Hilma af Klint - Painting for the Future

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July was a month of change at home and worldwide. It is an exciting time to be a woman. For the first time, 50 percent of the athletes competing in the Summer Olympics are women and we have a woman leading the Democratic campaign for President. I was encouraged to learn there are 369 female billionaires in 2024! I am hopeful about the future for you, our country, and women like me. I am grateful to all the empowered women who crashed the glass ceilings and cleared the paths for us to live full and vibrant lives as mothers, artists, executives, performers, athletes, and politicians. I strongly believe the world will be a better place when every human being is encouraged to follow their internal guidance and share their own personal genius with the world.

This month I am excited to honor one of my favorite empowered childless cat ladies from the art world, Hilma af Klint. It is her extraordinary achievement to attain monumental fame following an inward path. She was a woman before her time. The 2018 Guggenheim Museum retrospective of her work was titled "Paintings for the Future"

Described as a pioneering mystic and medium Hilma af Klint was paradoxically delicate and powerful, working quietly and privately away from the art world, Hilma rocked the art world and rewrote art history when it was discovered that she created large abstract canvases five years prior to the first by Wassily Kandinsky and experimented- with writing and drawing guided by the unconscious decades before the Surrealists. 

af Klint's sensitivity to the ethereal was married to an analytical and scientific way of navigating the world. She was an eager botanist, well-read in natural sciences and world religions. She was wise enough to stipulate that her works, comprising over 1,300 paintings, 100 texts, and 26,000 pages of notes and sketches, were not to be shown for 20 years following her death, and she also stated that no work could be sold separately, ensuring that her artworks could not become misunderstood commodities. 

As a human able to renounce the ego at a time in history when building a cult of personality was often a key to success, af Klint stands apart for her commitment to a path of intuitive intelligence and humility. 

Af Klint's art combined geometry, figuration, symbolism, language, scientific research, and religion in a radical new way. Her route to abstraction drew from an interest in mathematics and from her studies of organic growth, including shells and flowers, all culminating in a desire to portray life through a spiritual lens. She was fascinated by the scientific discoveries of her time, Darwinism, the X-ray machine, microscopy, electromagnetic waves, and telegraphy.

Childhood:

As a female artist at the start of the 20th century, af Klint received only some of the support she needed. Born the fourth of five children into a prominent Swedish family — her father was a naval officer and her grandfather was a nautical cartographer, Hilma first attended the Technical School, now known as Konstfack, studying classical portraiture. Following the death of her ten-year-old sister, Hermina when af Klint was just eighteen years old Hilma began an investigation of spiritual work. attending séances, and mystical group meetings to create a dialogue with the spirit world. 

Education:

At the age of twenty, in 1882, Hilma went to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. She remained at the Academy for a subsequent five years, continuing her classical art training. She was fortunate the Scandinavian education system already admitted both men and women to their Academies (unlike France and Germany) and it was not uncommon for women to make a living from their art. 

After graduating with honors in 1887, Hilma was awarded a scholarship in the form of a shared art studio in Stockholm's artist quarter, where her landscapes and portraits quickly became the source of her financial independence and stability. af Klint found commercial success as an artist in Stockholm. In collaboration with fellow art student Anna Cassel, she illustrated a book on horse surgery written by John Vennerholm, the director of the Veterinary Institute in Stockholm. She also served as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists.

Spiritualism and Anthroposophy

Af Klint became increasingly interested in Spiritualism—a movement based on the notion that a spiritual realm exists, and that people on Earth can interact with its inhabitants. Spiritualism and other mystical movements became popular across Europe around the turn of the century, especially among artists. These ideologies offered a way for people to reinterpret their religious beliefs in the context of rapid scientific advancement and a new awareness of the plurality of religions. 

In 1889 af Klint joined the Swedish Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Theosophy was founded by the Russian philosopher, Madame Blavatsky, and Anthroposophy was a spiritual movement developed by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who aimed to define a 'spiritual science', deeply rooted in the idea that spirituality could be rationally understood through both science and art. She joined the Edelweiss Society, a Stockholm association that combined Christian ideas, theosophical teachings and spiritualism.

The Five:

In 1896 af Klint began meeting regularly with four other female artists from the Edelweiss Society, Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson to explore spiritual realms through meditation and séances. The Five, active until 1908, recorded messages from higher spirits referred to as The High Masters. In trancelike states, the group communicated with mystic beings Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor – understood to be intermediaries of The High Masters – transcribing their messages via automatic writing and drawing.

By 1904, the High Masters began calling for a temple filled with paintings to be created. During a séance, af Klint heard a voice telling her to make paintings 'on an astral plane' in order to 'proclaim a new philosophy of life'. This was essentially a celestial commission, "from the entity Amaliel who told her to paint the 'immortal aspects of man". 

The Commission:

Historians once believed that only af Klint answered the call. But several scholars now say that Anna Cassel, another artist from the Five, was responsible for 14 paintings from a 1906-7 series called “Primordial Chaos”, a procession of images meant to illustrate the birth of the world and the dualities of life, as well as one painting from the 1907 “Eros” series. More may be discovered to be collective works from the group.

The year 1907 is imprinted on the minds of many people drawn to modern art as the year it all began — when Picasso opened the path to Cubism with the splintered forms of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Equally startling, 1907 is at least five years before the triumvirate of European geniuses viewed as the primary innovators of modernist abstraction — Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian — had their breakthroughs, primarily during World War I. 

When the other four members declined the commission, af Klint accepted and undertook a full year of preparation, praying and fasting, to receive the transmission of many of her most famous works. From 1906 at age 44, af Klint embarked on her most prolific phase of abstract painting. Culminating in 1915, she produced 193 works, each of which belonged to one of six series all over-arched by the larger body called Paintings for the Temple.

Paintings for the Temple:

In 1907, af Klint claimed to receive a message indicating that she should be the leader of the group. The other four refused to accept this new order and soon the group disintegrated and ceased to work collectively. From this point on af Klint focused entirely on the great commission known as The Paintings for the Temple.

The title for the artist's most important body of work, Paintings for the Temple is significant. It suggests that the canvases require a specific architectural 'home' and that they are designed to help viewers transcend beyond mortal and earthy realms. Af Klint does not make reference to any particular religion, ( she does not use the word church, synagogue, or mosque) but instead aspires to build a 'temple', a universal place of worship dedicated to seeking balance through the union of opposites.

She envisioned the temple as a four-story building centered around a spiral staircase, similar to the Guggenheim. Tracey Bashkoff, the Guggenheim museum’s director of collections points out that af Klint conceived of this structure around 1930, just as Hilla Rebay, the female abstract painter who was a founder of the Guggenheim, began imagining its spiral.

Rudolf Steiner:

While the rest of the world may not have been aware of af Klint’s art, at least one important philosopher was. In 1908, af Klint reached out to Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian founder of Anthroposophy, to ask for his thoughts on her paintings. Steiner, like af Klint, was involved in some of the day’s more out-there forms of spirituality and he pioneered the idea that there is a world beyond this one that informs the human experience. Much to af Klint's disappointment and distress, although attracted to individual works, Steiner disapproved of the artist's self-proclaimed role as 'medium' and advised her not to let anybody see the paintings for the next 50 years. Even later on, when Steiner was opening an Anthroposophy center in Dornach, af Klint approached the philosopher once again, hoping that he might want her mystical paintings for it. He rebuffed her.  There is even some conjecture that Steiner may have shown images af Klint’s work to Kandinsky as Kandinsky was also a follower.

After his correspondence, af Klint took a four-year hiatus from art-making, using her time instead to attend to her mother, who had suddenly gone blind. 

From 1912 onwards Hilma continued to paint the temple series with augmented vigor, always maintaining her public persona of being a portrait, and landscape artist and keeping her more significant personal work a secret.

Metaphysical Medium:

After 1915, once the Paintings for the Temple had been completed, af Klimt recorded that her 'divine guidance' had come to an end. In turn, the artist's approach to painting, mainly according to size and medium, changed. Firstly her oil paintings on canvas became smaller (as had been previously in her Primordial Chaos series) and then she began to experiment with watercolor on paper, returning to a more "automatic" process adopted in early meetings with 'The Five'.

During 1917 she wrote over 1,200 pages entitled Studier över Själslivet (Studies of the Life of the Soul), detailing her experience as a metaphysical medium.

Later years,

Af Klint’s mother died in 1920, and subsequently, she began another highly creative year, predominantly exploring world religions and studying the scientific intricacies of flowers and trees. She moved to Helsingborg, a coastal city in Southern Sweden, and between 1921 and 1930 often visited the Goetheanum in Switzerland (the world center for the Anthroposophy Movement), joining the Anthroposophy society, meeting Rudolf Steiner again, and became deeply immersed in his theories and ideas. During this time, af Klint was highly concerned with the legacy of her work, cataloging and photographing her paintings, documenting her practice, writing in her journals and sketchbooks, and reviewing previous discoveries.

 At an old age, she insightfully understood that her works would not be appreciated by the audience of her time, so she left all of her creations to her nephew, stipulating in her will that they should only be made public twenty years after her death. Her nephew Erik af Klint, together with the Anthrosophical Society, inherited some 1300 paintings and 124 notebooks comprising more than 26,000 handwritten and typed pages When she died in 1944, almost 82 years old, none of her abstract works had ever been shown to the public.

The Work Revealed:

It wasn’t until 1987 that her work began appearing at major institutions. One large canvas was featured in a Los Angeles County Museum of Art survey of spiritualism and abstraction; two years later, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York gave her canvases a solo showcase organized by artist R. H. Quaytman. Yet her work remained outside the spotlight for decades—until, in 2013, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm mounted a traveling retrospective that became a surprise hit. Six years later, in 2018, the Guggenheim Museum in New York stated that its af Klint retrospective, received 600,000 visitors, making it the most widely seen exhibition the museum had ever done.

The Guggenheim exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future.” gave an inkling of af Klint’s parallel lives, following “The Ten Largest” with a small display of conventional but solid portraits, watercolors of plants and one landscape painting, primarily from the 1890s. Then it plunged — as she did — into her spiritually-guided work.

The Ten Largest:

“The Ten Largest” envelop you in hues from dusty orange to pale pinks and lavenders, tumbling compositions of circles, spirals, and pinwheels, and unfurling ribbonlike lines that sometimes form mysterious letters and words. The scale of the motifs and the paintings’ sheer size (10 feet by nearly 9 feet) invite you to step in and float away to the music of the spheres. That they are rendered in tempera on paper, lighter than oil on canvas but still quite painterly, contributes to their levitating power. In their wit, ebullience, multiple references, and palette, “The Ten Largest” seem utterly contemporary, made-yesterday fresh. But all were created in 1907.

It’s not surprising to learn that “The Ten Largest” depicts the human life cycle. The folkloric motifs themselves suggest fertilization and gestation, while the fading color and emptying fields of the later paintings in the series — including “No. 9, Old Age” — intimate a leave-taking.

The Guggenheim Show:

As the work proceeded up the Guggenheim spiral, af Klint continued to surprise, if not always with the jaw-dropping impact of the “Ten.” In the 26 small paintings of “Primordial Chaos” of 1906-7, a series of images meant to illustrate the birth of the world and the dualities of life, she used blue and yellow (colors she anointed as female and male) and green, to wrest abstraction from a world of squirming spermatozoa, notational charts, decorative writing and a horseshoe crab that evokes a flying saucer, with three exhausts. 

As with her religious interests, af Klint was not a visual monotheist. There’s a continual fluctuation in forms, references and degrees of abstraction. The richly mixed-media “Tree of Knowledge” drawings from 1913 reference of Art Nouveau, starting with a silhouette reminiscent of a toadstool — or a perfume bottle. The “Swan” series culminates in paintings whose segmented targets on red or black anticipate the later abstraction of Kenneth Noland, the 1960s Color Fielder.

Seeing the Future:

The rivalry between the artist’s family (which appoints a board chairman) and the Anthroposophical Society (which appoints trustees) has delayed initiatives, including plans for a temple to preserve the artist’s work. Both sides have characterized the discord as the inevitable consequence of greed, the unfortunate byproduct of af Klint’s sudden fame and the sharp trajectory of the market for her work. Even as the impact of these discoveries is defined and debated, the people charged with protecting her legacy are at odds. Three lawsuits in Swedish courts have challenged who should control the foundation created in af Klint’s name that oversees the fate of nearly 1,300 paintings and have raised questions about whether some of the caretakers are seeking to profit from her newfound fame. The infighting and court battles could imperil museum loans as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing deals.

Hilma af Klint was utterly unique. No one had created paintings like hers before – so monumental in scale, with such radiant colour combinations, enigmatic symbols and other-worldly shapes. In an era of limited creative freedom for women, her paintings became an outlet for her exceptional intelligence, spiritual quest and ground-breaking artistic vision.

Truth and Meaning:

 Although we remain far away from the harmonious world that af Klint was working towards, she continues to be a powerful role model for women artists. Her devotion to the inward search for true meaning and truth instead of pursuing self-promotion assures young artists that great leaps forward often require isolation and reflection. The contemporary German artists, Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder (together known as 'Das Institut'), interested like af Klint in expression of the unconscious and the difficult to decipher, cite af Klint as one of their "heroes".

Hilma af Klint is one of my art heroes. She models for me what’s possible when you stop following the crowd, commit fully to your internal guidance, and share your personal genius with the world.

Whether you’re an established artist seeking new horizons or a budding creative looking to elevate your work I hope I have given you some ideas to expand your artistic potential. Perhaps, like Hilma af Klint you are interested in pursuing the interior world inside your unconscious mind or you'd like to create art that will only be understood in the future.  If you would like my mentorship, guidance, and advice in exploring your own artistic path please reach out to me. It makes me happy to share my insights and my knowledge with you.

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With Light and Delight

Susan