Five years before Kandinsky, the man acclaimed for decades as the pioneer of abstract art, Hilma af Klint made her first abstract painting in her Stockholm studio in 1906. Eventually, more than 1,300 abstract paintings would come out of that one painting. Amazing in their continuity and obsession, such masterpieces were lost to history for decades.

The First Abstract Artist?

The works of the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint are considered by many to be among the earliest instances of abstract art in the Western canon. She had completed a substantial body of work before Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian painted their first abstract works. She belonged to a group of Theosophical ladies called "The Five," who met regularly for séances in an endeavor to make contact with the "High Masters." Her paintings sometimes resembled schematics due to the complexity of the spiritual notions they conveyed.

Biography

Hilma af Klint, the fourth of Mathilda af Klint (née Sonntag) and Captain Victor af Klint, a Swedish navy captain, would spend her summers at their estate, "Hanmora," on the island of Adelsö in Lake Mälaren. Her strong feelings of oneness with and respect for the natural world can be mainly attributed to having grown up in such a beautiful place. Hilma af Klint resided on the nearby island of Munsö during her twilight years.

Hilma af Klint's interest in mathematics and plants was likely genetic. When her family moved to Stockholm, she took advantage of the opportunity to study portraiture and landscape painting at the Tekniska skolan (today's Konstfack).

She was accepted into the Royal Academy of Fine Arts when she was twenty.

While in school from 1882 until 1887, she studied drawing, portraiture, and landscape. She was given a studio at the Atelier Building (Ateljébyggnaden) at the Academy of Fine Arts in central Stockholm, between Hamngatan and Kungsträdgrden. This was the heart of Stockholm's cultural life back then. Blanch's Café and Blanch's Art Gallery were located in the same building where the Art Society (Konstnärsförbundet), inspired by French En Plein Air painters, first began to challenge the traditional art vision of the Academy of Fine Arts. Hilma af Klint's career as a landscape painter, botanical illustrator, and portrait artist began in Stockholm.

The "life's work" she kept separate from her "conventional" painting allowed her to make a living.

At the Academy of Fine Arts, she met Anna Cassel, the first of four women who would later become her collaborators as "The Five" (De Fem), a group of artists who shared her ideas. The remaining ensemble members were Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman, and Mathilda Nilsson. Originally, "The Five" were linked as members of the Edelweiss Society, which fused the ideas of Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy with spiritualism. The five friends in The Five regularly participated in spiritist séances and discussed paranormal topics. Each meeting began with a time of prayer and meditation, progressed to a Christian sermon, and concluded with the reading and discussion of a text from the New Testament. The next step would be a séance. These individuals compiled a book (#5) that details a new mystical belief system that they claim was taught to them by enlightened beings called The High Masters ("Höga Mästare"). In a proclamation, Gregor said, "All the information that is not of the senses, not of the brain, not of the heart, but is the property that entirely belongs to the deepest essence of your being...the knowledge of your spirit."

Hilma af Klint began working with The Five in 1896. Through their collaboration, she experimented with automatic sketching, arriving at a geometric visual language that could comprehend the invisible forces of the inner and outer worlds.

Hilma af Klint started her series of abstract paintings in 1906, at 44, after making art for 20 years.

The Temple's construction lasted from 1906 to 1915, with a brief hiatus between 1908 and 1912. As she developed her aesthetic, Hilma af Klint coined a new set of terms to describe her work. Eventually, her paintings became more spontaneous and deliberate. She looked to the spiritual realm for guidance for the rest of her life.

The Temple's collection of artwork includes 193 works in several series. The paintings are enormous, reaching an impressive 240 by 320 cm, dated 1907. The demographics of The Ten Largest range from infancy to senescence.

As seen by the sliced circle and the helix cut in half and subdivided into a range of pastel colors, the paintings have a youthful, contemporary aesthetic of broken lines and swiftly grasped pictures. Hilma af Klint's artwork often features letters, phrases, and symbols. Good and evil, masculine and female, virtuous and earthy, etc., are only some of the symmetrical dualities or reciprocities often depicted in these works of art. Pink and red stand for love's emotional and intellectual depths; blue represents the feminine soul, and yellow represents the masculine soul. The "Swan" and "Dove" titles provide two sets of paintings in the Temple's collection with dual connotations as symbols of transcendence and love. Her images, which inspire a feeling of history and mystery through archetypal shapes and humanistic motifs, have been compared to doorways to other worlds and beg to be interpreted on various levels. 

Once Hilma af Klint's Temple was complete, the divine guidance ceased. Even though anyone no longer influenced her, she kept up her abstract paintings. When she started painting for the Temple, she used oil and watercolor for the first time. Her subsequent paintings are on substantially smaller canvases. In her series of paintings titled "The Viewpoints of Different Religions at Different Stages in History," she also illustrated the duality of physical existence and its spiritual equivalent. As early as 1920, Hilma af Klint began her creative and esoteric inquiry, and she may have found inspiration in the aesthetic theories developed by the Anthroposophical Society.

The artist Hilma af Klint devoted her entire life to attempting to solve the mysteries she found in her work. She used more than 150 notebooks to record her thoughts and findings. 

They first came into contact with Rudolf Steiner that year (1908). She writes to Steiner in one of the few letters that have survived, inviting him to Stockholm so he can view the 111 paintings that make up the final volume of the Paintings for the Temple series. While Steiner did view the artwork, he was uninspired by it and wrote off the creator as "inappropriate for a theosophist" due to her production practices. According to H.P. Blavatsky, the practice of mediumship leads its adherents down a dark path of occultism and black magic. Af Klint was forewarned by Steiner that her contemporaries would not appreciate or comprehend her artwork and that it would take another half-century for her paintings to be adequately appreciated. Despite being exposed to a wide variety of artwork, Steiner only singled out the Primordial Chaos Group as "the greatest thematically." It's been said that after hearing Steiner's response, af Klint didn't pick up a paintbrush for four years. Steiner preserved images of af Klint's hand-colored pieces. At the year's end, he met Wassily Kandinsky, who was not yet an abstract painter. Art historians say that Kandinsky saw the photographs and was subsequently inspired to go in his conceptual direction. She decided to shred all of her correspondence near the end of her life. She left about 1,200 artworks and 125 journals to her nephew, Erik af Klint. She painted two watercolors in the 1930s that predict what would happen in World War II; they are titled The Blitz and The Fight in the Mediterranean. 

Art historians such as Julia Voss have uncovered evidence that challenges the long-held belief that abstract painter Hilma af Klint never exhibited her work during her lifetime. In or around 1920, Af Klint met Dutch eurythmist Peggy Kloppers-Moltzer in Dornach, Switzerland. She was a member of The Anthroposophical Society. Later, the artist and Kloppers went to Amsterdam to talk to the editors of Wendingen, a Dutch art and architectural magazine. Despite the failure of the Amsterdam talks to produce fruit, Hilma af Klint's abstract paintings were exhibited in the British capital. During July 1928, London played host to the World Conference on Spiritual Science, and Kloppers was there as a member of the organizing committee. Initially, Hilma af Klint was not included in the group, but at Kloppers' urging, the situation was rectified. In July of 1928, Hilma af Klint and several monumental artworks set sail from Stockholm for London. af Klint did not go alone for four days, as evidenced by a postcard she sent to her friend Anna Cassel (discovered in 2018). While af Klint's traveling companion was never officially identified, De Fem member and lifelong friend Julia Voss has speculated that it was Thomasine Andersson. We don't know much about the paintings we saw, but based on what Voss mentioned, we can probably presume they came from the Paintings for the Temple collection. 

Hilma af Klint died in Djursholm, Sweden, from injuries she sustained in a traffic accident in 1944, having only presented her work a handful of times, primarily at spiritual conferences and meetings.

She was laid to rest in Stockholm's Galärvarvskyrkogrden. 

Featured Style

From 1906 through 1920, when she worked more abstractly, Hilma af Klint fused geometric and figurative elements with scientific and religious themes. Through seeing things like flowers and shells, she came to have a more spiritual outlook on life. 

Her aesthetic has traces of modern spiritual movements like theosophy and anthroposophy, as well as the scientific discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her attempts at abstraction reveal a longing to transcend realism and the constraints of the material world. 

She uses a symbolic visual language that develops from a familiarity with grids, circles, spirals, and petal-like patterns (sometimes diagrammatic, sometimes biomorphic).

It's worth noting that she also wrote about the contrasting aspects of the world. 

Like De Fem's automatic drawings, spirals are a recurring motif in her work. All geometric shapes, the spiral in this case, and the colors utilized here conjure up images of growth and progress. 

Both she and the work of other early woman artists exemplify the sublime.

Legacy

In her will, Hilma af Klint left all of her abstract paintings to her nephew, Vice Admiral Erik af Klint of the Royal Swedish Navy. Her requests for the confidentiality of her writings were honored for twenty years after her passing. Before their reveal towards the close of the 1960s, the boxes' contents were kept under tight wraps.

Her 1970 contribution request to Stockholm's Moderna Museet was turned down. By the 1970s, Erik af Klint had established a foundation in his name, and by then, he had already donated hundreds of sketches and paintings. Her introduction to the art world occurred in the 1980s when art historian Jo Fant presented her at a Nordik conference in Helsinki, Finland.

More than a thousand abstract paintings by Hilma af Klint are on display. The museum is owned and operated by the organization honoring the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. In 2017, Norwegian architectural firm Snhetta presented plans for a €6-7.5 million af Klint exhibition complex to be built in Järna, south of Stockholm. According to a long-term partnership agreement between the Foundation and the Moderna Museet signed in February 2018, a dozen of Hilma af Klint's paintings are permanently exhibited in a dedicated gallery. 

Most paintings Hilma af Klint did are about Abstract, and other subjects.

Famous Hilma af Klint period artists include John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 -1925), Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863 -1944), Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867 -1947), Henri Lebasque (French, 1865 -1937), Édouard Vuillard (French, 1868 -1940), Mary Vaux Walcott (American, 1860 -1940), Frederick Childe Hassam (American, 1859 -1935), Gustave Loiseau (French, 1865 -1935), Sir John Lavery, R.A. (Irish, 1856 -1941), Alexei von Jawlensky (Russian, 1864 -1941), Isaak Levitan (Russian, 1860 -1900), Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (Spanish, 1863 -1923), and others.

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