Swedish artist Hilma af Klint painted the world’s first abstract in 1906—not, as is often claimed, Wassily Kandinsky in 1911. She studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and would go on to develop a new type of abstract art informed by her deep spiritual commitments. Born in 1862 in Stockholm, af Klint died in a street car accident in 1944 in the same city after a long career in which she created over a thousand works. For the longest time an outsider, she rarely exhibited her most innovative works during her lifetime, and nearly a century would pass before they finally received recognition. Now, a major exhibition at Guggenheim Bilbao seeks to give af Klint the recognition she so deserves: it spans her early works on traditional themes, her automatic drawings and her most outstanding series, including Paintings for the Temple, Parsifal and the Atom Series to the watercolors of her final years.
An idyllic childhood within a wealthy family whose male members served in the Swedish navy, af Klint’s early years were not without dark clouds and trouble at the door. In 1880, tragedy struck the af Klint family. Hermina, Hilma’s youngest sister, died at the age of ten. Hilma herself was then eighteen. There are no extant photos, drawings or paintings of Hermina: this would suggest that she had died very unexpectedly. (Biographer Julia Voss surmises that the cause may have been pneumonia, which, along with bronchitis and tuberculosis, were the most common causes of death in 19th-century Sweden.) As far as we know, Hilma made no record of her feelings at the time (she had only just turned eighteen); her grief would manifest itself in her spiritualism, which developed over her lifetime.
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Af Klint devoted nearly a decade to her Paintings for the Temple, which represents a radical effort by af Klint to find visual expression for a transcendent, spiritual reality beyond the observable world. An exhibition currently at Guggenheim Bilbao comprises 193 paintings and drawings in which the artist set aside her formal education to create instead a new, nonobjective art informed by her relationship with spiritualism and other philosophies, such as Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and later the Austrian Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. Intended to hang in a spiral temple that was never realized, the Paintings for the Temple explore what remains hidden from the human eye—a topic that interested both the scientific and spiritual movements of the day and was also of great interest to Hilma af Klint and other modernist artists. Af Klint’s adherence to spiritualism did not come from her family: like most Swedes in the nineteenth century, her family had been Lutherans for generations.
Af Klint rarely presented her abstract art publicly and never showed it in mainstream artworld settings. She instead opted to share it with like-minded spiritual communities but struggled to find an enthusiastic audience. The influence Steiner is evident in af Klint’s work: he believed that close observation of the natural world would allow one to experience the spiritual world. ‘Making the invisible visible’ was a leitmotif in af Klint’s work: not only did this refer to the esoteric, but also to scientific phenomena such as the atom. As biographer Julia Voss notes, af Klint saw “no contradiction in her devotion to both science and spirituality:” the artist was commissioned in 1900 to illustrate a handbook on horse surgery, and a keen interest in science pervades her many drawings. Several of af Klint’s series are named after scientific discoveries of the time, such as the 1908 series Evolution and 1917’s Atom.
During the Guggenheim Bilbao press conference, I asked the panel a question that had been puzzling me: what happened to spiritualism? In its heyday, the years following the First World War, it had been a mainstream movement, with many adherents brought to it through their grief over fallen family members and partners who’d lost their lives in the global conflict; it continued through to the 1930s but then appears to have fallen out of fashion altogether. At its peak, even the English author of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had been a proud and very public adherent. “Spiritualism never really went away,” curator Tracey Bashkoff said with rising enthusiasm. “It survived onwards in small fringe groups around the world.” I disagree with Bashkoff on this point: there seems to have been a very noticeable public severing from the spiritualism movement, and I wonder, still, at its cause.
Hilma af Klint’s large canvases are well worth seeing in person. Their colors are vivid, startling and nuanced, and the subjects are the stuff of dreams and the subconscious. Even for people who have no interest whatsoever in spiritualism, there is much to be explored in af Klint’s mastery of form—her work invites close contemplation and inspires wonder.
“Hilma af Klint” is on view at Guggenheim Bilbao through February 2, 2025.
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