Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter, born near Stockholm on October 26, 1862. She died on October 21, 1944, after an accident, five days before her 82nd birthday.
From 1906 she painted large abstract canvases, years before Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich. She wanted them kept from the public long after her death, and they reached a wide audience 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. Af Klint believed she was taking dictation from spirits, and for most of her life she kept what they dictated out of public view.
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Nothing in her upbringing pointed that way. Af Klint came from a navy family. She was born at Karlberg Palace, a former royal residence that then housed the naval academy just outside Stockholm, where her father, Fredrik Viktor af Klint, served as an officer. An uncle, Gustaf, was a naval officer as well, and a mapmaker.
The household also knew loss. Of her siblings, only her brother, another Gustaf, and her sister Ida lived to adulthood, and her youngest sister, Hermina, died in 1880 at the age of ten.
That same year af Klint began her training as a painter, first at the technical school in Stockholm until 1882. She then entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she stayed until 1887.
She belonged to one of the first generations of women the Academy admitted, at a time when many art schools in Europe still turned women away, and she left with its scholarship for good results.
Her first career was a respectable one. She earned her living with landscapes, portraits and exact botanical and veterinary illustrations. Farmhouse, painted in 1891, shows that public side of her work: a calm, careful picture with nothing in it of the spirals she would paint fifteen years later.
Her private life ran on a different track. In 1896 she and four other women, among them Anna Cassel, a friend from the Academy, formed a circle they called The Five, also known as the Friday group.
The Five met to hold séances, sessions in which they tried to reach spirits. The women practiced automatic drawing, letting the hand move without a plan, and af Klint kept detailed notes of every session, writing down what the group believed came through.
In January 1906, ten years after the circle began, a séance produced a message unlike the others.
A commission for a temple
It came from Amaliel, one of the High Masters, the spirit guides the Five believed were speaking to them, and it offered af Klint a task far larger than one painting…
What You'll Discover
What Amaliel asked her to paint.
What the ten giant paintings stand for.
What Rudolf Steiner thought of her paintings.
How long she wanted her work hidden.
What happened on the day she died.
Where her paintings can be seen today.