Swedish painter Hilma af Klint painted the world's first abstract in 1906—not, as is often claimed, Wassily Kandinsky in 1911. He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and would go on to develop a new form of abstract art that he valued. deep spiritual bonds. Born in 1862 in Stockholm, Af Klint died in a traffic accident in 1944 in the same city after a long career in which he performed over a thousand works. Long an outsider, he rarely exhibited his most innovative works during his lifetime, and nearly a century would pass before they gained recognition. Now, a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao seeks to give Klint the recognition he deserves: it combines his early works with traditional themes, his spontaneous paintings and his outstanding series, incl. Temple Paintings, Parsifal as well as Atomic Series in the watercolors of his later years.
An uneventful childhood in a wealthy family whose male members served in the Swedish navy, 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 younger sister, died at the age of ten. Hilma was also eighteen years old. There are no surviving photos, paintings or drawings of Hermina: this would suggest that she died suddenly. (Biographer Julia Voss concludes that the cause may have been pneumonia, which, along with bronchitis and tuberculosis, were the most common causes of death in Sweden in the 19th century.) As far as we know, Hilma did not record her feelings in the Memorial. time (he had just turned eighteen); His grief would manifest itself in his involvement with the occult, which grew during his life.
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Af Klint spent almost ten years on him Temple Paintingsrepresenting af Klint's great attempt to find a visible expression of a transcendent, spiritual reality beyond the physical world. The exhibition currently at the Guggenheim Bilbao includes 193 paintings and drawings in which the artist set aside his formal education to create a new, abstract art informed by his relationship with spirituality and other philosophies, such as Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and later the Anthroposophy of the Austrian Rudolf Steiner. . Intended to hang in a whirling temple which was never fulfilled, i Temple Paintings explore what remains hidden from human eyes—a topic that interested both the scientific and spiritual movements of the time and that was of great interest to Hilma af Klint and other contemporary artists. Af Klint's attachment to the occult did not come from his family: like many Swedes in the nineteenth century, his family had been Lutherans for generations.
Af Klint rarely presented his abstract art publicly and did not show it in traditional artworld settings. Instead he chose to share it with like-minded spiritual communities but struggled to find an enthusiastic audience. Steiner's influence can be seen in the work of af Klint: he believed that observing the natural world would allow one to see the spiritual world. 'Making the invisible visible' was a leitmotif in Klint's work: this referred not only to the esoteric, but also to scientific objects such as the atom. As biographer Julia Voss notes, Klint saw “no contradiction in his dedication to both science and spirituality:” the artist was commissioned in 1900 to illustrate a book on horse surgery, and a deep interest in science pervades many of his paintings. Several of Klint's series are named after scientific discoveries of the time, such as the 1908 series. Evolution and 1917 The Atom.
During the Guggenheim Bilbao press conference, I asked the panel a question that had been puzzling me: what happened to spirits? In its heyday, in the years following the First World War, it was a general movement, many followers of which were brought to it by the grief of fallen family members and comrades who lost their lives in the world conflict; it continued until the 1930s but then seemed to have fallen out of fashion altogether. At its height, even the English author of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a proud and loyal public figure. “Spiritual things never really go away,” curator Tracey Bashkoff said with growing enthusiasm. “It has survived continuously in small groups around the world.” I disagree with Bashkoff on this point: there seems to have been a very noticeable social divide in the occult, and I wonder, still, the cause of it.
Hilma af Klint's large canvases are worth seeing in person. Their colors are vivid, surprising and nuanced, and the subjects are the stuff of dreams and the subconscious. Even for people who don't care at all about the spirits, there's a lot to see in Klint's vision—his work invites serious reflection and inspires wonder.
“Hilma af Klint” is on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao until February 2, 2025.
