Was Hilma af Klint really an abstract artist?

The rise of Sweden’s Hilma af Klint to art-world superstardom has been nothing less than meteoric. Little known at the time of her death in 1944, her work languished in obscurity for decades until Stockholm’s Moderna Museet brought it back to the public eye in 2013 in a show that broke attendance records. The feat was repeated five years later at The Guggenheim in New York, where Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future became the most visited show in the museum’s history, attracting 600,000 visitors, selling over 30,000 catalogues and generating a wave of global interest.

Since then, the af Klint industry has gone into overdrive, with a biography by art historian Julia Voss and a 2022 biopic bolstering her public recognition, while a catalogue raisonné published by Bokförlaget Stolpe and more blockbuster shows at Tate Modern in London and The Guggenheim in Bilbao have secured her a belated place in the canon. Now, French audiences have their first opportunity to experience the work of this singular, visionary artist in Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), a major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, co-produced with the Centre Pompidou, showcasing the ten major series on which her fame largely rests.

Born in 1862, af Klint trained at Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Art, a rare feat for a woman at the time, eventually graduating in 1887. She went on to establish herself as a respected figurative artist, producing conventional landscapes, portraits and botanical drawings that displayed a keen eye for the natural world. But it was the work she produced in private that would, more than a century later, bring her worldwide recognition. Like many artists and intellectuals at the time, she was drawn to the spiritualist and theosophical beliefs of people like Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, through which she developed a unique artistic language – a curious mixture of abstraction, figuration and symbolism – that was simultaneously of its time and light years ahead of it. Indeed, aware that her work would not be understood by contemporary viewers, she rarely displayed it outside of her immediate circle, and stipulated in her will that it should stay hidden until at least 20 years after her death.

The scale of af Klint’s ambition, whether one shares her esoteric beliefs or not, is remarkable. Her themes embraced weighty subjects including the spiritual evolution of humankind, the conflict between good and evil, the duality of spirit and matter, and even the possibility of a utopian ‘third gender’ – a notion that, while radical at the time, now feels more relevant than ever. And the way she presented these ideas was no less important. An intricate and highly deliberate mixture of organic and geometric forms, curving and spiralling lines, esoteric symbols and words, her work forms a fascinating – and long-hidden – parallel to the development of abstract art in the 1910s.

While still at the Academy she befriended Anna Cassel, one of the four women with whom she founded The Five, a group who explored the spiritual realms via meditation and séances. The origins of the Paintings for the Temple can be traced back to these spiritualist sessions, in which the women believed they could communicate not only with the dead, but with mystic beings who were intermediaries of ‘The High Masters.’ The messages they received were transcribed via automatic writing and drawing, several examples of which open the Paris show. Although these pencil drawings were rudimentary, their undulating lines, geometric shapes and snail-like spirals formed the basis of much of what followed, including Primordial Chaos (1906-07), an esoteric vision of the beginnings of the world which formed the opening series of the Temple paintings.

Once af Klint had embarked on the project, she worked with a fervour that makes her claims of celestial inspiration almost believable. In reality, however, she was often assisted by other artists, either from the now disbanded The Five or others in her circle. She produced seven series between 1906 and 1908, each more ambitious than the last, containing a dizzying array of influences ranging from Theosophical symbols to traditional Swedish design and colour theory. The 16 canvases comprising Evolution (1908) offer a spiritual take on Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human soul, damaged by the fall into the earthly realm, draws closer to the divine, while The Large Figure Paintings (1907) merge figuration and symbolism in a phantasmagorical exploration of the turmoil engendered by human sexuality. In these works, every shape, colour, word or letter is imbued with meaning, which is both fascinating and problematic. While modern eyes can appreciate them on a purely abstract level – as harmonious arrangements of shape and colour on a canvas – untangling the complex web of esoteric references that give them their ‘true’ meaning remains an obstacle.

This is particularly the case with The Ten Largest, a series of monumental paintings which af Klint was apparently called upon to create during a group seance in September 1907. The spirits demanded that she produce ‘ten paradoxically beautiful paintings’ illustrating the four stages of life – childhood, youth, adulthood and old age – as a ‘sacred mission’, giving her just over two months to complete the task. Together with Cornelia Cederberg from The Five and Gusten Andersson she rose to the challenge, but it still seems nothing less than miraculous. Created using egg tempera, a medium used in Renaissance art for religious paintings, these monumental, gloriously vibrant paintings are perhaps her most dazzling achievement. Like a pastel-hued version of Miró, they are an explosion of organic forms, geometric shapes, and spiralling lines, although their deeper meaning again remains largely impenetrable without the aid of interpretation.

From 1908 to 1912, af Klint took a hiatus from painting to care for her ailing mother. When she returned to the Paintings for the Temple, there was a notable change in style. Rudolf Steiner, who had recently formed his own branch of theosophy called anthroposophy, had apparently advised af Klint to distance herself from her ‘spirit guides’ in order to produce more personal symbols, a suggestion she clearly took to heart. In The US series (1913), for example, she employs the unusual motif of a crucified woman, thus combining her trademark mysticism with Christian iconography and hints of the Sadeian eroticism more common to a painter like Félicien Rops. In contrast, The Dove series (1915) cannot help but be read in the context of the First World War. Paintings of the bird, which for af Klint represented ‘a symbol of celestial peace’, are followed by Saint George and the Dragon, representing the triumph of good over evil. The series concludes with three paintings of planets, surrounded by the 12 signs of the zodiac, perhaps alluding to the 12 women with whom af Klint now surrounded herself. Two of the planets are painted in delicate pastel shades that hark back to early Renaissance frescoes, while a third is surrounded by bold rainbow colours against a black background.

The Paintings for the Temple are brought to a spectacular close with the triptych Altarpiece (1915-16), in which a central golden orb emitting boldly coloured rays sits between two smaller circles perched on top of triangles, one inverted, one not. Although visually breathtaking, the fact that the colours represent the Theosophical notion of the seven primal forces from which the universe originated will likely be lost on most viewers. And, although the accompanying labels throughout the exhibition offer some explanation of the complex symbology, by this stage visitors’ brains are likely to be exhausted by the overabundance of arcane ideologies.

In the end, an encounter with af Klint’s work is both illuminating and a little frustrating. Although she is presented as a pioneer of abstraction, it is sometimes difficult to separate her work from the complex esoteric beliefs that inform and shape it. Which raises an important question: is it really abstract at all? Although it contains echoes of painters like Kandinsky, Delaunay, Mondrian and Miró, it’s tempting to argue that these are actually representational paintings, albeit ones which give form to phenomena that are beyond our comprehension – the invisible forces that shape human creation.

Ultimately, however, we do not need to share af Klint’s beliefs in order to feel the power of her remarkable art. Nothing like them had been seen before, and it is unlikely we will see anything similar again. Perhaps we should simply accept that the only way to define them is as great art.

Hilma Af Klint: Paintings for the Temple is at the Grand Palais until 30 August.