The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood (1907)

 <p style="border: 0px; font-family: gradual; font-size: 22px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.2px; caret-color: #000000; color: #000000; orphans: self; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Swedish painter. </p> <div style="border: 0px; font-family: gradual; font-size: 22px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height : 24px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; caret-color: #000000; color: #000000; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px ; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none ;" class="extract size22" property="description"> <p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height : inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.2px;">We had to wait for the exhibition<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985</em>, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986, so that the work of Hilma af Klint is finally recognized by the history of art and the general public. 

His paintings are then exhibited alongside those of Mondrian, Vassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich. 

And yet, looking at the dates of her first abstract works, it appears that the painter, well ahead of her time, cannot have been influenced by the artists considered to be the pioneers of abstract art. 

His solitary and atypical journey is strongly linked to a spiritual and esoteric journey. 

Until then, only a small group of initiates knew of her “mystical” paintings, she herself being convinced that the general public was not ready to understand them. 

Botany and mathematics were important interests for his family. 

She spends her summers in a mansion near Lake Mälaren, not far from Stockholm, where the beauty of nature undeniably marks her artistic orientations. 

She first studied at the Technical Art School in Stockholm around 1880, then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (1882-1887). 

She then mainly painted landscapes and portraits (<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit ; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">Utsikt över Mälaren</em> [View of Lake Mälaren], 1903), demonstrating a sensitivity typical of his time. </p> <p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height : inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.2px; display: block;">For twenty years, she continued to paint in this academic movement, without any contact with European avant-garde movements. 

Then, in 1906, under the influence of the Theosophical Movement created by the Russian Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and whose importance was then considerable, she became passionate about mediumistic phenomena and constituted, with four other women artists, the group esoteric De fem (Of the five). 

During one of their spiritualism sessions, a spirit named Amaliel demands that she begin a series of paintings. 

This is how the series of <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">Målningarna till Templet</em> (Temple Paintings). 

This work, carried out in mediumistic – that is to say automatic – painting, sometimes in a sort of trance, was carried out from 1906 to 1908, then from 1913 to 1915. 

Bringing together more than 190 paintings, it is divided into different groups of paintings, including the series<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant- caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">WU</em> (The rose) or <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">De Tio Största</em> (The ten greatest). 

All express a search for harmony based on the opposition of antinomic principles: the masculine-feminine couple is a metaphor for the divide between spiritual life (symbolized by the letter “U”) and material life (symbolized by the “W”). ; similarly, the use of blue relates to women and yellow to men. 

In 1916, a year after the completion of her work, the artist had a workshop built on an island near Stockholm intended to exhibit the “mystical” series, to which she reserved access to selected people. 

Parallel to her creation, she continued, from 1910 to 1914, to present academic works, for her food, at certain exhibitions of the Association of Swedish Women Painters, of which she was a member. 

In 1914, she exhibited portraits and landscapes at the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö, where V. 

Kandinsky shows abstract paintings. 

From 1916 to 1920, she continued her research on the astral world, leading to a form of pure abstraction, as revealed in the striking series of this period: <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font- size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">Perceval</em> (1916), <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">The Atom</em> (1917). </p> <p style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height : inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.2px; display: block;">After the death of her mother in 1920, she moved to Helsingborg and became passionate about the thought of Rudolf Steiner, founder and head, since 1912, of the Anthroposophical Society. 

The result, in the two decades that followed, were small-format watercolors, both figurative and non-figurative. HASOn her death, she left a considerable body of work, comprising more than 1,000 pieces, which she bequeathed to her nephew Erik af Klint, under the condition of her will not to exhibit it for twenty years. 

But it was only forty years after his death that the general public finally discovered the scale and extraordinary modernity of these abstract works which allow a rereading of the birth of abstraction in European art history. 

A foundation is dedicated to his work in Stockholm. 

In 2008, the exhibition<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch : inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">Traces of the sacred</em>, at the Center Pompidou in Paris, gives a large place to his work. 

In 2013, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm will devote an exhibition to him<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight : inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction</em>. </p> </div> <div style="border: 0px; font-family: gradual; font-size: 22px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; font-stretch: inherit; line-height : inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; caret-color: #000000; color: #000000; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px ; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none ;"> <div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height : 18px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" class="size15">Guenola Stork<br><br> </div> <div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height : 1.4th; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" class="size12">Extracted from<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 0.04em;">Universal Dictionary of Women Designers</em><br>© 2013 Women – Antoinette Fouque</div> </div>