Hilma af Klint
Who
Swedish painter who made large, fully abstract paintings from 1906, years before Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian. Trained at the Royal Academy in Stockholm; earned a living with portraits and botanical drawings while producing the abstract work in private.
Why they matter
The 193-painting cycle Paintings for the Temple rewrites the start date of abstraction. The Ten Largest, at over three metres tall, are among the biggest paintings any Swedish artist of the period made, and were done in tempera on paper in a matter of weeks.
What to buy
Prints: reproductions have multiplied since 2018; the Foundation's own site lists licensed sources. Books: the Guggenheim's Paintings for the Future catalogue is the standard introduction; the multi-volume catalogue raisonne from Bokforlaget Stolpe is the complete record. Originals: none. The estate is held together by the Foundation and does not sell.
Notes
Her will asked that the abstract work not be shown until twenty years after her death. It was first exhibited publicly in Los Angeles in 1986, and the Guggenheim's 2018-2019 show was the most visited in that museum's history.
Story
Af Klint said the abstract paintings were commissioned. From 1896 she met with four other women as "The Five" for seances and automatic drawing, and in 1906 she recorded that a spirit guide had assigned her the temple paintings. She painted them, she said, without preliminary sketches and with no idea what the images meant, working out the symbolism afterwards in notebooks that run to thousands of pages. Rudolf Steiner visited her studio in 1908 and was unimpressed, which discouraged her for years. She left the work to her nephew with instructions to keep it sealed, apparently convinced her own time could not understand it. Stockholm's Moderna Museet declined the collection as a gift in the 1970s.
Key works
- The Ten Largest (1907) - Hilma af Klint Foundation (on deposit at Moderna Museet)
- Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915) - Hilma af Klint Foundation
- Altarpieces (1915) - Hilma af Klint Foundation
See the work
Prints
Books
See also
Browse all 2,101 artists · Open in the directory · Where the work hangs: 2 museums on a map