HILMA AF KLINT|10 MIN READ

Hilma af Klint Art and Its Meaning

A Swedish painter worked for years on paintings she believed would be understood only after her death. When they finally reached museum walls, they changed the story of abstract art.

WRITER Moryarty

View of a Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim. — Ryan Dickey from Evanston, IL / Chicago, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hilma af Klint art stayed in boxes for most of the twentieth century. The Swedish painter finished some of the most ambitious abstract pictures of the early 1900s and instructed her family to keep them private for twenty years after her death, because she believed her own time wasn't ready for them. She called the big project behind them the great work of her life: Paintings for the Temple, made between 1906 and 1915, a cycle of 193 paintings and drawings for a temple that was never built.

Seven of those works appear here. Five belong to The Ten Largest, the 1907 series in which she painted the four ages of a human life in huge, floating shapes. Two come from 1915, the year she brought the spiritual project to its end with the Dove group and the three Altarpieces. Together they show what she meant by abstraction, and why she was sure it belonged to a future she wouldn't live to see.

Why The Ten Largest Childhood No. 2 stayed private for decades

The Ten Largest, Childhood, No 2 was painted in 1907, and it opens the story of a life. The series runs in pairs through four ages: childhood begins it, youth and adulthood follow, and old age closes it. No. 2 is the second childhood canvas, full of large rounded shapes that float and interlock in blue, pink, orange, yellow and white, with small glyph-like marks scattered through the curves. Her own title for it was De tio största, nr 2, Barnaåldern, grupp IV.

By the time she painted it, af Klint was in her forties and thoroughly trained. She had studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1880s and earned her living in Stockholm as a landscape and portrait painter.

She died in 1944, and her nephew Erik af Klint inherited more than 1,000 works and just over 125 notebooks.

The childhood paintings stayed unseen because she asked for it. The instruction she left her nephew was that the abstract works remain private for twenty years after her death, because she believed her own time wasn't ready for them.

In 1970 the whole collection was offered as a gift to Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the museum refused it.

The reversal came slowly, and late. The works passed into the care of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, and in 2022 Moderna Museet in Stockholm showed the complete Ten Largest series for the first time since 2013, with Childhood No. 2 among them. Watercolours and a complete set of hand-coloured photographs of the ten paintings hung beside the big canvases, showing how af Klint went on studying her own work long after 1907.

How did Hilma af Klint paint The Ten Largest No. 3 Youth in forty days?

The Ten Largest No. 3 is one of the two paintings devoted to Youth, and it carries a strange origin story. Af Klint reported that her spiritual guides asked for ten paradisaically beautiful paintings that would give the world a glimpse of the four stages of life. No. 3 answers that request in orange, yellow, blue and black: overlapping spirals and petal-like shapes drift across a luminous orange ground with no single focal point, as if youth itself had too much energy to settle.

She began the series in the autumn of 1907 and finished all ten canvases in forty days. Cornelia Cederberg and Gusten Andersson, two members of her circle, helped her carry out the painting.

The work happened at Hamngatan 5 in Stockholm, in a studio she shared with Lotten Rönnqvist and Alma Arnell.

She painted the series in tempera on paper, later mounted on canvas. It was the paint of the Renaissance altarpieces she had admired in Florence on a trip to Italy a few years earlier. That choice links the series to the sacred paintings she had admired in Florence. The series was meant for a temple that was never built.

Each original stands about 3.2 metres tall, and af Klint meant all ten to hang together in a circular arrangement.

The original remains with the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm. A fully abstract cycle of 1907 arrived years before abstraction became the better-known story of modern art, and a reproduction at poster scale keeps its luminous orange ground and drifting spirals in view.

How did The Five's séances shape The Ten Largest No. 7 Adulthood?

In 1896 af Klint formed a circle called The Five with four other women. They held séances, practised automatic writing and automatic drawing, and tried to contact beings they called the High Masters. Years before the first Temple painting, this group was where af Klint learned that a hand could move across a paper and produce marks nobody had planned.

That training shows in her account of the later paintings. She said the pictures were painted directly through her, without preliminary drawings and with great force. In her understanding she wasn't inventing the images but receiving them.

Painted in 1907 and titled Grupp IV, De tio största, nr 7, Mannaåldern, The Ten Largest No 7 belongs to the four Adulthood canvases. She painted on large sheets of paper that were later mounted on canvas, and the scale makes it most likely that each sheet lay flat on the studio floor while she worked. No. 7 shares the purple background of the four Adulthood paintings, with green and red accents in looping forms.

In the original painting, letters recur: u, w and s, along with the word vestalasket, meaning Vestal ascetic.

The painting is kept in Stockholm by the Foundation that preserves her work. The complete series was displayed at Moderna Museet Malmö from 4 April 2020 to 11 April 2021, where all ten canvases hung together, as af Klint had intended the series to be seen.

What did adulthood mean in The Ten Largest No. 8, and how did the painting become known?

The Ten Largest No. 8, painted in 1907, closes the four Adulthood paintings. The series gives adulthood four canvases where childhood, youth and old age receive two apiece, as if the middle of a life needed the most room. No. 8 carries the same letters, scrolling marks and geometric forms as its three companions, but with a calmer energy: soft pinks dominate, brightened by yellows and blues.

Adulthood, for af Klint, wasn't a matter of counting birthdays. She was more interested in spiritual and mental development than in physical growth, so the four Adulthood canvases concern what changes inside a person rather than what changes around them.

Public understanding of No. 8 came through a slow opening of her estate. The Hilma af Klint Foundation was set up in 1972 to make the huge collection known, a first institutional step between the family's private inheritance and the wider world.

The real rediscovery came in 1986, when the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 included her work, which had stayed largely unknown, and placed it in the larger story of abstraction. That showing was part of the context in which paintings such as No. 8 came to be recognised.

By 2018, it had reached one of the grandest stages in modern art. No. 8 hung with the other Adulthood paintings at the Guggenheim in New York in the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. The original remains with the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, which lends the works to the exhibitions that have made them famous.

What does old age mean in The Ten Largest No. 9?

The Ten Largest, No. 9, Old Age begins the final pair of the series. Painted in 1907, it sits at the point where the playful organic shapes of the series' earlier paintings give way to symmetry and geometry, as the series reaches old age. The luminous pink ground is full of spirals, petal-like forms and symbolic emblems that float and interconnect, with crisp outlines giving the whole a serene, settled energy.

Af Klint left notes about what this stage meant to her. She wrote, later, that this image concerned a divinity that had taken in both the male and the female principle. The note describes old age as that joining, the male and female principles brought together in one divinity.

The painting took its place in art history through a series of reconsiderations. The Ten Largest was included in the 2013 exhibition Hilma af Klint, A Pioneer of Abstraction, which looked again at who had really begun abstract painting, and when.

In 2018 the series reached the Guggenheim in New York, where it was shown in Paintings for the Future and filled the first gallery. No. 9 remains with the Stockholm foundation that cares for her work.

The Dove No. 1 and Christian meaning in her paintings for the temple

The Dove, No. 1 was begun in 1915, in the late stretch of Paintings for the Temple. Where The Ten Largest had moved in big organic sweeps, this picture is highly structured: a central circular form is intersected by symmetrical axes and surrounded by smaller geometric shapes, all in soft pinks, gentle yellows, muted greys and earthy browns, with a calm, subtle luminosity.

The path to this late phase ran through disappointment. In 1908 Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian thinker whose work she studied, gave the Temple paintings a cold response. Af Klint stopped painting abstractly until 1912 and spent part of the interruption caring for her blind mother.

When she returned to the project, its Christian symbols had become more pronounced. The Dove group belongs to this changed emphasis: across the group, the dove stands for the Holy Spirit, and a struggle between good and evil unfolds as Saint George fights the dragon. Af Klint wrote in her notes that Saint George was one of her alter egos.

The Dove, No. 1 hung in Gallery 203 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The painting is owned by the Stockholm foundation that cares for af Klint's estate, which lends it for exhibitions.

The spiral temple planned for Altarpiece No. 1

Altarpiece No. 1 was completed in 1915 as part of the three-work group that closes Paintings for the Temple. Her own title, Grupp X, nr 1, Altarbild, names it plainly as an altar picture. She used metal leaf, the traditional material of sacred art, on these three paintings, and in No. 1 a radiant circle sits at the centre of a vertical arrangement, luminous yellow against a deep black ground with accents of blue, red and purple.

The project behind it began with a single moment. In a séance in 1906, af Klint said, a spirit guide named Amaliel commissioned the work. She answered at once and called it the great work she was to perform in her life. Eight years of painting followed for a temple that was never built.

Af Klint kept a notebook from 1930 to 1931 that describes the temple in detail: a round building with several storeys, where visitors would climb a spiral path to an altar room at the top of the building. That room would hold the three Altarpieces. She never built it, but she planned it as precisely as an architect.

The three pictures relate to a Theosophical view of evolution, which moves upward from the physical to the spiritual and downward from the divine to the material. Of the three, No. 1 offers the ascent; its companion, No. 2, with its dark inverted triangle, draws the celestial down to earth.

From October 2018 to April 2019, the painting hung in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in Paintings for the Future. The museum's spiral ramp gave No. 1 and its companions a setting unusually close to the unbuilt temple af Klint had imagined nearly ninety years earlier.

More than 600,000 people saw that exhibition, making it the most visited show in the Guggenheim's history. The painting belongs to the Stockholm foundation, which lends it to exhibitions around the world.

The seven works here trace a single conviction: that a picture can carry a message across time, from a painter to an audience she never met. Af Klint believed her own century wasn't ready for her paintings. Childhood begins the life, the Dove brings a struggle between good and evil, and the Altarpiece points upward from a temple that was never built. What survives, on museum walls and on a Hilma af Klint poster in your own home, is the sense that she was writing to us all along.

Did you know?

She painted the first 111 Temple paintings between November 1906 and April 1908, about one every fifth day.
After the three finished Altarpieces, she added one more small work, Human Chastity, Closing Painting, even though she considered the Altarpieces the finale.
She was born at Karlberg Palace in Stockholm on 26 October 1862.
She died in 1944, the same year as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Munch.
She knew Goethe's Theory of Colours, published in 1810.
Some works in The Dove carry ringed planets, astrological symbols and numbers, with metallic accents that recall medieval icons.
The Ten Largest were painted in tempera on large sheets of paper later mounted on canvas.

Questions about Hilma af Klint's paintings

What does Hilma af Klint's art mean? The abstract pictures are a record of spiritual messages. She believed shapes, letters and colours arrived from guides rather than from her own invention, and she kept more than 125 notebooks alongside the paintings. The mystical ideas drew on the spiritualist teachings of Helena Blavatsky as well as Rudolf Steiner. One canvas can work as a colour composition and as a message at once.

What is Hilma af Klint's art style? The Temple paintings move from large organic forms, full of spirals and petal shapes, toward stricter, more diagrammatic geometry as the years pass. Letters and symbolic emblems recur, and the later works sometimes look like charts of a private religion. She had developed this symbolic imagery by 1906, before the rise of abstract art as the story is usually told.

What are Hilma af Klint's most famous paintings? The Ten Largest of 1907 is the series most people meet first: ten canvases over three metres high, moving through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. The three Altarpieces of 1915 sum up the whole Temple project. The Dove is one of the late groups begun in 1915. At the Guggenheim in New York in 2018, The Ten Largest filled the first gallery of Paintings for the Future.

What were the Paintings for the Temple? A cycle of 193 paintings and drawings, made between 1906 and 1915, which af Klint believed she had been commissioned to make for a temple that was never built. She said the spirit guide Amaliel asked her on the first day of 1906, when she was 43, and she accepted at once.

What does the dove mean in Hilma af Klint's paintings? In the Dove group of 1915, the dove stands for the Holy Spirit, and a struggle between good and evil unfolds as Saint George fights the dragon. In two of the group's paintings the dove appears with red-tinged wings. Large hands that move between heaven and earth hold the dove.

About the author

Moryarty has been finding and restoring vintage posters since 2015. We search museums, libraries and private collections for images worth keeping, restore every one by hand, and print in our Barcelona workshop on museum-quality fine art paper. With an artist like af Klint, whose letters and colours were meant to carry meaning, holding the reproduction close to the original is the whole point of the work.

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