You’ve been a fan of her “Awakening (Memory of Father),” from 1943, for years now.

My reading of the painting is that it’s a dreamlike scene, an abstracted landscape with day and night present at once. It has this form in the sky that’s been described as a golden trumpet. But if you look closely, underneath that shape and also on top, is a faint texture that makes it feel like it’s moving. For me that form is a luminous symbol of death. Agnes Pelton’s father died when she was 10 years old. My father died when I was 13, and I also dealt with his death through abstraction. Pelton used abstraction to convey personal meaning as opposed to just dripping paint on canvas, like Jackson Pollock, or making abstract forms, like Ellsworth Kelly. One of my theories is that until the advent of abstraction, women artists were not free to convey their experiences directly. Abstraction opened up the visual landscape for us to invent forms to convey our internal reality.

Besides Pelton, which other artists are you thinking of?

Natalia Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, starting from the early 20th century when abstraction became a possible mode of expression. Earlier, women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi had to fit their forms into an art historical tradition created by men, like the way she used [her rendering of] the biblical theme of Judith beheading Holofernes to express the violence of being raped.

Hilma af Klint has also been a real revelation in the art world lately since her recent show at the Guggenheim.

That’s an understatement [laughs].

Usually we tell the history of abstraction by identifying three or four men who invented abstraction around the same time in 1913: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka. Seeing Hilma af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple” at the Guggenheim, which she began in 1906 as a result of her séances, just upended this history.