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born on October 26, 1862 at Karlberg Castle in Solna, Sweden
died on October 21, 1944 in Djursholm, Sweden
Swedish painter
80th anniversary of her death on October 21, 2024
Biography
“The work of Hilma af Klint crashes like a meteorite into one of the most important narratives in art history”; “...it is no longer a secret that a concentrated power lies in her work”; “the history of abstraction must be rewritten”; “the rediscovery of Hilma af Klint is considered one of the greatest sensations in art in recent years”; “...groundbreaking artist and pioneer of abstraction.” This is only a handful of the numerous quotes from the past few years that extoll the artist’s work and that clearly point to how the Swedish painter had broken with all previous artistic tradition.
Hilma af Klint's extraordinary biography began in 1862, when she was born at Karlberg Castle as the fourth child of her parents. Her father came from a long line of highly respected naval officers. It was he who first awakened Hilma's interest in science, mathematics, botany and painting. For several generations, the men of the family had been commanders in the Swedish fleet. They had mapped the coast of Sweden and had recorded what they had discovered in the underwater world below sea level; for these services to Sweden, they had been ennobled (af is the Swedish word for German von). His daughter Hilma would later also become a cartographer – although not of the world deep in the seas, but of the spiritual world. Like her ancestors, she too would use nautical signs to map what was revealed to her of the unseen realm.
She grew up in a liberal home that provided the daughters with schooling and education. The Protestant parents were also lenient when it came to religion; dogmatism was rejected and the children were allowed to explore religious alternatives. Scientific education was a matter of course, and Hilma learned of the discovery of X-rays, the theory of radioactivity, electromagnetic waves, and the invention of the telephone. The research results of the 19th and early 20th centuries in physics, chemistry, medicine and biology had turned the previous understanding of reality on its head and served to fuel her certainty that the invisible could be made visible. Previously, she believed, nature had obviously had a false bottom – but had now revealed what had hitherto been hidden. Hilma was fascinated by the invisible, spiritual world and like many others she also hoped that connections to the afterlife would be exposed. In 1879, at the age of 17, she took part in spiritualist sessions for the first time. When her beloved little sister Hermina died at the age of 10 a year later, Hilma was unable to accept her death and wanted to keep the door to her sister open: she took part more and more often in séances in order to regain and maintain contact with her sister. Hermina was to accompany Hilma af Klint for the rest of her life.
She was one of the first women to begin studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1882 (women in Germany did not have access to academies and universities until 1919), and it was there that she met and fell in love with fellow student Anna Cassel. Both were convinced that the higher worlds were accessible and that there were no sharp boundaries between this world and the hereafter. They were to remain close friends throughout their lives. Hilma af Klint graduated with distinction in 1887 and went on to earn her living by painting portraits and landscapes in the traditional academic style and by working as a draughtswoman together with Anna Cassel and others at the Veterinary Institute in Stockholm. Hilma and Anna would often travel together on study trips through Germany as well as to Norway, Holland, Belgium and Italy. It was the heyday of spiritualism, with many different spiritualist groups forming. Hilma and Anna joined the Edelweiss Society and thus belonged to the innermost circle of spiritualist movements. Soon thereafter, however, the two and three other friends founded their own group and began to conduct séances themselves. The Five – later it was The Thirteen – recorded and interpreted the sessions in minutes and automatic drawings. In 1906, Hilma af Klint heard a voice during one seance that was to radically change her life: she was told to paint on an “astral plane.” She had always known that artists could be as receptive as scientists to vibrations, rays and the ethereal. Many other painters and poets shared this conviction: for example, Mondrian, Strindberg, Munch and Kandinsky were interested in mysticism, magic and the occult, and Rilke attended séances regularly.
For the artist it was now obvious that if the messages and revelations came from dimensions in which the spirit had freed itself from the material, then art could no longer be about pure representation; abstraction was the only form of manifestation possible. The artist had to focus on the irrational, the imaginary and the visionary, transforming from artist into magician. “The artist must be a clairvoyant: he must see what others do not see; he must be a magician: he must have the power to make others see what they themselves do not see, but which he does see” (P.D. Ouspensky). Hilma af Klint painted her first non-figurative canvas in 1906, years before Kandinsky painted non-figuratively – until her rediscovery he was regarded as the first abstract artist. Hilma af Klint immersed herself in theosophy, the philosophical tradition that was further developed by the American Helena P. Blavatsky. Blavatsky posited that not only was organic life in constant evolution, but that the spirit followed the law of constant transformation and could even direct matter. As in a chain reaction, matter and spirit develop higher and higher up to the sphere of the divine. Hilma af Klint adopted these ideas for her art and began painting in groups, later stipulating in the will she drew up in old age that the paintings in a series were to never be torn apart. The series bear titles that are a reflection of the times she lived in: Evolution, Atoms, Eros and Primordial Chaos. The latter series contains almost 200 abstract paintings.
At first her abstract paintings had small formats, but then a spirit from the higher world guided her to begin a series dedicated to the four phases of human life – The Ten Largest.
The paintings in this series are as large as “barn doors” (Voss, p. 237). Each one measures 3.28 x 2.40 m. Within two months, she had created 80 square meters of paintings in which not a single object could be seen. She herself noted that “the form is the waves, behind the form is life itself” (Voss, p. 239). She was focused on transformation, on overcoming duality and on the metamorphosis of matter into spirit. From then on, she painted in organic, dynamic and geometric forms; she combined symbols and letters, endowing them with secret meanings (M stood for matter, U for spirit). She created a unique artistic and spiritual cosmos.
She dealt with sexual themes in the series The Large Figure Paintings. Using the color blue for the female spirit and yellow for the male spirit and creating stylized references to body parts, she painted in symbols. The union of two spirits was itself a symbol of overcoming duality and of overcoming matter; every individual possessed a “dual sexuality” in that the two spirits also existed within each person. She was convinced of the androgyny of living beings, and described herself as “hermaphrodite.” In her love relationships with women – and allowing her own male spirit free expression – she sought to find and connect with her “dual soul.”
Hilma af Klint began the Paintings for the Temple series in 1908, completing the first 111 paintings in the same year. After its completion in 1915, the series comprised 193 paintings.
In the same year, she invited Rudolf Steiner to her studio. At that time, he was still a member of the Theosophical Society, and she hoped that he would understand and collaborate with her. Steiner was critical of her abstract paintings full of symbols and of her self-image as a medium; he dismissed her work with a shake of his head and left to visit Kandinsky – not without first, however, taking color photographs of Hilma af Klint's paintings with him. His rejection triggered a four-year creative crisis for Hilma af Klint.
Nevertheless, she joined the anthroposophical society that Steiner founded, traveled to Dornach eight times from 1920 onwards and offered him her paintings as gifts. Steiner remained coolly unmoved and steadfast in his rejection of her, which deeply hurt and offended Hilma af Klint. However, she continued to believe in anthroposophy. She attended Steiner's lectures, read his writings and agreed with him that naturalism was the false path to pursue in art. According to Steiner, “no depiction ... has ever been able to capture nature.” Both believed that true art, in contrast, could reveal the spiritual world (Voss, p. 360).
Hilma af Klint began painting again in 1912, continuing to be influenced by higher beings, but creating her works much more independently than before. In 1916 she created the Parzifal series of 144 watercolors, and in 1917 she dictated 1240 typewritten pages about the life of the soul. 1918 was a decisive year in her life: she joined forces with Thomasine Andersson. Thomasine was a member of the Thirteen group and a trained nurse; together they cared for Hilma's blind mother. With Thomasine, the harmony Hilma had longed for returned. The down-to-earth Thomasine became her second half, her “dual soul.” In order to reach wisdom, Hilma explained, “two individuals must walk the path together, for the path makes it impossible for a single person to go any further” – without love, knowledge was not possible. Thomasine was highly educated in science and medicine and was fluent in German. The next writings were in German.
A new creative period then began for Hilma. The message was the same as before, but now the immersion was in nature instead of in séances and spiritual/spiritist sessions. She wrote that understanding nature was the first step towards the release of matter into spirit. Instead of depicting a plant, however, she chose to search for its secret and to portray its inner essence in her painting. The motif arose from the colors.
Hilma af Klint believed that every flower and every stone could open the door to a higher, spiritual world (Voss p. 357). She noted in 1917: “First I want to try to understand the flowers of the earth…in the end I want to penetrate the forest, explore the silent moss, the trees and the many animals that inhabit the cool, dark undergrowth.” With Thomasine's help, she recorded her findings in notes and in radiant pictures that she called “flowers, mosses and lichens.”
She realized that the microcosm and macrocosm were connected: the smallest snail shell was subject to the same cosmic laws as the galaxies in the universe. “Above and below” was already taught by Paracelsus in the 16th century. In her own words, she was painting patterns of life. The snail was a hermaphroditic animal that united both sexes, and she chose the spiral as the central motif in her paintings to symbolize the perfect harmony of cosmic geometry.
In the years that followed, Hilma af Klint tried to find opportunities to present her paintings to the public, traveling with Thomasine to Amsterdam and London, among other places, to take part in exhibitions there. She met with little enthusiasm. She dreamed of building a temple, as the higher powers had wanted her to do. It was to be spiral-shaped and open up to the sky. But as she was by then almost 70 years old, Hilma af Klint decided to leave the realization of her dream to future generations. Without her knowledge, the Guggenheim Museum was founded in New York in 1939 – a spiral-shaped building.
In her later years, she organized her paintings, appointed her nephew Erik af Klint as administrator and archivist and stipulated that her work should not be shown to the public until 20 years after her death. She believed that her contemporaries would be unable to understand and appreciate her paintings. Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 82 after a life of material modesty, but characterized by enormous willpower, energy and ingenious creativity and inspired by magical traditions, theosophy, esoteric teachings and nature itself. She left behind an oeuvre of 1300 paintings and 26,000 pages of text.
Her great-nephew Johann af Klint did in fact wait until 1966 to open the archive, offering exhibitions to the Stockholm museums that same year. He was turned down, and it was not until 20 years later that an exhibition was held in Los Angeles. There was no significant response. She was not even mentioned in an exhibition on abstract art at MoMA. Is one reason for the museum directors' skepticism the fact that Hilma af Klint was a woman? And one with vision? “Art history is a man's suit; the fabric is male and it is tailored by men” (intro to the film Beyond the Visible). Finally, in 2018, the Guggenheim Museum in New York exhibited Hilma af Klint – and it was a sensation. A record number of visitors – 600,000 people – saw Hilma af Klint's paintings and the catalog became the museum's best-seller.
Hilma af Klint's message endures: matter is permeated by the invisible spirit, consciousness is permeated by the unconscious, nature is transparent towards the transcendent, the past pushes itself into the present, masculine and feminine are united. Biology and physics, neuroscience and psychoanalysis have confirmed most of her groundbreaking hunches. Now, a generation after her death, the time is ripe for Hilma af Klint. She painted abstractly before the term even existed. She changed the map of art history.
“But what did Hilma actually describe in her paintings? There are no simple answers to this question. Because how you read a map depends entirely on where you are currently standing. And so that is something that everyone can only answer for themselves.” (Hillström/Eklund, The Invisible World of Hilma af Klint)
(Text from 2022; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
What I needed was courage. And I found it through the influence of the spiritual world, which gave me rare and wonderful instructions.
The pictures were painted directly by me, without preliminary sketches and with great energy. I had no idea what the paintings would depict, and yet I worked quickly and confidently without changing a single brushstroke.
I want to gain a deep insight into our earthly existence in relation to the element at the center of the universe.
The more vividly thoughts vibrate, the more agile life on earth becomes, anyone will be able to work on matter with their imagination.
Behind the effervescent power of the plant lies the warmth of feeling, behind the agility of the animal lies the power of thought. In the seriousness of the stone thinking and feeling are united.
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