Hilma af Klint: The Complete Story
Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter who made fully abstract art around 1906, years before Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich, the men the textbooks still credit with inventing it. Then she hid almost all of it, and the world only caught up a century later.
Her canvases are unlike anything else from their time: huge fields of spirals, circles, soft pinks and yellows, letters and flowers, built to make invisible spiritual forces visible. She believed they were guided by powers beyond herself.
Her story is part art history scandal, part séance, part one of the great rediscoveries of our age. Here is the whole thing.
The claim that rewrites art history
Open almost any textbook and it will tell you abstract art began around 1910 with Wassily Kandinsky. Af Klint was painting pictures of no real object as early as 1906.
That makes her a serious candidate for the first abstract artist in Western art. She got there first, working in near total privacy in Stockholm while the famous men were still painting recognizable things.
This is the heart of why she matters, and why her rediscovery has forced museums to rewrite part of the story of modern abstract art.
Why almost no one knew
Here is the twist that kept her hidden for decades. Af Klint sensed her work was too strange for her own time.
In her will, she asked that her abstract paintings stay unseen until 20 years after her death. She trusted a future audience would understand what her contemporaries could not.
So more than a thousand works sat in storage. She died in 1944, and the art world only began to look seriously in the 1980s. She built her own delay into history.
The séances and The Five
Af Klint did not see herself as inventing anything. She thought she was receiving it.
From 1896 she met regularly with four other women in a group they called The Five. They held séances, prayed and made automatic drawings, convinced they were in contact with spiritual guides.
She said her greatest works were commissioned by these unseen guides. Whatever you make of that, it freed her hand. Believing the images were not hers to judge let her paint things no trained artist of 1906 would dare.
Her secret language of color and symbol
Af Klint's abstraction is not random. It runs on a private code, and once you know a few signs the paintings open up.
Blue and yellow. Blue stands for the feminine, yellow for the masculine. Their meeting is one of her constant themes.
The spiral and the snail. Signs of growth and evolution, the slow climb toward higher knowledge.
The swan. A symbol of duality and union, of opposites becoming one.
Letters and words. The W, and small inscriptions, that stand for matter, spirit and the forces between them.
Her style sits close to Symbolism, the movement that painted ideas and the spirit rather than the visible world. She simply pushed it all the way into pure shape and color.
The Paintings for the Temple
Her masterwork is a single vast project: 193 paintings made between 1906 and 1915, which she called The Paintings for the Temple.
They were meant to hang in a spiral temple that was never built, leading the viewer upward as they climbed. The best known group, The Ten Largest, are enormous sheets, taller than a person, showing the stages of human life from childhood to old age in soft pinks, blues and oranges.
We save the close, painting by painting readings for our paid stories. Here, what matters is the scale of the ambition: a whole temple of the soul, painted by a woman almost no one was watching.
What actually shaped her
Af Klint was not painting in a vacuum. Two huge currents fed her work.
The first was spiritual: theosophy and later the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, which held that a hidden order lies behind the visible world. She once showed her work to Steiner, who reportedly told her the world was not ready for it.
The second was science. This was the age of X-rays, radio waves and the splitting of the atom. Suddenly there was proof that powerful, real forces existed beyond human sight. Af Klint wanted to paint exactly those unseen forces.
The conventional painter underneath
Here is what surprises people. Af Klint could paint in a perfectly traditional way, and did.
She trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, one of the first generation of women allowed in, and graduated with honors. To earn a living she painted careful botanical studies, portraits and landscapes, often in watercolor.
That respectable public career was the cover. Behind it, in private, she was making the radical work she showed almost no one.
Her life off the canvas
Af Klint was born in 1862 at a naval academy outside Stockholm, into a family of mapmakers and officers. The precision of charts and diagrams never left her work.
The death of her younger sister in 1880 turned her toward spiritualism and the search for contact beyond death. She never married. Her closest companion for years was a woman named Thomasine Andersson, and she spent long stretches painting on a quiet island in Lake Malaren.
She lived simply and privately, pouring everything into a body of work she assumed would only be understood long after she was gone.
How Hilma af Klint died
She kept working into her seventies, organizing and annotating her huge archive so a future audience could decode it.
In 1944 she was hurt in a tram accident and died soon after, at 81. She left more than a thousand paintings and works on paper, and a will telling the world to wait.
The rediscovery
The comeback is almost as remarkable as the work. Her abstractions were largely unseen until a 1986 exhibition in Los Angeles on spiritual art.
A major show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013 began the real reappraisal. Then, in 2018, a survey at the Guggenheim in New York drew around 600,000 visitors and became the most attended exhibition in that museum's history.
Suddenly the public was asking the obvious question: how had we never heard of her, and was the official story of who invented abstraction simply wrong?
Where to see Hilma af Klint
Be warned, she is harder to find than most masters. Almost all of her work is held together by the Hilma af Klint Foundation, and she has no single permanent room of her own.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm. The closest thing to a home base, and the museum that led her modern rediscovery.
Major touring shows. Her work travels the world in blockbuster exhibitions, from New York to London to Asia. Catching one is the surest way to see The Ten Largest in person.
The Guggenheim, New York. Site of the record breaking 2018 show that made her a household name.
Two good starting points online are the Moderna Museet and the Guggenheim.
Hilma af Klint, quick questions
What is she known for? Pioneering abstract painting around 1906, before Kandinsky.
Who were The Five? A group of five women who held séances and made spirit guided art together.
Why was her work hidden? Her will asked that it stay unseen for 20 years after her death.
What did she paint with? Mostly oil and tempera on canvas and paper, plus watercolor for her nature studies.
How did she die? From injuries after a tram accident in 1944, aged 81.
Where can I see her? Mainly through the Hilma af Klint Foundation, the Moderna Museet, and touring shows.
If af Klint's story struck you, keep pulling the thread:
The Old Masters Were Women Too, more women the history books quietly erased.
10 Women Artists You Need to Know, a guide to the names that got left out.
What is Abstract Art, the movement she may have started first.