The Ten Largest are ten paintings Hilma af Klint made in 1907 to show the four stages of a human life: childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. Each is more than three meters tall and built from curved shapes, symbols and even words.
Af Klint said the idea was not hers. In January 1906 a spiritual being named Amaliel offered her a commission, and the Ten Largest grew out of the work that followed.
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She took the commission, then showed the result to almost no one. The Hilma af Klint Foundation says her non-figurative work was shown only in anthroposophical and theosophical settings, among them seventeen spiritual paintings in Stockholm in 1913 and works from her Temple cycle in London in 1928.
That is unusual for work on this scale. Each of the ten is more than three meters tall, bigger than a standard doorway, and she kept them in her studio.
They belong to a cycle of 193 paintings she called Paintings for the Temple. In 1932 she marked her notebooks to stay closed until twenty years after her death.
Who handed her the commission?
A spirit called Amaliel, one of the beings af Klint knew as the High Masters. She had been trying to reach them since 1896, when she and four friends founded a circle during a séance.
The circle called itself The Five. Its members were Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman, Mathilda Nilsson and af Klint. For twelve years the women recorded the messages they believed came from the High Masters.
In January 1906, according to the chronology kept by the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Amaliel offered her the commission and she accepted immediately. By November she had started the first series of the Paintings for the Temple, titled Primordial Chaos.
The cycle kept growing until 1915 and reached 193 paintings. The Ten Largest came early in it, in 1907, painted on sheets of paper spread across her studio floor.
What You'll Discover
How fast she painted them.
Why she kept them out of sight.
Why Kandinsky got the credit.
What finally brought them out.