Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint began her artistic training in 1880 at Tekniska skolan (the Technical School) in Stockholm. She simultaneously studied portrait painting for Kerstin Cardon (1843 – 1924). This was followed by studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, 1882 - 1887. As a gifted graduate of the Academy, she was given access to one of the Academy’s much sought-after studios (Hamngatan 5) in the very heart of Stockholm. The studio, the view from which she immortalized in Winter view of Kungsträdgården park (1890, oil on canvas, 23.5 x 30.5 cm, p. 118 in Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 7, private collection) was shared with female artists, Alma Arnell (1857 – 1934) and Lotten Rönquist (1864 – 1912), until af Klint left it in 1908.

After graduating, af Klint managed to earn a living as an artist. Initially drawing and painting landscapes and portraits in the naturalistic style, early works that testify to her gift for precise observation. At the beginning of the 20th century af Klint began developing her oeuvre, mainly within communities of women. Like many of her contemporaries, she was interested in spiritualism and occultism. Through the group called “The Five” (the other four members being the artist Anna Cassel [1860 – 1937] – a friend from the Academy, Sigrid Hedman [1855 – 1922] – also a trained artist, Cornelia Cederberg [1854 – 1933] and Mathilda Nilsson [1844 – 1923]) af Klint encountered higher planes of consciousness during séances.

Between 1906 and 1915 she created her central body of work, The Paintings for the Temple. This major cycle of, mainly, abstract works comprises 193 paintings in various series, groups and subgroups. Hilma af Klint, who produced the first 111 paintings between November 1906 and April 1908, described how she had painted them as a medium (with the shapes of the works coming to her spiritually): “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 brushstroke”. Another 82 works were painted between 1912 and 1915, completing the entire cycle. Her hand was no longer guided this time – she had grown more familiar with going in and out of a heightened state of consciousness – which meant that she could influence the aesthetics of the images to a greater extent, inspired by the words and images she heard and saw inside herself.

Hilma af Klints abstract paintings are as powerful as they are enigmatic, and she left behind a comprehensive and visually striking oeuvre (her estate, left to her nephew Erik af Klint [1901 – 1981] upon her death in 1944, comprised more than 1000 works and about 125 notebooks). Iris Müller-Westermann writes (in [Eds.] Iris Müller–Westermann & Milena Högsberg, Hilma af Klint. Artist. Researcher. Medium, exhibition catalogue, Moderna Museet, Malmö, 2020):

A radical pioneer of an art that abandoned the depiction of visible reality, the artist opened doors to new horizons at the beginning of the twentieth century. As early as 1906 she was developing an abstract imagery, several years before Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and Frantisek Kupka, who are still regarded as the forerunners of twentieth-century abstract art. […] Although af Klint exhibited her early, figurative works, she almost never showed her abstract paintings in public during her lifetime, mandating that this was not to occur until at least twenty years after her death. She was convinced that people would only then start to understand their significance. Today, many of these fascinating images look as if they could have been produced in the twenty-first century. One hundred years ago, Hilma af Klint painted pictures for the future.

Almost 82 years old Hilma af Klint passed away, following an accident, 1944. In 1972 the Foundation for Hilma af Klint’s work was created to make the extensive estate accessible and known to the general public. In 1986 af Klint’s abstract paintings were shown for the first time to a wider audience in the exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890 – 1985”, at LACMA, Los Angeles, USA. In 1989 Liljevalchs Konsthall (Liljevalchs Public Art Gallery) in Stockholm had the honour of being the first to show Hilma af Klint’s entire cycle of Paintings for the Temple (193 works)! The gargantuan presentation was followed up by Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013. This exhibition, the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the artist, called “Hilma af Klint – Abstract Pioneer”, toured to various countries around Europe and was seen by over a million people. More recently, when Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented “Hilma af Klint – Paintings for the Future” in 2018 - 2019, the museum doubled the exhibition’s length of run (from three to six months), thereby breaking visitor records.

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