A Swedish mystic painted abstract art before Kandinsky, then hid it
In 1906 a 44-year-old Stockholm painter began producing huge canvases of spirals, circles and coded colour, years ahead of the pioneers usually credited with inventing abstraction. Hilma af Klint believed spirits guided her brush, and she ordered that the work stay out of sight until two decades after she died.
Born on 26 October 1862, af Klint was the fourth child of a Swedish naval commander, Captain Victor af Klint, and spent childhood summers at the family manor on Adelsö, an island in Lake Mälaren. She loved botany and mathematics, trained at the Technical School in Stockholm, and entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at twenty, studying portraiture, landscape and botanical drawing from 1882 to 1887. She left with honours and a studio in the Academy's building in central Stockholm.
Her spiritual life deepened after her younger sister Hermina died in 1880. With four women she met through the Academy, among them Anna Cassel, she formed a circle known as The Five. Their meetings mixed prayer, a sermon and Bible study with séances aimed at reaching beings they called the High Masters. By 1896 the group was experimenting with automatic drawing, and af Klint came to feel that an outside force was literally moving her hand.
The result was the Paintings for the Temple, made between 1906 and 1915 with a pause from 1908 to 1912. One count gives 196 works; her own letter to Rudolf Steiner mentions 111. The Ten Largest, from 1907, each measure roughly 240 by 320 cm and trace a human life from infancy to old age. Colour carries meaning: blue for the female spirit, yellow for the male, pink and red for love. The critic Daniel Birnbaum suspects Cassel helped paint them.
Steiner, whom she met in 1908, told her that her contemporaries would not grasp the pictures for another fifty years, and she reportedly stopped painting for four years afterwards. The familiar story that she never wanted to exhibit is now questioned: the historian Julia Voss found that around 1920 she discussed a show with editors of the Dutch magazine Wendingen. She died on 21 October 1944.
Source: Hilma af Klint
