Hilma af Klint (Father: Captain Victor af Klint, a Swedish naval commander; Mother: Mathilda af Klint, née Sonntag)
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose groundbreaking works are now recognized as among the first abstract paintings in Western art history. Her radical, non-objective creations predate the purely abstract compositions of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich by several years, fundamentally challenging the established timeline of modern art.
Af Klint began her career with a traditional artistic education. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887 and established herself as a respected portrait and landscape painter, as well as a meticulous botanical illustrator. However, her inner life was deeply rooted in spiritualism, a movement gaining immense popularity across Europe. She became deeply engaged with Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and later, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy.
In 1896, she formed a spiritualist group called “The Five” (De Fem) with four other women. During their séances, she acted as a medium, receiving messages and visions from spiritual guides they called the “High Masters.” In 1906, at the age of 44, she began her most significant project: The Paintings for the Temple. Comprising 193 monumental paintings created between 1906 and 1915, this series was intended to be installed in a spiral temple to help viewers achieve spiritual enlightenment. Her aesthetic shifted entirely to complex, vibrant geometric forms, biomorphic shapes, and mysterious symbolic text.
Recognizing that the world was not yet ready to understand her visionary work, af Klint rarely exhibited her abstract paintings during her lifetime. Upon her death in 1944 following a traffic accident, she left behind over 1,200 paintings and 26,000 pages of notes, with the strict stipulation that her abstract work must remain hidden from the public until at least twenty years after her passing.
Her work remained virtually unknown until 1986, when it was finally exhibited in Los Angeles. A blockbuster 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York broke attendance records, firmly rewriting art history and cementing af Klint’s legacy as a true pioneer of abstraction.
Active in others filds : Spiritualism (Mediumship), Botanical and Veterinary Illustration.
