Several years before the world was welcoming the gigantic proponents of modernism, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazmir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian into the mainstream, af Klint was quietly creating her dazzlingly bold and colorful swirls, her biomorphic shapes and rectilinear constructions.  The pull of the outside world had little interest for her.  So little, in fact, that she stipulated that no one would see her creations until 20 years after her passing.  

If it’s true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder happened to be Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich henchmen, then the likes of Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, and Klee (and that’s just the early 20^th Century artistic giants whose names start with “K”) were in big trouble.  By the time the Nazi campaign to purge the world of modernist art ended, some 20,000 pieces were confiscated, hidden, sold, or destroyed.