B
y Andrew Ferren
New York Times
In Search of Hilma af Klint, Who Upended Art History, But Left Few Traces
In and around Stockholm, the secretive painter — whose bold abstract works predated Kandinsky’s — lived a life of
spiritual yearning that shaped her artistic career.
It seemed a daunting challenge to follow in the
footsteps of a secretive artist who destroyed all her
correspondence more than a decade before her death in
1944. Someone who, between 1906 and 1915, had
created an astonishing cache of nearly 200 novel
paintings — bold abstract compositions as large as 10
by 8 feet — mostly in a small, shared studio in the
heart of a major European city, with virtually no record
of anyone seeing or discussing the work.
But if it’s 2019 and the artist is Hilma af Klint and the
city is Stockholm, I was ready to sign up for some
Swedish sleuthing.
If her name sounds familiar it’s because Hilma af Klint
(1862-1944) was the unexpected star of last year’s
global cultural calendar with a six-month show at New
York City’s Guggenheim Museum.. It was her first
solo show in America — 75 years after her death
Now celebrated as a pioneering abstract painter
working years before the modernist male titans
Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and others
supposedly “invented” the concept of abstract painting,
af Klint was virtually unknown until a few of her
paintings were included in the 1986 exhibition “The
Spiritual in Art” at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art.
While there is not currently any comprehensive display
of af Klint’s abstract works in Sweden or anywhere
else, I discovered over three days in late May with the
help of museum curators, biographers and af Klint
family descendants, that it is possible to move around
Stockholm, one of Europe’s most evocative cities, and
connect with her life — almost from cradle to grave —
and its artistic context.
It helps that Stockholm was untouched by the
destruction of 20th-century wars and still looks rather
19th-century, with ornate, low-rise buildings, and both
tall ships and vintage-looking ferries darting to and fro
on the city’s bustling waterways. And this autumn is a
great time to go, as an exhibition at Millesgarden
Museum just opened with 20 af Klint paintings (…)
To the extent af Klint was known to art historians
before the 1980s, it was as a portraitist, illustrator and
painter of descriptive botanical studies. As far as is
known, she showed the abstract works — lush, flowing
fields of color punctuated by looping floral and
biomorphic forms, as well as letters, shapes, often
indecipherable words and symbols that float across the
paintings’ surfaces — only to a handful of people.
Perhaps because of their reactions, she feared the
world was not ready to understand her nonfigurative
work and instructed her heir to not show the abstract
paintings until 20 years after her death.
That heir was her nephew, Erik af Klint, a naval man
who knew nothing about art and happily obliged his
aunt’s hibernation clause. In the late 1960s when the
crates were finally opened, the paintings astonished.
But so did the 26,000 pages of af Klint’s
accompanying notes, many detailing the paintings’
creation starting in 1906, led by a spiritual guide
named Amaliel who contacted af Klint during séances
and not only “commissioned” the paintings but, at least
at the outset, had, she claimed, directed her hand as she
painted.
“The pictures were painted directly through me,
without any preliminary drawings and with great
force,” af Klint wrote in one of her journals of the 193
mostly abstract works known as “The Paintings for the
Temple,” meditations on human life and relationships
in the most elemental terms. “I had no idea what the
paintings were supposed to depict, nevertheless I
worked swiftly and surely without changing a single
brush stroke.”
She went on to paint many more abstract series,
totaling nearly 1,300 works, as well as a few portrait
commissions and other naturalistic works, many of
whose whereabouts today are unknown. In addition to
painting, af Klint spent the last decades of her life
pursuing her spiritual journey.
Tracing her path
Though a lack of financial resources would be a
constant feature of her long life, Hilma af Klint was
born in a palace, a perfect spot to pick up her trail.
Completed in 1795, Karlberg Palace, where her father
taught naval studies, remains a military academy and is
closed to the public. But there are fantastic views of its
commanding, buttoned-down neoclassical facade from
across the water on Kungsholms Strand, as well as a
lovely public park behind it
I was lucky to spend several hours visiting sites in and
around Stockholm with several af Klint family
descendants, including Hilma’s grandnephew Johan af
Klint, who was 5 when the artist died and left her
artwork and writings to his father. While Erik af Klint
had been close to his aunt, he knew nothing of her
work or spiritual ideas, which Johan says included
theosophy, Rosicrucianism, hermeticism and an
esoteric strain of Christianity. “It was a very male- thickets and clearings, deer and other wildlife, not to
dominated society and she was strong-willed and sort mention the exuberant wildflowers whose colors and
of knocked into this square family,” he said.. forms the artist celebrated in her work.

I asked Julia Voss, whose biography of Hilma af Klint Today one can see from the road the modest but pretty
will be published early next year (in German; the wooden house at Hanmora, as the estate is still called,
English edition is expected in 2021), where I might though it is no longer in her family’s possession. It was
follow in af Klint’s footsteps and, of all places, she here that Hilma spent childhood summers and in her
directed me to Stockholm’s 13th-century cathedral to early adulthood taught Sunday school at the quaint
view two works of art that she is convinced af Klint church, which can be visited.
absorbed from a young age. The first is a massive
sculpture of “St. George and the Dragon,” a theme in (…) frgm about her burial.
one of her series.
As Hilma herself wrote, “The experiments I have
Sketches from one of the collaborative notebooks conducted … that were to awaken humanity when they
created by a group of spiritually inclined women were cast upon the world were pioneering endeavors.
known as “De Fem” (“The Five”), on display at the Though they travel through much dirt they will yet
Moderna Museet. retain their purity.”
It’s known that Hilma participated in séances as a
teenager and dedicated even more time and energy
communicating with the spiritual realm after her sister
died when Hilma was 18. She joined a circle of women
artists known as the Edelweiss Society who held
séances, and by 1896, she participated in weekly
séances with four other women who called themselves
The Five (De Fem). After prayers and Bible readings,
the séance would begin and the women would
collaboratively record their experiences in journals and
in automatic drawings that include motifs later
explored in af Klint’s “Paintings for the Temple.”

(Fragment about tourism and specific museums…)

Erik af Klint and his family lived at Karlavagen 56, the
family home on one of the district’s broader avenues,
where his son Johan recalls his great-aunt’s paintings
were stored, rolled up in boxes in an unheated attic for
more than 20 years. Miraculously, they emerged in
virtually impeccable condition.

Despite having rejected an outright bequest of Hilma’s

legacy, the Moderna Museet has been instrumental in
conserving the collection and has recently committed
to maintaining her presence in its galleries.
“We don’t want to create a separate gallery or a shrine
to her that is isolated from everyone else,” Fredrik
Liew, the curator of Swedish and Nordic art, said,
“because our museum exists to put things into
context.”

Return to roots
Aristocrats were expected to be landowners, so the af
Klint family acquired property on the island of Adelso
in Lake Malaren. If Stockholm surprises visitors for
seeming to have more water than land, Lake Malaren,
which stretches west of the capital, is the opposite — a
body of water so dense with islands, peninsulas and
outcroppings that it can appear more like a network of
rivers. Approaching Adelso by car in early summer is
like flipping through one of Hilma’s sketchbooks, with
rapidly alternating glimpses of water and forest,