The Visionary Genius Hilma af Klint: Explore the Spiritual World of the very first Abstract Artist

Hello, my name is Paul Priestley. Welcome to Art History School, the home of art history for everyone. Today we're going to look at the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. Once barely a footnote in the history of art, but now she transcends modern art greats such as Kandinsky and Mondrian. How did this happen? Let's find out. Hilma af Klint was born on the 26th of October 1862 at Carlberg Palace in Solna, Sweden, the naval academy where her father was based. She was the fourth of five children born to Matilda 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 Carlberg Palace, but during the summers the family would move to Adelsö, an island in Lake Maleren 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 Konstfakt and studied classical portraiture under the supervision of the artist Kirsten Carden. 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 10-year-old sister Hermina when Hilma was just 18 years old. Soon after this tragic event she attended her first séance 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 Kassel who became a lifelong friend. At this time Hilma painted landscapes and portraits very successfully and this quickly became the source of her financial and independent 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 Hilmar 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 Victor Rydberg and Hilmar 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, 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 seances. The medium Sigrid Hedman was one of the Five. She 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 create their ideas. The Five established contact with spiritual beings who they called the High Masters and received messages through a psychograph, an instrument for recording spirit writings. They made meticulous notes of their seances and these experiences led to a definite change in Hilmar Af Klint's art. In 1898 Hilmar's father died so she moved to 52 Brahega Garten in Stockholm to live with her mother. But in 1904 Hilmar Af Klint's work profoundly changed after what can only be described as an otherworldly experience. During a seance she claimed to have heard a voice telling her to make paintings on the astral plane in order to proclaim a new philosophy of life. In 1905 she noted that the voice Amiel had given her the following message. You had to proclaim a new philosophy of life and you yourself had to be part of the new kingdom. Your labours will bear fruit. So in November 1906 at the age of 44 Hilmar Af Klint began painting the paintings of the temple which comprised several series of paintings on various themes. The first preparatory group was called Primordial Chaos and consisted of 26 small pictures. According to Hilmar 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 Hilmar Af Klint's studio and saw some of the early paintings for the temple and declared that he could not decipher them and doubted anyone would in the next 50 years. Later in 1908 Hilmar moved to a studio in a building in the Brahegatan in Stockholm so she could take care of a blind mother who 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 Hilmar Af Klint rented a villa owned by the Gireta family on the island of Munsor 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 totaled 193 works subdivided into series and subgroups. Hilmar Af Klint shared an interest in the spiritual with other pioneers of abstract art including Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Unlike Hilmar 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 Hilmar 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 Hilmar Af Klint's early naturalistic 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 Vasily Kandinsky. She was convinced the world was not ready for her abstract paintings. 1916 saw Hilmar 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. Hilmar 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 the goals of spiritualism. Hilmar Af Klint's new studio was completed in 1917 in Munso near Stockholm and it was here that she showed her Atoms series to a few selected people. The following year Hilmar and her mother and her nurse Thomasina Andersen moved to the villa Förenheim in Munso. 1920 was an intensely creative year for Hilmar Af Klint. In several series of small oil paintings she explored the world's great religions. She saw religion as based on duality, that is a division into opposites such as good and evil, order and chaos. None of them appeared to Hilmar Af Klint to attain unity. Later in 1920 following the death of her mother Hilmar and Thomasina Andersen moved to Helsingborg where Hilmar joined the Anthroposophical Society. Later in the year they visited Dornach in Switzerland where Hilmar again met Rudolf Steiner, a founder member of the Anthroposophical Society. Influenced by his views Hilmar Af Klint gave up painting geometric compositions and after a two-year hiatus in 1922 began painting watercolours 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 1920s 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 a fire towards Britain, a foretelling of the Blitz of 1940 perhaps. According to her great-nephew Johann Af Klint she had the gift of prophecy. In 1935 she moved to Lund near Malmo and in 1940 Thomasina 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 the 21st of October 1944 she died from complications resulting from injuries received in a traffic accident. She was 81 years old. Interestingly Vasily 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 the 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 predates Kandinsky's by five years. The delayed appreciation of her work is in 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 a true pioneer and inventor of abstraction. Thank you for watching. I hope you've 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'll find lots of interesting rewards in return for your patronage. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Goodbye!