Some shows you miss, and you keep missing them, until a city you were not expecting hands them back to you.

In 2018 the Guggenheim gave Hilma af Klint her first big American show. I was living in New York at the time. I kept meaning to go. And then, suddenly, the show got famous, the available slots were gone, the line ran down Fifth, and eventually, the show closed. More than 600,000 people saw it, the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history. Sadly, I was not one of them. And, I have been mildly annoyed with myself ever since.

But then, fate gave me another chance. The Grand Palais in Paris announced a big Hilma show for this summer. As luck would have it, I was now living in Prague, a quick plane ride away. So, I booked my ticket and I went in early July.

I took an art-loving college friend with me. She’s such a good sport - always open to exploring whatever artsy outing I propose. So, earlier this July, we braved the Parisian summer heat to and crowded metro to get to the show. After a brief detour (the Grand Palais is grand after all!) we found the right entrance and soon enough we made our way to Gallery 8 and into the show.

Unlike the Guggenheim, the show in Paris is not attempting to deliver a full career survey, and that turns out to be the best decision. Here, the show is focused on Paintings for the Temple, the cycle that the artist worked on from 1906 to 1915. All 193 works, almost the entire set in one place. The show is curated by Pascal Rousseau and it’s co-produced with the currently closed Centre Pompidou.

In the first set of galleries, you start getting a taste for Hilma and her work. And you get the sense that, at least in my opinion, she was far ahead of her time. Smaller paintings, range of colors and shapes both simple and complex at the same time. Definitely intriguing.

The first gallery gave us a taste and made us feel we knew what to expect upstairs. How wrong were we! We did not expect the scale.

The Ten Largest are ten paintings from 1907, each one over three meters tall, were waiting for us there. Hilma af Klint painted them on the floor because there was no other way to work at that size. Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, Old Age. A whole human life in ten panels, in peach and pale blue and egg yolk yellow, with shapes that can look like a botanical diagram and that can, at times, resemble a very good textile archive. We loved them and spent quite a bit of time admiring every single one.

Photographs do nothing for them. The color is chalkier and looks closer to fresco than to paint in real life. And the size is really awe-inspiring. She was not making pictures for a wall. She was building a room for a spiral temple that existed only in her head. Too bad it was never built, I wonder what that experience would be like.

The large paintings were, by far, my favorite part of the show. Both my friend and I kept returning to them to take another picture, to admire them some more. And frankly, to admire the woman we had not known before but whose work was so far ahead of her time.

Her story itself is interesting. She died in 1944 and left instructions that the abstract work stay sealed for twenty years. More than a thousand pieces, in crates. She asked for twenty years. She got forty-two. The twenty passed and nothing happened. Moderna Museet was offered the collection in 1970 and turned it down. It took until 1986, and a group show in Los Angeles about spirituality in abstract painting, before a public finally saw her. She chose the silence. But is looks like the art world was already well practiced at not looking in her direction. What a shame.

She was painting abstraction in 1906. Kandinsky’s first abstractions are usually dated around 1911. Do that math however you like. The tidy story about who got there first was written by people who had no idea her work existed. I came out thinking about how much of what we call art history is just a record of who happened to get shown.

Well, she has the limelight now. New York gave her a career. Paris gives her the temple. So, if you happen to be in Paris before the end of August, go. Give it a full afternoon. Not an hour. An afternoon.

Grand Palais, Paris. Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Temple 1906-1915, until 30 August 2026.