Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter, born near Stockholm on 26 October 1862, who died on 21 October 1944 after a tram accident, five days before her 82nd birthday. From 1906 she painted large abstract canvases, years before Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich, and asked that none be shown until twenty years after her death.
Her work reached a wide public only in 2018, when her show at the Guggenheim in New York became the best-attended in the museum's history.
She did not think she was inventing anything. She believed she was taking dictation.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
In January 1906 a spirit she called Amaliel offered her a commission, and af Klint wrote that she said yes at once. She expected the task to take a year. "In the end it became the greatest work of my life," she recalled. By 1915 she had painted 193 canvases for a temple that was never built.
Then she put them away. In 1932 she wrote that the work should stay unseen for twenty years after her death, and she spent a year sorting and documenting it.
Her will covered roughly 1,300 paintings and more than 25,000 pages of notes. The twenty years she asked for ran out in 1964. The first time the paintings appeared in a major museum was 1986, forty-two years after she died, in a Los Angeles group show on spiritual art.
What You'll Discover
Who she was before the spirits.
What the spirits asked of her.
What the mystic made of her paintings.
What her ages of life look like.
What happened on the day she died.
Where the paintings hang today.