Modern Age
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944)
Swedish Early Abstraction painter.
Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter who made large-scale abstract art years before Kandinsky, Malevich, or Mondrian — and then hid it from the world. Academically trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, she earned her living as a conventional painter of landscapes and botanical studies. But her real work grew out of spiritualism: from 1896 she met with four other women in a group called 'The Five' (De Fem), holding séances and making automatic drawings that they believed were guided by higher intelligences.
In 1906, acting on what she recorded as a commission from these spiritual guides, she began an enormous body of non-representational work she called the 'Paintings for the Temple' — some 193 works over nine years, including the mural-scale suite 'The Ten Largest', which maps the ages of human life in blazing color, biomorphic form, spirals, and symbolic letters. Her imagery is at once diagrammatic and organic: a science of the invisible, drawn by hand.
Af Klint understood that her contemporaries were not ready for this art. Her will stipulated that the abstract works not be shown until at least twenty years after her death. She died in 1944, and her paintings stayed largely unseen for decades; only in recent years has she been recognized as a pioneer who reached abstraction on her own terms, for reasons entirely her own.
The words the record keeps using: visionary, diagrammatic, luminous, serene, esoteric, original.
At a glance
- Lived 1862–1944
- Origin Swedish
- Worked in Stockholm
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Early Abstraction
- Mediums Egg tempera on panel, Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Color-form abstraction, Diagrammatic painting
Works in the archive
- The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood, 1907 (Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm)
One of ten mural-scale sheets charting the ages of human life, from infancy to old age; this one belongs to 'Adulthood'. Painted in 1907 as part of the 'Paintings for the Temple', it is among the earliest large abstract… - The Swan, No. 17 (Svanen), 1915 (Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm)
From the SUW/UW series that closed the 'Paintings for the Temple', 'The Swan' group moves from figurative paired swans toward pure geometry. In No. 17 the birds have all but vanished, resolved into a stark division of… - Altarpiece, No. 1 (Group X), 1915 (Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm)
The Altarpieces (Group X) were conceived as the culmination of the temple cycle, intended for the summit of a spiral temple af Klint imagined but never built. In No. 1 a great rainbow-banded triangle rises toward a…
What was said
Af Klint recorded in her notebooks that the 'Paintings for the Temple' were undertaken as a commission received through the séance group 'The Five', and that the great abstract cycle was intended to give visible form to a spiritual order and the evolution of the soul.
She believed that reality's deepest layer is invisible, and that painting could chart unseen forces and correspondences — hence her diagrammatic spirals, paired opposites, and symbolic alphabets, meant to be read as much as seen.
Convinced her contemporaries could not yet understand the work, af Klint stipulated that her abstract paintings not be publicly shown until at least twenty years after her death.
Lineage
Learned from Nicholas Roerich
What would Hilma make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Hilma af Klint", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Hilma · Keep a life moment the way Hilma would · Pictures made after Hilma