Updated 2 years ago
1862-1944, Swedish abstract painter
In a revolutionary time of great upheaval in the late 19th century, there arose a few pioneers and seers in technology (Nicola Tesla), science (Michael Farraday, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein) and art (Hilma af Klint) who grasped and started to map out the newly discovered quantum world we inhabit, abound in invisible fields and energies.
The legacy of these pioneers was immediate…. except one. Af Klint’s was hidden literally underground for years – by design.
Hilma af Klint was “a Swedish artist and [Theosophist] mystic whose paintings are considered among the first abstract works known in Western art history.” –Wikipedia
Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim: One Work, Many Layers to Love| NYT
By eerie coincidence, the particular layout of the Guggenheim Museum is exactly how she wanted to exhibit her work.
“At the turn of the 20th Century, the world was on the brink of dramatic change. Political, scientific, and cultural evolution fundamentally changed reality. Art was changing too.
Painters like Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian began to replace perceived reality with signs, natural color with symbolic color, representation with abstraction. A new expressive form emerged.
In 1944, as war again raged in Europe, these two icons of abstract art died— their legacy secured.
But that very same year, another artist passed— one whose work was yet unknown to the public, a female artist who worked to make the invisible visible.
Who was she?”
In the summer of 1986, a Swedish farmer recovered his abandoned country house from his last tenant. In the basement next to the house he found, covered in dust from years, huge wooden boxes.
When he opened them he was baffled. There were 1200 paintings, some very large, with geometric figures of intense colors. He called in a neighbor who supposedly was more educated or informed, but didn’t even understand what they had just discovered. They assumed that the paintings formed an enormous scenography or were illegal, maybe stolen.
The neighbor thought he would call a friend who worked in a museum and ask if the paintings had a signature. “Yes,” said the neighbor – on the corner says Hilma Klint.”
Some officials and art connoisseurs arrived and took away the boxes.
A few weeks later the Stockholm Art Museum made public an unusual discovery. It was more than a thousand paintings, drawings, and theoretical essays, a totally abstract work, with pure color geometric shapes, and precise texture, signed and dated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
What was unusual was the dates: they were painted before Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian “invented” abstract painting. Hilma was a clear forerunner. Why did nobody know about her? Why were the paintings hidden?
Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862. Her father was a mathematician and had a large library in which little Hilma prescribed everything about geometry and art.
At twenty she entered the Swedish Academy of Arts, one of the few schools that admitted women, and was part of the first generation of European painters who set up exhibitions and lived off their work. She painted portraits and realistic landscapes that were well-appreciated by her clients.
In those years X-rays were invented and electromagnetic waves were discovered, which could send information through air and vacuum. These events blew Hilma’s mind and apparently, she came to the conclusion that invisible parallel worlds exist.
She was interested in these alternative realities and different levels of perception. Because at that time the sciences were connected with spiritualism and Hilma went to spiritual sessions.
The possibility of communicating with the most beloved of her sisters, who had already died, was also encouraged. She would attempt to communicate with her sister, but formed a club with five other women; they met every Friday, summoned spirits, and had automatic painting and poetry sessions (which the surrealists did years later).
Hilma started creating rare paintings with random spots, pretending to let herself go to other energies, then she went to paint that chaos based on the geometric structures of nature, which she knew well since she was a child.
She spent some days painting her commissions and others locking herself in a country house to unleash a creative passion she kept top secret. Two painters in one person.
So hidden away for several years and on the day she wrote her will, she put her grandson Erick as the sole heir, on condition that he kept his paintings in wooden boxes, which could only be opened twenty years after her death
Why did she decide this?
Perhaps she considered her paintings a very intimate and sincere view, only of herself; perhaps she thought her work was completely out of academic rules and making it public would end her successful career.
But here you are, life decided something else: the grandson left this world before the date of the revelation and the paintings remained hidden for many years more than Hilma wanted, until 1986 when the Swedish farmer found it in his basement.
In the eighties, the avant-garde of the beginning of the century was already totally assimilated; art followed its paths, more different than ever.
Amidst this worldly noise, Hilma af Klint returned from the afterlife to take her place as the true mother of surrealism.
Thanks to Ann-Sofi Carlborn to bring this to my attention.”
-from Soulwell Academy forum
“The formation and early history of the Theosophical Society was one of the “pivotal chapters of religious history in the West.” The Theosophical Society had significant effects on religion, politics, culture, and society. In the Western world, it was a major force for the introduction of Asian religious ideas. In 1980, Joseph Campbell described it as “probably the most important non-traditional or occult group in the last century”, while in 2012 Santucci noted that it had had “a profound impact on the contemporary religious landscape
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