AllMovie

Lasse Hallström’s Hilma brings to the big screen the life story of a woman who defied conventions and revolutionized the art world when her work was exhibited in its entirety in 2019 at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. Hilma died in 1944, unknown and unrecognized as the woman who invented abstract painting, displacing Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian as the initiators of abstract painting and Modernism. From her adoration of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner and her invincible belief in spirits, to her unconventional romantic life and close circle of fellow female artists who converged around Hilma and her atelier, the film provides a nuanced portrait of a woman who chose to remain true to her vision as an artist, despite working in a hostile, misogynistic world where women were not expected to express themselves and still were not allowed to vote.