Hilma af Klint – Spiritualist, Artist, Mystic & Painter

Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm on 26 October 1862, the Protestant daughter of a Naval Commander. Hilma was raised at Kilgarten Castle naval academy & bred in the cool Scandinavian city climes & naturistic outdoor environs of Aldeso on Lake Malaren where she holidayed with her parents & three siblings. She showed great promise in visual arts & was sent to a school in Stolkholm where she studied portraiture & landscape art.

Hilma became interested in the human story at the age of 18, after the death of her 10 year old sister Hermina from flu. Seven years later in 1887 at age 25, she graduated with honours as one of the first women to study painting at Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She was gifted a scholarship in the form of an art studio in the city’s art hub where she worked painting mainstream commissions for money while secretly producing a massive body of work containing art & paintings of a psychic & prophetic nature.

As a female artist in Scandinavia she was permitted to work alongside men as her contemporaries & to investigate the worlds of the unseen & unkown.  She was highly respected in art circles & deeply involved in spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy & Anthroposophy.  In 1896, af Klint and four other like-minded women founded a spiritual group named “The Five” (De Fem) who studied esoteric texts, the paranormal, held séances, practised automatic writing & channelled mediumistic drawing. Spiritualism was studied more broadly in the early 1900’s & accepted socially as an intellectual concept & pursuit. Many philosophical societies were formed throughout the northern hemisphere including well known participants like Madame Blavatsky & Rudolph Steiner.

An avid seeker of truth, it became Hilma’s quest for understanding who we are as humans in the broader scheme of life, our mortality & role in the Cosmos. Her work uses both symbols & colour to humanise cosmic concepts … spirals of energy as movement, dark & light, bold & bright colours for male & female, yin & yang, interlocking & overlapping circles representing unity & oneness. 

In her self instigated seances af Klint was in contact with an entity she called “Amaliel”, one of the “Higher Masters” who encouraged her to paint what she saw from the astral plane. Her paintings contained messages for humanity communicated to her by spirit through visions. Hilma later acknowledged that a body of work titled “Paintings for the Temple” was channelled through her by a force far greater than herself.  This collection of “secret paintings” contains a depth of information that even today we may not truly grasp or understand.
In 1906 at age 44 Hilma painted her first abstract works. There is a stark difference between the geometric abstraction of the channelled paintings as compared to her works of studies from nature, watercolours of botany, landscapes, plants & animals.
Hilma’s abstract work was first displayed internationally in Los Angeles in 1986 … fast forward to 2018 where her exhibition opened in the Guggenheim in New York, breaking attendance records creating wide spread popularity & further promoting her work and reputation.
Hilma was only around five feet tall. She produced a series of extremely large 10ft canvasses expressing the four stages of development of the human soul. The series, titled “The Ten Largest” were all painted on the ground making their monumental scale so endearing.
“The Ten Largest” is exhibiting at the NSW Art Gallery in Sydney now until September 2021. There is also an array of watercolours from Hilma’s life, notebooks with sketches, miniatures & draft works. Highly recommend for a go see …
Hilma af Klint died at 81 in 1944 as a result of a road traffic accident in Sweden. She was buried near her father in a modest grave with no plaque, testament to her humble, unobserved & unwitnessed life. In her will, she stipulated that her work, a body of around 1200 paintings & over 20 000 pages of notes, should not be released for 20 years. Consequently, the art was not shown until 1986 in the US then becoming internationally renowned through an exhibition in her home city of Stolkholm in 2013 … bringing a lifetime of invisible work to the light of consciousness … divine timing indeed!

Interesting facts: Hilma was a vegetarian, she wore a lot of black & although having love interests, she never married!!! (Thks Wikipedia)