Hilma af Klint painted some of the most radical non-representational images of early twentieth-century art – yet for much of her life they remained almost invisible to the public. Born in 1862, she studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and mastered a traditional figurative style of painting. At the same time, she developed an entirely different visual language of spirals, letters, organic forms, and bold fields of color. Between 1906 and 1915, she worked on the extensive series The Paintings for the Temple, which includes The Ten Largest from 1907. Today, she is regarded as a central pioneer of early abstraction – but her art becomes more interesting if one does not try to make her its sole “inventor.”
An academically trained artist with two parallel paths
Hilma af Klint had a solid traditional education. She could paint portraits, botanical studies, and landscapes in the manner expected of a professional artist around the turn of the century. This matters, because her later abstraction was not the result of an inability to paint representationally. It was a deliberate search for another kind of image.
At the same time, she was deeply interested in spiritualism, Theosophy, and questions of the unseen. Together with four other women, she formed the group De Fem. They worked with séances, automatic drawing, and notes they understood as messages from spiritual planes. To a modern viewer, that aspect may feel unfamiliar, but it cannot be stripped away without changing the work itself.
The Paintings for the Temple, 1906–1915
In 1906, af Klint began the project that would become her best known: The Paintings for the Temple. The series comprises nearly two hundred works and moves through different visual systems. Here are geometry, plant forms, shell spirals, letters, dualities, and colors that seem to carry meanings of their own.
It is tempting to see everything as a code that simply needs to be deciphered, but that is not necessary. The images function even without an answer key. They can be monumental and playful at the same time, almost graphic design in one moment and cosmology in the next.
The Ten Largest – the ages of life on an enormous scale
During 1907, Hilma af Klint painted The Ten Largest, a series of works depicting different stages of human life: childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. The scale is almost bodily. The large paper surfaces are filled with flowers, spirals, ovals, fragments of words, and pastel colors.
That is one reason why reproductions from the series work so well on the wall: each painting has a strong composition of its own, yet it is clearly felt to belong to a larger system. A single image can become a field of color in the room. Two or three create an immediate dialogue.
As reproductions, it is also possible to see how different the parts of the series are. The Ten Largest No. 1 belongs to childhood, No. 3, Youth to youth, and No. 5, Adulthood to adulthood. They work individually, but the differences become clearer when seen side by side.
The symbols: the swan, the spiral, the colors, and duality
Af Klint’s visual language is rich in recurring symbols. The Swan appears in an entire series and can be read through opposites: black and white, two and one, material and spiritual. The spiral suggests movement, development, and growth. Botanical forms recur, sometimes close to natural study, sometimes completely transformed.
She also used letters and words as visual elements. Not everything needs to be translated. When one tries to reduce every sign to a simple meaning, some of the image’s strangeness disappears. It may be better to think of them as a language whose rhythm one can feel without speaking it fluently.
Why did almost no one see the works?
Hilma af Klint did not present her large abstract body of work in the same way as her more conventional painting. She was also convinced that parts of the work belonged to a future audience. In her posthumous instructions, she specified that certain works were not to be shown until after her death.
When she died in 1944, she left behind a very large body of artistic and written material. It took decades before the abstract part achieved broader recognition in art history. Exhibitions from the 1980s onward changed the picture, and the Guggenheim’s major New York exhibition in 2018–2019 made her an international public phenomenon.
Was she the first to make abstract art?
The simple answer “yes” is tempting but too crude. Af Klint created large non-representational works very early, before several of the artists who usually appear in the standard history of abstraction had arrived there. At the same time, artists in different countries were working toward abstraction for different reasons, often without contact with one another. What is interesting, therefore, is not to name a solitary winner, but to understand how early and how consistently her own project developed.
This is how Hilma af Klint works in a home
Her art can carry colour. In an otherwise calm room, an image from The Ten Largest can be the element that makes everything else fall into place. The motifs from The Swan are often more graphic and work well in a black frame. The large geometric works benefit from more breathing room and a larger format than one might first imagine.
On a gallery wall, it can be beautiful not to combine Hilma only with other abstract art. A botanical illustration or a historic photograph can make the whole feel less predictable while also reflecting her own interest in nature, science, and the invisible.
See Historly’s Hilma af Klint posters →
For a more concentrated, geometric expression, Altarpiece No. 2 is a fine counterpoint to the organic forms in The Ten Largest. Here is Historly’s full selection of Hilma af Klint posters.
Frequently asked questions about Hilma af Klint
What is Hilma af Klint best known for?
She is best known for her early abstract and symbolic art, especially The Paintings for the Temple and the series The Ten Largest.
When was The Ten Largest painted?
The series was painted in 1907 and addresses different phases of human life.
Why were her abstract works not shown earlier?
She kept large parts of the production outside the public art world and believed that certain works were intended for a future audience. After her death in 1944, it took a long time before the material received broad attention.
Is Hilma af Klint the first abstract artist?
She is among the earliest artists to have created an extensive non-representational body of work. To call a single person the “first,” however, oversimplifies an art-historical development that unfolded in parallel in several places.