now regarded as a predecessor to pioneers of abstract art such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In her lifetime, her abstracts were considered so radical, she asked they be hidden for 20 years after her death. When they finally began to be shown outside Sweden in the 1980s, the timeline of Modernism had to be revised. Where Kandinsky claimed to have created the first abstract artwork in 1911, Klint had abstracts dated 1906. Nearly half a century on, however, she is still left off lists and out of exhibitions. In 2012, when New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) staged a show dedicated to abstract art, Klint was not included. Curator Leah Dickerman argued at the time that the artist did not define her mystical creations as secular art, and so they did not qualify. MOMA has since acquired Klint works and, in 2025, staged a solo exhibition. A major show in France sought to contextualise her work this year, through a massive retrospective at the Grand Palais from May to August. Born in Stockholm to a naval commander from a noble family, Klint was one of the first women admitted to the city's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and graduated with honours in 1887. She had a successful career as an artist, and served briefly as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists. Her abstracts reflected her engagement with new ideas of spiritualism and mysticism then sweeping Europe. She died aged 81, following a traffic accident in Sweden....