Hilma af Klint

The Ten Largest

After 20 years of artistic work, af Klint painted her first series of abstract paintings. “Works for the Temple” were created between 1906 and 1915 and included 193 paintings. “The Ten Largest” represents the phases of life from early childhood to old age. She described the artwork as “gates to other dimensions.”

af Klint went to work in Stockholm where she made a living off her portraits, landscapes, and botanical drawings. But af Klint’s private work was very different.

But there were other people with similar interests. At the Academy of Fine Art, she met the first of four women who shared her ideas. They called themselves “The Five.” They met regularly to discuss their ideas, pray, meditate, and read. They even tried to speak to angels, ghosts, and spirits from other dimensions!

af Klint created her own visual language that she used to visualize invisible ideas. Blue represented femininity. Yellow masculinity. Pinks and reds showed different degrees of love. Spirals represented growth. Good and evil, earthly, and spiritual were represented with colors, shapes, movements, patterns, and “primordial geometry.” She wrote and drew about religion, plants, and atoms.

In 1908, af Klint invited spiritualist Rudolph Steiner to her studio. He was not impressed by af Klint’s artwork. He compared it to black magic and said that it would take 50 years for anyone to understand it. af Klint was so devastated by Steiner’s criticism that she stopped painting for 4 years.

Importantly though, Steiner kept photos of af Klint’s art. And later that same year, he met Wassily Kandinsky who had not yet attempted abstract painting. Art historians now assume that af Klint’s work influenced Kandinsky’s experiments with abstraction, and that his reputation as the inventor of abstraction was given to him unfairly.

af Klint was curious about science, religion, and philosophy. She used abstract painting and symbolism to explore her spiritual thoughts and feelings. These paintings were so new and different that she didn’t think anyone else would understand them.

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and a mystic.

Through her work with The Five,

af Klint began to create experimental artwork. She drew without thinking or planning anything at all. She felt that she was “being directed by a force that would literally guide her hand.”

These automatic drawings were created as early as 1896. Wassily Kandinsky is credited as the inventor of abstract art, but af Klint’s abstractions predate his by almost 15 years!

Hilma was born on October 26, 1862. She grew up on an island surrounded by nature. She was interested in plants and math and- of course - art. She learned to paint portraits and landscapes before going to college at the Royal Academy of Fine Art.

Hilma af Klint died in a car accident in 1944.

Her will instructed that her artwork should be kept secret for 20 years. When the boxes were opened in the 1960s, almost no-one knew what might be found inside.

The collection included 125 diaries

and 1200 paintings!

Hilma af Klint’s artwork was introduced to international audiences for the first time in the 1980s. “Hilma af Klimt: Paintings for the Future” was the most visited exhibition in the history of the Guggenheim Museum.

Art historians are working now to give Hilma af Klint the credit she deserves as perhaps the first abstract artist in the history of Western art.

After af Klint completed “The Works for the Temple,” she stopped working from “spiritual guidance,” but she continued to practice abstract painting. She worked smaller and most often with watercolor. She produced more than 150 illustrated notebooks.

Hilma af Klint

Fun fact: Hilma af Klimt’s paintings predicted specific events of World War II almost ten years before they happened!