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Liber XXII · Occultism

Liber XXII · Occultism · Chapter VI: Occult Literature & Art

Hilma af Klint: Theosophy, Séances and Abstract Painting

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), the Swedish painter whose Theosophical and spiritualist abstractions became world famous with the 2018 Guggenheim exhibition.

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Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a Swedish painter who, from 1906, created large abstract and symbolic works guided by Spiritualist séances and Theosophical and later Anthroposophical ideas. Kept almost entirely out of public view during her lifetime and for decades afterwards, her paintings were rediscovered from the 1980s, and the 2018–19 exhibition Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York became the most visited show in that museum's history. She is now widely discussed as one of the pioneers of abstract art and a key example of esotericism's influence on modernism.

Training and Early Career in Stockholm§

Hilma af Klint was born on 26 October 1862 at Karlberg Palace in Solna, near Stockholm, where her father, a naval officer, was based at the military academy. The family belonged to the minor nobility and had a tradition of naval service and mapmaking, and Hilma showed an early interest in mathematics and botany as well as drawing. From 1882 to 1887 she studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, which had opened its courses to women in the 1860s and where she graduated with distinction.

After graduating she rented a studio in central Stockholm and supported herself as a professional painter of landscapes, portraits and botanical illustrations, exhibiting conventional naturalistic work. She also worked for a time as a draughtswoman at a veterinary institute. Nothing in her public career hinted at the paintings she would begin to make in private.

Spiritualism, Theosophy and The Five§

Af Klint's interest in the invisible world appears to have deepened after the death of her younger sister Hermina in 1880. Like many educated Europeans of her generation she took part in Spiritualist séances, discussed in our guide to Spiritualism, and she read widely in the Theosophical literature that was spreading through Scandinavia, including the writings of Helena Blavatsky. Theosophy offered a framework in which art, science and religion could be united in the study of hidden spiritual laws, as our overview of Theosophy explains.

In 1896 she and four other women, Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson, formed a group they called De Fem, The Five. They met regularly for prayer, meditation and séances, recorded the messages they received in notebooks, and practised automatic writing and drawing, letting the hand move without conscious direction. The communications came from beings they called the High Masters, given names such as Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens and Gregor. These experiments in automatic drawing, made years before abstraction appeared in European avant-garde art, prepared the visual language of her later work.

The Paintings for the Temple, 1906–1915§

In 1904, according to her notebooks, the Master Amaliel told af Klint that she was to execute paintings for a temple. She began in November 1906 and, in two phases separated by a pause, completed 193 works by 1915, known collectively as The Paintings for the Temple. She described herself as working under direction, especially at first, saying that the images came through her rather than from her own planning.

The series opens with Primordial Chaos, small paintings of spirals, shells and flowing lines in blue, yellow and green. In late 1907 she painted The Ten Largest, ten works over three metres tall, in tempera on paper, depicting the stages of human life from childhood through youth and maturity to old age in exuberant forms of circles, petals, spirals and letters. Later groups include The Tree of Knowledge, The Swan, The Dove and the three Altarpieces of 1915, whose triangles and golden discs suggest the ascent and descent of spirit.

The paintings use a coded vocabulary drawn from esoteric thought. Spirals and snail shapes stand for evolution and development; paired forms, lilies and roses, and contrasting colours express the union of masculine and feminine principles, with blue and yellow often linked to the feminine and masculine in her notes; letters such as W and U appear as symbols for matter and spirit. She imagined the works installed in a spiral-shaped temple, which was never built. The broader history of such esoteric art is outlined in our article on occult literature and art.

Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophical Years§

In 1908 af Klint met Rudolf Steiner, then leader of the German Theosophists, during his lecture visit to Stockholm, and showed him her paintings. His response, as later reported, was reserved: he is said to have discouraged mediumistic methods and to have remarked that her contemporaries would not understand the works. Af Klint stopped the series for about four years, during which she cared for her mother, who had lost her sight, before resuming in 1912 with greater independence from the Masters' dictation.

After the Temple series she continued to paint esoteric works, including series on the atom and on Parsifal, and she turned increasingly to Steiner's ideas. She joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1920 and spent long periods at Dornach, the movement's Swiss centre, in the 1920s. Her later work includes many watercolours of flowing colour influenced by Steiner's and Goethe's colour theories, together with detailed botanical studies she hoped would reveal the spiritual aspect of plants. The movement she joined is described in our guide to Anthroposophy.

A Hidden Œuvre: Her Will and Posthumous Discovery§

Af Klint believed that her esoteric paintings were meant for a future audience. She left more than a thousand paintings and works on paper, along with some 26,000 pages of notes and notebooks, to her nephew Erik af Klint, and she is reported to have stipulated that the esoteric works should not be shown until at least twenty years after her death. She died on 21 October 1944 at Djursholm, near Stockholm, after being injured in a road accident involving a tram.

The collection remained largely unseen. In the 1970s the family established a foundation to keep it together. International attention began with the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986, which presented her alongside Kandinsky, Mondrian and Kupka as part of the esoteric roots of abstraction. A major retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013 then travelled across Europe, establishing her reputation among critics and curators.

Paintings for the Future: The 2018 Guggenheim Exhibition§

The decisive moment came in New York. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, curated by Tracey Bashkoff, opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in October 2018 and ran until April 2019. It brought together The Ten Largest, the Altarpieces and much of the Temple series in Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral rotunda, a setting many visitors and critics felt answered af Klint's dream of a spiral temple.

The exhibition attracted more than 600,000 visitors, more than any previous show at the museum, and its catalogue became a best-seller. It was followed by further exhibitions, books, a documentary film and a surge of popular interest, from fashion to social media, and by sometimes heated discussion of her place in the history of art. For the first time a broad public encountered a body of work in which Theosophical ideas of spiritual evolution, set out in books such as Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, were translated into painting.

Abstraction, Esotericism and Art History§

The Guggenheim exhibition sharpened an old debate. Af Klint's first abstract works predate the abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky, usually dated to around 1910–11, and some have proposed rewriting the story of modern art with her at its beginning. Others reply that she did not exhibit these works or take part in the artistic conversations of her time, that she understood them as spiritual communications rather than as art for its own sake, and that other Spiritualist and esoteric artists had made non-figurative images even earlier.

What is no longer in doubt is the role of esotericism in early abstraction. Kandinsky, Mondrian and František Kupka were all influenced by Theosophy, and af Klint's work shows that the same ideas could lead independently, outside the avant-garde, to radical new forms. Historians of religion and art now study her notebooks as a rich record of how Spiritualism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy were lived and practised by a circle of women in early twentieth-century Sweden.

Frequently asked questions§

Was Hilma af Klint a Theosophist?§

She was strongly influenced by Theosophy and Spiritualism and read Blavatsky's works, and her paintings use Theosophical ideas of spiritual evolution and hidden laws. From 1920 she was a member of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical Society.

What are The Ten Largest?§

The Ten Largest (1907) are ten paintings, each over three metres high, that form part of her Paintings for the Temple. They represent the stages of human life from childhood to old age in abstract and symbolic forms.

Why were Hilma af Klint's paintings hidden for so long?§

She believed the world was not ready for them and is reported to have asked that her esoteric works not be shown for at least twenty years after her death. They then stayed in the care of her family and foundation until exhibitions from 1986 onward brought them to light.

Was Hilma af Klint the first abstract painter?§

Her abstract works of 1906–07 predate those of Kandinsky, and some historians call her a pioneer of abstraction. Others note that she worked outside the art world and saw her paintings as spiritual communications, so the question depends on how abstraction and art are defined.

Sources and further reading§