During a séance, she heard a voice telling her to make paintings “on an astral plane” in order to “proclaim a new philosophy of life.” With the guidance of the spirit Amaliel, whom she had first heard in 1904, she painted 26 paintings in 1906, starting a major project that she called Paintings for the Temple. In 1904, af Klint was profoundly changed by an otherworldly experience. Throughout her life, her paintings were a visual representation of her complex spiritual ideas that she first developed with her women friends. The automatic pencil drawings of af Klint from this time include motifs that would occur in her later work. They kept careful minutes of the séances in a process known as automatic writing or psychography. They acted as mediums, and while in a trance, experienced communication with sprits. They called themselves “The Five” and prayed together and held séances in an attempt to communicate with other worlds.
In 1896, af Klint started meeting regularly with four other women artists to pursue occult practices and to practice free-flowing writing and drawing. With this scholarship and her hard work, she was able to become financially independent by painting landscapes and portraits. After graduating with honors, she was awarded a scholarship in the form of an art studio in Stockholm’s artist quarter. In 1882, when she was twenty, she was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm where she studied for five years, continuing her classical art training. Around this time she first began attending séances, mystical group meetings that aimed to create a dialogue with the spirit world. These interests grew following the death of her ten year old sister, Hermina, when af Klint was just eighteen years old. During this time, she became interested in mysticism. In her teenage years, Hilma studied art at the Technical School, which is now known as Konstfack, practicing classical portraiture.
During the summer, the family lived on an island in Lake Mälaren where Hilma’s fascination with nature began. At the palace, Hilma studied science, math, art, and other topics. The family lived in Karlberg Palace in Stockholm, the naval academy where her father was based, until Hilma was 10. Her ancestors were famous for having drawn “The Sea Maps of Sweden” and for calculating marine navigation tables. Her father was an admiral and mathematician. Hilma af Klint was born into a prominent aristocratic Swedish family in 1862, the fourth of five children. The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. 17, she had completely abstracted the swan into pure colors and shapes. Between 19, she painted 24 swan paintings. Some of her paintings look like Kandinsky or Klee paintings, including her Group IX/SUW, No. Some of her male contemporaries, abstract artists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and others, are much better known, but her work predates their earliest abstract art. She was knowledgable about scientific discoveries of her time including quantum mechanics, electromagnetic waves, and Einstein’s theory of relativity, and sought to understand these theories in an artistic and spiritual way.Īn artist who was way ahead of her time, af Klint was the first major Western artist to paint abstract art. While painting, she channelled spiritual guidance to showcase a cosmic view of the universe and its subatomic parts. She painted more than 1200 paintings, sketches, and watercolors, ranging from veterinary drawings and botanical sketches to huge oil paintings that were inspired by her interest in world religions. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a mystic, amateur scientist, and artist from Sweden.
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