
Astral Reign
ORIGIN STORIES are inescapably political. Battles to crown the “first” abstract artist might be bloodless, but they have been fought fiercely, for decades, by art historians seeking to establish a definitive breakthrough. Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, František Kupka: The story of modern Western nonrepresentational art has typically begun with a few European men jockeying for position as “figure one.” Since the relatively recent awareness of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), who produced innovative and boldly graphic abstract work predating that made by these