Back in 95 when NPR made me its first media reporter, my NPR friend and colleague Peter Breslo wrote,

Media Reporter. I hope you do a story on paper mache. It's my favorite medium. Of course, since the days of cave

painting art in countless forms has been a prime medium of human expression.

But how does the creative spark catch fire?

This is a story of one unlikely blaze.

In 1887, Hilma Afkent was one of the first women to graduate Stockholm's Royal Academy of Fine Arts,

and she went on to paint exquisite landscapes and portraits in the style of the day.

She was small with blue eyes, were mostly black, unmarried, also unconnected to the modern movements brewing elsewhere. Back then, no one would

guessed her art would cover the walls of one of the world's most famous repositories of modern

and especially abstract art. For one thing, the spiral temple in Manhattan known as the Guggenheim Museum hadn't yet been built.

I visited in 2019 when Afklin's paintings were there.

What we see mostly here in the exhibition are the works that she did under her spiritualist practice.

Tracy Bashkoff curated the Guggenheim show, Hilma of Clint,

paintings for the future.

Working as a medium, she took on a commission

that was given to her by the higher spirits that she was communing with

to paint works that would eventually fill a temple,

and that's where she really pushed the boundaries.

Funny word, medium. It can mean anything from paper mache to serving as the earthly tool of a

disembodied spirit. During a seance in 1904, Hilma Af-Clint heard a voice directing her to render and paint a new philosophy of life.

She painted shapes, coiled and swirling, stable and sublime, derived from both nature and pure geometry.

It was a staggering departure from the work that had defined her career and far ahead of her time.

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