Photograph · unknown photographer · published 1901
Hilma af Klint
1862 — 1944
She was painting abstract pictures years before Kandinsky did, then told the world not to look at them until she had been dead for twenty years.
In 1906 a respected Stockholm painter of landscapes and portraits began a series of canvases filled with spirals, petals, letters and floating geometry. Nothing in them depicted anything in the visible world. Art history has long credited Wassily Kandinsky with the first abstract painting, around 1911. Hilma af Klint was there about five years earlier, and almost nobody saw her work.
She painted on commission, as she recorded it, from spirit guides she met at séances, and she believed the world was not ready for what they showed her. So she showed it to almost no one. She left more than 1,200 paintings to her nephew with an instruction to keep the abstract work hidden for at least twenty years after her death. It took forty-two years before any of it reached a public gallery.
A life in two kinds of painting
The lifeline
1862
Born 26 October at Karlberg Palace, Solna, where her father served as a naval officer
1882
Enters the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and graduates with honours in 1887
1896
Forms “The Five” with four women friends; they hold séances and fill notebooks with automatic drawing
1906
Begins The Paintings for the Temple, her first abstract works
1932
Writes that the work must stay unseen for twenty years after her death
1944
Dies on 21 October after a tram accident, five days before her 82nd birthday
By the numbers
The measure of her
193
Works in The Paintings for the Temple, made between 1906 and 1915
1,200+
Paintings left to her nephew Erik af Klint, along with 125 diaries
42
Years from her death in 1944 to the first public showing of her abstract work, in 1986
600K+
Visitors to her 2018–19 Guggenheim retrospective in New York
What she painted
The work
1906
Primordial Chaos. The first group of temple paintings: small blue-green canvases of spirals and curves, about five years ahead of Kandinsky’s first abstractions.
1907
The Ten Largest. Ten paintings of the stages of human life, from childhood to old age, each about 3.2 by 2.4 metres, in coral, lilac and ochre.
1908–12
A four-year pause. She stopped the commission to care for her mother, who had gone blind.
1915
The Altarpieces. Three large works that closed the 193-work temple cycle. The paintings were meant for a spiral temple that was never built.
1932
The embargo. She began putting her notes and works in order for future viewers and marked the abstract work to stay hidden for twenty years after her death.
Hidden, then found
Recognition
In her lifetime
Known publicly as a skilled painter of portraits, landscapes and botanical studies
Rudolf Steiner met her in 1908 and was reportedly unenthusiastic about the work
In 1922 Steiner declined her offer of paintings for the new Goetheanum
She never exhibited the abstract work at all
Today
Moderna Museet turned the paintings down as a gift in 1970; later it toured her work worldwide
She first appeared in public in The Spiritual in Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986
Her Guggenheim show Paintings for the Future drew more than 600,000 visitors
She is now counted among the first abstract painters in Western art
The place that made her
Stockholm
She was born at Karlberg, the palace on the edge of Stockholm that houses Sweden’s military academy, into a family of naval officers and map-makers. At twenty she joined one of the first generations of women trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She spent most of her working life in the city and died in Djursholm, just north of it.
1792
Year the military academy moved into Karlberg Palace, where she was born
1864
Year the Academy of Fine Arts opened a section for women, 18 years before she enrolled
5 yrs
Her time at the Academy, 1882–1887, ending in honours
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force.”
— Hilma af Klint, notebook
