Hello, my name is Paul Priestley. Welcome to Art History School,
the home of art history for everyone. Today we are going to look at the Swedish artist,
Hilma af Klint, once barely a footnote in the history of art, but now she transcends the modern
art greats such as Kandinsky and Mondrian. How did this happen? Let’s find out.
Hilma af Klint was born on 26 October 1862, at the Karlberg Palace in Solna, Sweden, the
naval academy where her father was based. She was the fourth of five children born to Mathilda and
Victor af Klint who were both staunch Protestants. Her father was a mathematician and an admiral in
the Swedish navy. Most of her childhood was spent in the Karlberg Palace, but during the summers,
the family would move to Adelsö, an island in Lake Malaren, near Stockholm. It was here that Hilma's
fascination with nature and organic life began. In 1872 the family moved to Stockholm
where Hilma attended the General School for Girls. In 1880 she moved on to the Technical School,
now known as Konstfack, and studied classical portraiture under the supervision of the artist
Kerstin Cardon. Around this time, she became a committed vegetarian, usually wore black and
began to develop an interest in the spiritual and the occult. These interests grew rapidly
following the death of her ten-year-old sister, Hermina when Hilma was just eighteen years old.
Soon after this tragic event she attended her first séances and mystical group meetings.
At the age of 20 in 1882, Hilma enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She
was one of the first women to do so and spent the next five years studying drawing, portraiture and
landscape painting. She graduated with honours and as a result, was awarded a studio in the Academy’s
“Atelier Building”, in Stockholm's artist quarter. Here she met fellow student Anna Cassel
who became a lifelong friend. At this time Hilma painted landscapes and portraits very
successfully and this quickly became the source of her financial independence and stability.
She was lucky in that the Scandinavian education system, unlike most of Europe and America admitted
both men and women to their Academies and it was not uncommon for women to make a living from their
art. However, as we shall see it was unusual for women such as Hilma af Klint to become visionaries
and outshine their male contemporaries. In 1889 the Swedish Theosophical Society
was founded in Stockholm, in the house of the writer Viktor Rydberg and Hilma af Klint
soon became a member. Theosophy was based on the idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity
without the distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour. It encouraged the study
of religion, philosophy, and science and the investigation of the unexplained laws of nature
and the powers latent in man. In 1896 she joined the Edelweiss Society
but left soon after with four other like-minded women artists and founded the “Friday Group”,
also known as “The Five”. They met every Friday for spiritual meetings, including prayers, studies
of the New Testament, meditation and séances. The medium, Sigrid Hedman, was one of the five,
led exercises in automatic writing, a form of writing and drawing which began with no
preconceived subject or composition in mind. This idea was decades before the Surrealists would
use automatic drawing to generate their ideas. The Five established contact with spiritual beings
whom they called “The High Masters” and received messages through a psychograph, an instrument for
recording spirit writings. They made meticulous notes of their séances and these experiences led
to a definite change in Hilma af Klint’s art. In 1898 Hilma’s father died so she moved to 52
Brahegatan in Stockholm to live with her mother. But in 1904 Hilma af Klint’s work profoundly
changed after what can only be described as an otherworldly experience. During a séance,
she claimed to have heard a voice telling her to make paintings 'on an astral plane' in order
to 'proclaim a new philosophy of life'. In 1905 she noted the voice Amaliel,
had given her the following message: ‘You are to proclaim a new philosophy of life
and you yourself are to be a part of the new kingdom. Your labours will bear fruit.’
So, in November 1906 at age 44, Hilma af Klint began painting,
‘The Paintings for the Temple,’ which comprised several series of paintings on various themes.
The first, preparatory group was called Primordial Chaos and consisted of twenty-six small pictures.
According to Hilma af Klint, these paintings were created under the guidance of a High Master. The
paintings are reminiscent of landscapes, of a stormy sea above which flicker mysterious lights.
Others break free entirely from representation, combining geometric shapes such as spirals with
dynamic brushstrokes, letters of the alphabet and symbols.
It was a conscious decision on her part to keep these works secret, only showing them to a small,
very select group of friends. In 1908, Rudolf Steiner,
leader of the German Theosophical Society, held several lectures in Stockholm. On one occasion
he visited Hilma af Klint’s studio and saw some of the early ‘Paintings for the Temple’
and declared he could not decipher them and doubted anyone one would in the next 50 years.
Later in 1908 Hilma moved to a studio in a building on Brahegatan in Stockholm,
so she can take care of her blind mother, whom she had cared for, for several years. As a result,
work on “The Paintings for the Temple” stopped for the next four years during which time
she took up the study of philosophy. In 1912 Hilma af Klint rented a villa
owned by the Giertta family on the island Munsö near Stockholm and resumed work on
the “Paintings for the Temple”. Between 1912 and 1915 she painted another 82 works to complete the
“Paintings for the Temple” which totalled 193 works, subdivided into series and sub-groups.
Hilma af Klint shared an interest in the spiritual with the other pioneers of abstract art including
Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. And like Hilma af Klint many were
drawn to Theosophy, which opened a route towards a new world of spiritual reality,
rather than merely depicting visual impressions of the world around them.
To Hilma af Klint her spiritual guides, who inspired and communicated with her, were as
real as the impressions provided by her physical senses. By visualising these inner processes
and experiences and giving them visual form, she created a highly idiosyncratic form of expression.
Had she not kept her abstract work secret she would surely have held the accolade of
producing the world’s first abstract paintings. Instead, Kandinsky’s paintings of 1911 would,
until recently, come to be recognised as the first abstract works of art.
In 1911 Hilma af Klint’s early naturalist paintings were exhibited
by the Association of Swedish Women Artists at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm.
She participated in the world congress of the Theosophical Society in Stockholm in 1913, and the
following year exhibited naturalistic paintings at the Baltic exhibition in Malmö, with artists
from the Nordic and Baltic countries as well as Germany, and Russia who, incidentally, featured
works by Wassily Kandinsky. She was convinced the world was not ready for her abstract paintings.
1916 saw Hilma af Klint develop her metaphysical paintings through further studies of the
spiritual. The Parsifal Series, resulted from this study and was a numbered sequence of 144
works on paper. The series title may refer to the Arthurian legend in which Parsifal,
one of the Knights of the Round Table, took part in the quest for the Holy Grail and like
the legend of the Holy Grail, the paintings represent a search for spiritual knowledge.
The “Atoms” series is concerned with the world beyond the observable world,
remember this is a time when science was discovering x rays, sound waves, atoms,
subatomic particles and the like. Hilma af Klint explored how she might create a visual equivalent
of this hidden existence. Her images include notations that indicate atoms moving through a
period of development, until they achieve oneness, much like the path and goals of spiritualism.
Hilma af Klint’s new studio was completed in 1917 in Munsö near Stockholm, and it was here
that she first showed her Atoms series to a few selected people. The following year Hilma,
her mother and her nurse, Thomasine Andersson moved to the villa Furuheim in Munsö.
1920 was an intensely creative year for Hilma af Klint. In several series of small oil paintings,
she explored the great world religions. She saw religions as based on duality,
that is, a division into opposites, such as good and evil, order and chaos. None of
them appeared to Hilma af Klint to attain unity. Later, in 1920 following the death of her mother,
Hilma and Thomasine Andersson, moved to Helsingborg where Hilma joined the
Anthroposophical Society. Later in the year they visited Dornach in Switzerland,
where Hilma again met Rudolf Steiner, a founder member of the Anthroposophical society.
Influenced by his views, Hilma af Klint gave up painting geometric compositions.
And after a two-year hiatus in 1922 began painting water-colours in which she allowed the flow of the
colour to dictate the subject matter. She also painted watercolours relating to nature, as in
the series On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees. During the 1920’s she spent long periods
in Dornach, studying anthroposophy and attended many of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures.
Between the years 1925 and 1930 she appears not to have painted at all or produced any written texts.
In 1927 she donated a series of flower studies, mosses and lichen to the scientific library in
Dornach, in which she had systemised nature according to her own research. Unfortunately,
this collection appears to have disappeared. In 1932 she painted A map of Great Britain, in
which she foresaw the second World war. Here you can see a pale face blowing fire towards Britain,
a foretelling of the Blitz of 1940, perhaps. According to a great nephew Johan af klint
she had the gift of prophecy. In 1935 she moved to Lund,
near Malmö and in 1940 Thomasine Andersson, her lifelong companion died. Later in 1944 she went
to live with her cousin Hedvig af Klint in Stockholm. But later that year on 21 October
1944 she died from complications resulting from injuries received in a traffic accident.
She was 81 years old. Interestingly, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian also died in 1944.
On her death Hilma af Klint left more than 1,200 works of art, which had only been seen
by a handful of people, in addition to some 125 notebooks which were found in trunks,
some of which had never been opened. The notebooks detailed her thoughts,
mediumship experiences and notes about her paintings. In one of notebooks, she
stipulated that her work should not be publicly displayed until at least 20 years after her death.
Hilma af Klint did not have any contact with the modern movements of her time,
yet she is now generally considered to be the pioneer of abstract art - her first abstract
painting created in 1906, pre-dates Kandinsky’s by five years. The delayed appreciation of her work
is due in part to her own wishes. She rarely exhibited or participated in any form of
self-promotion and only showed her abstract works to a select few. In fact, it was not until 1986,
when one of her abstract paintings was shown in a collective exhibition in Los Angeles,
entitled The Spiritual in Art, did the general public see her work. In 2013
the Modern Museum in Stockholm hosted the first exhibition dedicated solely to her work
and it was from this point that her work began to receive the acclaim it deserved.
Belatedly, Hilma af Klint is now regarded in the art world as the
true pioneer and inventor of abstraction. Thank you for watching, I hope you have really
enjoyed learning about Hilma af Klint, a truly innovative artist. If you have,
then please subscribe to my channel and do not forget to click the little black bell, because
that will tell you when my next video is released. If you want to support the making of these videos,
then please check out my Patreon channel where you will find lots of interesting rewards in return
for your patronage. Thank you for watching, I will see you in the next video. Goodbye.