Human Chastity, 1915

In November 1906 artist Hilma af Klint wrote, “The experiments I have undertaken...will astound humanity.” Geometric and organic forms, af Klint invented a distinctive artistic language, now recognized as among that era’s earliest forays into abstraction.

Born in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint grew up in a family of naval officers and cartographers. She and her family lived at the Military Academy in Karlberg Palace in the city, spending summers on rural Adelsö island in Lake Mälaren, where she developed a close connection to the natural world. Af Klint attended Sweden’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and, following her graduation with honors in 1887, found recognition showing landscape painting at a series of group exhibitions organized by the Swedish Association for Art.

Af Klint also worked as a scientific illustrator. Commissions in these years included anatomical illustrations of horses for a textbook on equine surgery and drawings of fungi specimens as part of research by a renowned Swedish mycologist. In these renderings, af Klint skillfully captured the specificity of her subjects’ color, texture, and shape, demonstrating her sensitivity to nature and her observational abilities.

At the same time, af Klint pursued an interest in spiritualism, believing in a realm beyond the visible, engaging with Theosophy and anthroposophy. Founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875, Theosophy embraced reincarnation, the divinity inherent in every being, and the possibility of evolving one’s consciousness. Rudolf Steiner built on these ideas in founding anthroposophy, focusing on the individual’s spiritual journey—their direct contact with the spirit. These belief systems, adopted across the globe by artists and others in the early 20th century, were central to af Klint’s worldview, and she explored spiritual ideas in her artistic practice and in the notebooks she kept throughout her life.

As early as 1896, af Klint participated in seances and created collaborative automatic drawings with a collective of women called The Five. In 1906, she accepted from her spirit guides what she described as “a great commission,” which led her to create a monumental cycle of paintings, 193 in all, known as the Paintings for the Temple.

The central series, called The Ten Largest, charted humanity’s journey from youth to old age and featured pulsating, abstract shapes that recall the spiraling tendrils and biomorphic forms of plants.

In January 1917, seeking to represent nature’s most basic element, af Klint embarked on The Atom Series (1917). Employing the visual language of science, she created abstract diagrams depicting what is impossible to see with the naked eye. Af Klint also ascribed moral conditions to the atom, connecting its form and energy to human character, writing, “The atom finds within itself Truth and Justice.”

She continued to explore the possibilities of the diagram, and in the spring of 1919 embarked on a project to demonstrate the “connection between the plant world and the world of the soul.”

Beginning that April, af Klint embarked on daily observations of nature, drawing flowering plants on the island of Munsö, outside of Stockholm, creating a portfolio known as the Nature Studies. Breaking with traditional botanical art, af Klint paired each plant with a diagram, which visualized an aspect of human character or a spiritual quality she gleaned from close looking. Af Klint imagined the Nature Studies as the central element in a flora, or a botanical atlas, demonstrating her belief that careful observation of nature would reveal ineffable aspects of the human condition.

In channeling a spiritual realm, af Klint pioneered a singular form of abstraction before contemporaries like Vasily Kandinsky, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Kazimir Malevich. In 1932, understanding the radical potential of pushing beyond conventional representation, af Klint determined that her paintings, drawings, and notebooks “should be opened twenty years after my death.”

Upon her passing in 1944, af Klint bequeathed her works to her nephew, who followed her directions and preserved them for the future. Today, exhibited across the world, af Klint’s paintings and drawings, along with her voluminous writings, have prompted a reevaluation of abstraction’s beginnings.

Biography source

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