Hilma af Klint and the Paintings for the Temple: Abstraction and Spirits
The Five, the seances, the Ten Largest of 1907 and the meeting with Steiner: how Hilma af Klint arrived at abstraction before Kandinsky did.
When she died in Djursholm, near Stockholm, in 1944, Hilma af Klint left more than a thousand works and a precise instruction: her abstract paintings were not to be shown until at least twenty years after her death. The international public discovered them only in 1986, at an exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the spiritual in art. Since then her figure has forced historians to rewrite the origins of abstraction.
An academic painter and The Five
Born in Solna in 1862 into a family of naval officers, af Klint studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and established herself as a painter of landscapes, portraits and botanical illustrations. At the same time she cultivated a strong interest in spiritualism and Theosophy, both widespread in late nineteenth-century Sweden. In 1896 she formed with four other women a group called De Fem, The Five, which met regularly for seances.
During these meetings the group recorded messages it attributed to spiritual entities called «the High Masters» and practised forms of automatic drawing, in which the hand moved without conscious control. According to af Klint's notebooks, in 1904 one of these guides entrusted her with the task of creating paintings for a temple intended to receive a new spiritual message.
The Paintings for the Temple
Between 1906 and 1915 af Klint worked on the cycle of the Paintings for the Temple, made up of 193 works grouped in series. Its most spectacular core is The Ten Largest, of 1907: panels over three metres high representing the ages of human life, from childhood to old age, with spirals, petals, letters and organic forms in clear, bold colours. These images precede Kandinsky's first abstractions by several years.
The painter described the first works of the cycle as dictated by an external force that guided her hand without her knowing their meaning in advance. In later series, such as the Swan series and the Altarpieces, the composition becomes more geometric and considered, with symmetries, circles and triangles alluding to the union of opposites and the evolution of the soul.
The meeting with Steiner
In 1908 af Klint met Rudolf Steiner, then general secretary of the German section of the Theosophical Society, who visited her studio. According to the accounts handed down, Steiner was perplexed and felt that her contemporaries would not understand those works. The painter interrupted the cycle for some years, but later joined the Anthroposophy founded by Steiner and stayed for long periods at Dornach, in Switzerland, at the Goetheanum.
In her final decades af Klint continued to paint spiritually inspired watercolours and to fill thousands of notebook pages, in which she recorded visions, colour schemes and reflections on the meaning of her works. These writings, preserved by the foundation that bears her name, are now a precious source for understanding the link between her painting and the esoteric doctrines that inspired it.
The major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in 2018 and 2019, brought her work to a vast public. Her story shows that European abstraction was born not only from formal research but also from spiritual practices and esoteric doctrines, and that a painter who had remained on the margins had travelled that road early and independently of the more famous masters.