Imagine painting something no one has seen before. Canvases more than three metres tall, full of spirals, petals and words in a language of your own. Then imagine deciding the world isn't ready, and asking that no one see them until twenty years after you're gone.
That isn't a legend. That's Hilma af Klint.
A respectable painter with a secret
Born in Stockholm in 1862, Hilma af Klint trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and earned her living with landscapes, portraits and botanical drawings. Very proper.
In private, she met with four women friends in a group they called The Five. They held séances, practised automatic drawing and filled notebooks with messages they believed came from spiritual guides. In 1906 she began a vast series, The Paintings for the Temple: 193 works, completed in 1915. Some of the earliest are entirely abstract, several years before the canvases by Kandinsky usually credited as the beginning of abstract art.
Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest (detail), 1907
The Ten Largest
In a few months of 1907, she painted The Ten Largest: ten enormous canvases about the stages of a human life, childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. Soft pinks, lilac, orange. Flowers that look like diagrams, diagrams that look like flowers. Standing in front of them feels less like looking at a painting and more like standing inside a feeling.
Why she hid them
She seems to have believed her contemporaries wouldn't understand, and she left instructions that her abstract works should not be shown until at least twenty years after her death. She died in 1944. Her work only began reaching a wide public in the 1980s, and in 2018 her exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York became the most visited in the museum's history.
Hilma af Klint, The Swan, 1915
How to look at her paintings
Her symbols had precise meanings for her, many recorded in her notebooks. But you don't need to decode them to feel something.
- Look only at the colours for one minute. Which one would you take home?
- Notice the shapes that repeat: spirals, circles, petals. Where does your eye travel along them?
- With one of The Ten Largest, ask: which stage of life does this feel like to me right now? The answer may surprise you.
- Then let it go. Leaving a painting a little mysterious is a way of respecting it.
If you'd like a simple method for any painting, here's how to read a painting in five questions. And if she leaves you wanting to make something, try these four paintings that make you want to create.
Stories like this, every season
Hilma af Klint is exactly the kind of artist we like to spend time with in "(meditating) On Art". "(letters) On Art" brings you each issue, with a letter and a postcard every month in between.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi