Hilma af Klint Mother of Abstraction

Hilma Af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were the first Western abstract art known to the current art community. Some even said she invented abstract art. She died in 1944 at 81, leaving behind more than 1,000 paintings that she kept hidden during her lifetime.

A considerable body of her abstract work predates Kandinsky’s first purely abstract compositions. She belonged to a group called “The Five”, a circle of women inspired by Theosophy who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the so-called “High Masters”—often by way of séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, visually represented complex spiritual ideas.

But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with Af Klint’s radically abstract painting practice—one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colourful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalising world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.

Throughout her life, Hilma Af Klint sought to understand the mysteries she had come in contact with through her work. She produced more than 150 notebooks with her thoughts and studies.

Hilma Af Klint never dared to show her abstract work to her contemporaries. Her major works, dedicated to the Temple, had been questioned and rejected by Rudolf Steiner. Hilma Af Klint concluded that her time was not yet ready to understand them. More than 1200 paintings and drawings were stored in her atelier, waiting for the future.

Hilma Af Klint died in the aftermath of a traffic accident, having only exhibited her works a handful of times, mainly at spiritual conferences and gatherings. Her spirit lives on in these images.

Clockwise from left:

The Dove No. 1

Hilma Af Klint

HK012

The Ten Largest No.2

Hilma Af Klint

HFK014

The Ten Largest No.7

Hilma Af Klint

HFK012

Alterpieces No. 1

Hilma Af Klint

HK003

Af Klint was born in Sweden in 1862. She studied Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She studied arts for seven years there, and after finishing her studies, she dedicated herself to painting landscapes and portraits for ten years.

Indeed she was a good painter. Most of her work is remarkable and widely known, almost eighty years after her death. But, what happened with Hilma, that suddenly changed her direction regarding her painting style? To understand her work, it is necessary to talk about her interests, and her biggest one was her devotion to séances. These séances are rituals where people can communicate with higher souls and spirits from other dimensions.

Hilma met every week for ten years with a group of friends to contact these spirits. She and her other four friends started to make these realms and formed the group of The Five. Af Klint felt somehow instructed by these spirits in one of these sessions, and that is how she started the “Paintings for The Temple” series. A collection of 193 paintings was divided into groups according to the story she intended to tell.

She had an exquisite technique and painting style. She used a combination of colours to talk through the paper. Many would not understand her since people were not ready to see this level of work. In a movement controlled by men, At Klint was the first of her kind. Nowadays, many consider her the real pioneer of the abstract movement, even before Kandinsky, Mondrian and others.

“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”

Af Klint used a wide range of colours, but predominantly she used blue for female forms, yellow for male ones, and green to emphasise their unity. She intended to transmit with her style, especially in her Primordial Chaos series, the connection between two opposite “poles”, in this case, male and female and the reproduction of life, and how this was spiritually vital.

Almost eighty years have passed after her death, and people and critics still understand some of her messages to fully understand the meaning of her artworks. Art historians have done most of it. Nevertheless, some axes are still not entirely decoded, or people do not give the same interpretations to what she truly meant. Who knows? Maybe to understand what Af Klint intended to communicate, we also need to have one of these encounters.