the home of art history for everyone. Today  we are going to look at the Swedish artist,  

Hilma af Klint, once barely a footnote in the  history of art, but now she transcends the modern  

art greats such as Kandinsky and Mondrian.  How did this happen? Let's find out. 

Hilma af Klint was born on 26 October 1862,  at the Karlberg Palace in Solna, Sweden, the  

naval academy where her father was based. She was  the fourth of five children born to Mathilda and  

Victor af Klint who were both staunch Protestants.  Her father was a mathematician and an admiral in  

the Swedish navy. Most of her childhood was spent  in the Karlberg Palace, but during the summers,  

the family would move to Adelsö, an island in Lake  Malaren, near Stockholm. It was here that Hilma's  

fascination with nature and organic life began. In 1872 the family moved to Stockholm  

where Hilma attended the General School for Girls.  In 1880 she moved on to the Technical School,  

now known as Konstfack, and studied classical  portraiture under the supervision of the artist  

Kerstin Cardon. Around this time, she became  a committed vegetarian, usually wore black and  

began to develop an interest in the spiritual  and the occult. These interests grew rapidly  

following the death of her ten-year-old sister,  Hermina when Hilma was just eighteen years old.  

Soon after this tragic event she attended her  first séances and mystical group meetings. 

At the age of 20 in 1882, Hilma enrolled at the  Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She  

was one of the first women to do so and spent the  next five years studying drawing, portraiture and  

landscape painting. She graduated with honours and  as a result, was awarded a studio in the Academy's  

“Atelier Building”, in Stockholm's artist quarter. Here she met fellow student Anna Cassel  

who became a lifelong friend. At this time  Hilma painted landscapes and portraits very  

successfully and this quickly became the source  of her financial independence and stability.  

She was lucky in that the Scandinavian education  system, unlike most of Europe and America admitted  

both men and women to their Academies and it was  not uncommon for women to make a living from their  

art. However, as we shall see it was unusual for  women such as Hilma af Klint to become visionaries  

and outshine their male contemporaries. In 1889 the Swedish Theosophical Society  

was founded in Stockholm, in the house of  the writer Viktor Rydberg and Hilma af Klint  

soon became a member. Theosophy was based on the  idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity  

without the distinction of race, creed, sex,  caste, or colour. It encouraged the study  

of religion, philosophy, and science and the  investigation of the unexplained laws of nature  

and the powers latent in man. In 1896 she joined the Edelweiss Society  

but left soon after with four other like-minded  women artists and founded the “Friday Group”,  

also known as “The Five”. They met every Friday  for spiritual meetings, including prayers, studies  

of the New Testament, meditation and séances.  The medium, Sigrid Hedman, was one of the five,  

led exercises in automatic writing, a form  of writing and drawing which began with no  

preconceived subject or composition in mind. This  idea was decades before the Surrealists would  

use automatic drawing to generate their ideas. The Five established contact with spiritual beings  

whom they called “The High Masters” and received  messages through a psychograph, an instrument for  

recording spirit writings. They made meticulous  notes of their séances and these experiences led  

to a definite change in Hilma af Klint's art. In 1898 Hilma's father died so she moved to 52  

Brahegatan in Stockholm to live with her mother.  But in 1904 Hilma af Klint's work profoundly  

changed after what can only be described as  an otherworldly experience. During a séance,  

she claimed to have heard a voice telling her  to make paintings 'on an astral plane' in order  

to 'proclaim a new philosophy of life'. In 1905 she noted the voice Amaliel,  

had given her the following message: 'You  are to proclaim a new philosophy of life  

and you yourself are to be a part of the  new kingdom. Your labours will bear fruit.' 

So, in November 1906 at age 44,  Hilma af Klint began painting,  

'The Paintings for the Temple,' which comprised  several series of paintings on various themes.  

The first, preparatory group was called Primordial  Chaos and consisted of twenty-six small pictures.  

According to Hilma af Klint, these paintings were  created under the guidance of a High Master. The  

paintings are reminiscent of landscapes, of a  stormy sea above which flicker mysterious lights.  

Others break free entirely from representation,  combining geometric shapes such as spirals with  

dynamic brushstrokes, letters  of the alphabet and symbols.  

It was a conscious decision on her part to keep  these works secret, only showing them to a small,  

very select group of friends. In 1908, Rudolf Steiner,  

leader of the German Theosophical Society, held  several lectures in Stockholm. On one occasion  

he visited Hilma af Klint's studio and saw  some of the early 'Paintings for the Temple'  

and declared he could not decipher them and  doubted anyone one would in the next 50 years. 

Later in 1908 Hilma moved to a studio in  a building on Brahegatan in Stockholm,  

so she can take care of her blind mother, whom  she had cared for, for several years. As a result,  

work on “The Paintings for the Temple” stopped  for the next four years during which time  

she took up the study of philosophy. In 1912 Hilma af Klint rented a villa  

owned by the Giertta family on the island  Munsö near Stockholm and resumed work on  

the “Paintings for the Temple”. Between 1912 and  1915 she painted another 82 works to complete the  

“Paintings for the Temple” which totalled 193  works, subdivided into series and sub-groups. 

Hilma af Klint shared an interest in the spiritual  with the other pioneers of abstract art including  

Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet  Mondrian. And like Hilma af Klint many were  

drawn to Theosophy, which opened a route  towards a new world of spiritual reality,  

rather than merely depicting visual  impressions of the world around them. 

To Hilma af Klint her spiritual guides, who  inspired and communicated with her, were as  

real as the impressions provided by her physical  senses. By visualising these inner processes  

and experiences and giving them visual form, she  created a highly idiosyncratic form of expression. 

Had she not kept her abstract work secret  she would surely have held the accolade of  

producing the world's first abstract paintings.  Instead, Kandinsky's paintings of 1911 would,  

until recently, come to be recognised  as the first abstract works of art. 

In 1911 Hilma af Klint's early  naturalist paintings were exhibited  

by the Association of Swedish Women Artists at  the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm.  

She participated in the world congress of the  Theosophical Society in Stockholm in 1913, and the  

following year exhibited naturalistic paintings  at the Baltic exhibition in Malmö, with artists  

from the Nordic and Baltic countries as well as  Germany, and Russia who, incidentally, featured  

works by Wassily Kandinsky. She was convinced the  world was not ready for her abstract paintings. 

1916 saw Hilma af Klint develop her metaphysical  paintings through further studies of the  

spiritual. The Parsifal Series, resulted from  this study and was a numbered sequence of 144  

works on paper. The series title may refer  to the Arthurian legend in which Parsifal,  

one of the Knights of the Round Table, took  part in the quest for the Holy Grail and like  

the legend of the Holy Grail, the paintings  represent a search for spiritual knowledge. 

The “Atoms” series is concerned with  the world beyond the observable world,  

remember this is a time when science was  discovering x rays, sound waves, atoms,  

subatomic particles and the like. Hilma af Klint  explored how she might create a visual equivalent  

of this hidden existence. Her images include  notations that indicate atoms moving through a  

period of development, until they achieve oneness,  much like the path and goals of spiritualism. 

Hilma af Klint's new studio was completed in  1917 in Munsö near Stockholm, and it was here  

that she first showed her Atoms series to a  few selected people. The following year Hilma,  

her mother and her nurse, Thomasine Andersson  moved to the villa Furuheim in Munsö. 

1920 was an intensely creative year for Hilma af  Klint. In several series of small oil paintings,  

she explored the great world religions.  She saw religions as based on duality,  

that is, a division into opposites, such  as good and evil, order and chaos. None of  

them appeared to Hilma af Klint to attain unity. Later, in 1920 following the death of her mother,  

Hilma and Thomasine Andersson, moved  to Helsingborg where Hilma joined the  

Anthroposophical Society. Later in the  year they visited Dornach in Switzerland,  

where Hilma again met Rudolf Steiner, a  founder member of the Anthroposophical society.  

Influenced by his views, Hilma af Klint  gave up painting geometric compositions.  

And after a two-year hiatus in 1922 began painting  water-colours in which she allowed the flow of the  

colour to dictate the subject matter. She also  painted watercolours relating to nature, as in  

the series On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees. During the 1920's she spent long periods  

in Dornach, studying anthroposophy and  attended many of Rudolf Steiner's lectures.  

Between the years 1925 and 1930 she appears not to  have painted at all or produced any written texts. 

In 1927 she donated a series of flower studies,  mosses and lichen to the scientific library in  

Dornach, in which she had systemised nature  according to her own research. Unfortunately,  

this collection appears to have disappeared. In 1932 she painted A map of Great Britain, in  

which she foresaw the second World war. Here you  can see a pale face blowing fire towards Britain,  

a foretelling of the Blitz of 1940, perhaps.  According to a great nephew Johan af klint  

she had the gift of prophecy. In 1935 she moved to Lund,  

near Malmö and in 1940 Thomasine Andersson, her  lifelong companion died. Later in 1944 she went  

to live with her cousin Hedvig af Klint in  Stockholm. But later that year on 21 October  

1944 she died from complications resulting  from injuries received in a traffic accident.  

She was 81 years old. Interestingly, Wassily  Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian also died in 1944. 

On her death Hilma af Klint left more than  1,200 works of art, which had only been seen  

by a handful of people, in addition to some  125 notebooks which were found in trunks,  

some of which had never been opened.  The notebooks detailed her thoughts,  

mediumship experiences and notes about  her paintings. In one of notebooks, she  

stipulated that her work should not be publicly  displayed until at least 20 years after her death. 

Hilma af Klint did not have any contact  with the modern movements of her time,  

yet she is now generally considered to be the  pioneer of abstract art - her first abstract  

painting created in 1906, pre-dates Kandinsky's by  five years. The delayed appreciation of her work  

is due in part to her own wishes. She rarely  exhibited or participated in any form of  

self-promotion and only showed her abstract works  to a select few. In fact, it was not until 1986,  

when one of her abstract paintings was shown  in a collective exhibition in Los Angeles,  

entitled The Spiritual in Art, did the  general public see her work. In 2013  

the Modern Museum in Stockholm hosted the  first exhibition dedicated solely to her work  

and it was from this point that her work  began to receive the acclaim it deserved. 

Belatedly, Hilma af Klint is now  regarded in the art world as the  

true pioneer and inventor of abstraction. Thank you for watching, I hope you have really  

enjoyed learning about Hilma af Klint,  a truly innovative artist. If you have,  

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