Hilma af Klint

When Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) bequeathed the entirety of her work to her nephew Erik af Klint, she told him that all of her pieces carry within them a deeply complex philosophy of life. “Everything should be done to bring this hidden message to light,” she urged him. The artist left behind 1,600 works, 124 of which are her personal notebooks with a total of 26,000 pages that provide extensive insight into the artist’s private thoughts, creative process and her intentions for the future curation of her art. For the first time, all of these diaries have been combed through in the quest for the philosophy of life contained within her work, and to identify what, as Erik af Klint writes, his aunt’s “spiritual masters intended” with such a message. Hilma af Klint called the notebooks “educational material,” and they are the key to understanding her paintings. This volume touches upon ideas from Spiritualism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy, and addresses elements of the 17th-century spiritual beliefs of Rosicrucianism, a movement that held particular influence over af Klint’s life and work as she strove to achieve what she called the “mystery knowledge” of the world beyond the known.

This catalogue raisonné contains the entire production of the abstract pioneer Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). The catalogue consists of seven volumes containing a total of nearly 1,600 works.
Hilma af Klint has taken the art world by storm. Once virtually unknown, she is now included among the greatest modern painters and her works are considered groundbreaking. Almost 80 years after her death, she has redrawn the map of early abstract art, both in Sweden and internationally.
”A catalogue raisonné is necessary in order to see the different cycles, motifs and symbols that recur in such an exciting way. If someone really wants to understand how Hilma af Klint’s works function, they need these books,” says Daniel Birnbaum, director of Acute Art and former director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, who was co-editor with Kurt Almqvist.
The first three volumes, Spiritualistic Drawings 1895–1910, The Paintings for the Temple 1906–1915 and The Blue Books, were published in 2020. The first volume presents the 15 sketchbooks produced by the group of artists known as The Five, which included af Klint. This period constitutes an important starting point for her abstract painting and for what would later lead to her most important series—The Paintings for the Temple. The second volume comprises these paintings, a total of 193 works, including the iconic The Ten Largest.
The third volume presents the ten blue books that Hilma af Klint used to show small copies of The Paintings for the Temple, an easy way to present her works to people when she traveled. According to af Klint’s own notes, these books were not intended to be studied until 20 years after her death.
The fourth volume, Parsifal and the Atom 1916–1917, shows the two series Parcifal and The Atom. The Parcifal series was inspired by the legend of King Arthur and has been interpreted as an investigation of inner realms, while The Atom is apparently an exploration of the spiritual structure of the universe.
At the end of the 1910s, Hilma af Klint created a number of series of small paintings in which abstract imagery is explored using a ruler and compass. These are presented in the volume Geometric Series and Other Works 1917–1920.
In 1922, at the age of 60, Hilma af Klint completely abandoned her geometric approach for watercolours inspired by the Anthroposophical movement. The works from this period are presented in the sixth volume, Late Watercolours 1922–1941.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a pioneer of modern abstract art who turned away from the visible, physical world to embrace a spiritual reality in both her life and work. In 1896, together with Anna Cassel (1860–1937), Cornelia Cederberg (1854–1933), Sigrid Hedman (1855–1922) and Mathilda Nilsson (1844–1923), af Klint left the Edelweiss Society—a group which combined Christian concepts with ideas of Theosophy and Spiritualism—and established The Five. The all-female group, which met every Friday in Stockholm to practice group meditations and séances, believed they could channel mystic beings whom they called the High Masters, with names such as Amaliel, Ananda and Gregor. In trancelike states, the women transcribed the messages from these High Masters via automatic writings and drawings into a series of shared sketchbooks, resulting in a kaleidoscope of collective and raw work that is firmly rooted in the spiritual realm.
Over the course of the group’s existence, up until 1908, they filled 15 such sketchbooks, three of which have been reproduced in facsimile form for the first time and are presented in this sumptuous slipcased edition. The set includes sketchbook nos. 2, 6 and 13, dating from October 1896 to January 1906, and provides a rare look into the early influential years of af Klint’s artistic and spiritual practice.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was classically trained, with a degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Although landscapes and portraits are not her most famous pieces, they remain important to her oeuvre. This volume shows yet another side of Af Klint’s multifaceted artistry, presenting her as painter of landscapes, portraits and botanical specimens. The total number of paintings in these genres is still not determined, since many of these works were sold to private buyers, where they remain. In 2020 the search to find further works was initiated.

During the last years of the 1910s, Hilma af Klint created several series of small paintings in which she systematically explored an abstract idiom with the help of ruler and compasses. The triangles, squares, circles, and ellipses that appear here in constantly new constellations express a spiritual dynamic, according to af Klint’s notebooks from these years. Hilma af Klint considered this work a kind of research, and she used ‘spiritual scientific’ methods – a term borrowed from anthroposophy – in order to understand the evolution and development of mankind. In her studies of living beings, she gained insight into an abstract world of geometrical conditions and guidelines.

For the first time since its original publication in 1989, Åke Fant’s pioneering account of Hilma af Klint’s life and career is available to read in English. Following her training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and 20 subsequent years of painting, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began working with an abstract visual language in 1906. She then dedicated the rest of her life to her magnum opus, a series of large-scale abstract paintings intended to be exhibited as part of an immense spiritual temple. Af Klint drew upon contemporaneous occult sources to develop her work, such as Spiritualism and the writings of Theosophical writers Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, as well as Rudolf Steiner, who claimed to be clairvoyant. This edition supplements Åke Fant’s original text and curator Lars Nittve’s foreword with a new preface by Kurt Almqvist (President, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit). An updated timeline, full-color reproductions of af Klint’s art and a beautiful cloth binding further emphasize the momentousness of Fant’s work, which remains vital even in the light of subsequent research, at a time when interest in Hilma af Klint and her work has never been greater.

In the 1920s, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) spent extended periods in Dornach, Switzerland, where Rudolf Steiner had established an international center for the anthroposophical movement, the Goetheanum. At the Goetheanum, af Klint took part in the center’s rich cultural life. Among other things, she studied Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory of color. In 1922, at the age of 60, she completely abandoned her geometrical way of working for the “wet-on-wet” watercolor method inspired by anthroposophy, and developed by Steiner and his circle. An example of this is her series On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees from 1922. Most of the series presented in this, the sixth volume of Hilma af Klint’s catalogue raisonné, have no titles.

The two series presented in this volume are Hilma af Klint’s (1862–1944) first major works after she completed The Paintings for the Temple. When she created Parsifal and The Atom, she still claimed that she was guided by spiritual leaders, but at the same time she appears to have experienced a new feeling of independence. The Parsifal series is inspired by the Arthurian legend and is usually interpreted as an exploration of inner spheres and different planes of consciousness, while The Atom seems to be a study of the universe’s spiritual structure. Af Klint’s understanding of the concept of the atom is inspired by the Theosophical and Anthroposophical ideas that slumbering spirit is contained within all matter.

The drawings in this first volume of a new catalogue raisonné represent an intense ten-year period of Hilma af Klint’s (1862-1944) life that would lay the foundation for her later achievements. In 1896, af Klint and four other women formed The Five, a group steeped in the spiritualist beliefs permeating Europe at that time, including theosophy, Rosicrucianism and other strains of liberal religious thought. From 1896 to 1907, The Five engaged in a daily systematic method of spiritual experimentation. During séances, Hilma af Klint drew automatic spiritual sketches based on the messages that the medium (not always the same member) communicated from the spirits the group summoned. The elaborate system of symbols, geometry and biological imagery that characterize her work all find their origin during this period.

Hilma af Klint rarely exhibited her work during her lifetime, and her magnum opus, The Paintings for the Temple, was shown to the public in the series of exhibitions that started in 2013 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and ended with the grand exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2018-19. This series of 193 paintings began with af Klint receiving communication from an otherworldly figure during a séance. Specific themes, such as evolution and duality, are conveyed through vivid pastel color schemes and intricate geometric patterns arranged carefully on canvases that reach over ten feet in height.

This volume, the third in the artist’s first seven-part catalogue raisonné, contains the sketches and preparatory work af Klint made in anticipation of The Paintings for the Temple. af Klint traveled with these sketchbooks so as to be able to show her friends her work in a more accessible format.

In this thorough critical appraisal, 20 specialists on modern art, art history, philosophy and religious studies examine the unique art, the cultural circumstances and art-historical positioning of Swedish abstractionist Hilma af Klint. Topics explored here range from early abstract art and the impact of Darwinism to Goethe’s color theory, as well as the importance of occult religious movements such as theosophy and anthroposophy that influenced the early modernists, and discussions of af Klint’s own personal diary notes and research.

The book is based on the seminars that were held in conjunction with the exhibition Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction in 2013. This extremely successful exhibition attracted a record number of visitors to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, after which it continued to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created 193 paintings that she would title The Paintings for the Temple. Colorful, mostly abstract, with biomorphic imagery, these works expressed af Klint’s mediumistic vision of spiritual reality, which she hoped would ultimately be installed in a round temple for true spiritual comprehension and enlightenment. Since the internationally acclaimed Guggenheim exhibition of 2018-19, these works have come to number among her most popular, defining and beloved.

This handsomely produced clothbound volume collects these paintings in the second of a projected and collectible seven-volume catalogue raisonné that will present the entirety of af Klint’s work in its dazzling totality for the first time. Produced in cooperation with the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, it features introductions by Daniel Birnbaum, former head of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and architect of the grand af Klint exhibitions between 2013 and 2019, and Kurt Almqvist, President of the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit.

The result of a series of lectures delivered during the 2016 Serpentine Galleries exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, this volume gathers essays examining the last abstract series made by Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). The paintings were all created in the first half of the year 1920 and are the last paintings af Klint made before turning to watercolor.

Reproductions of these images are complemented by essays from Briony Fer, David Lomas, Branden W. Joseph, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum, which shed new light on af Klint and her importance for artists today, also addressing the need for a broader conception of art history that her work proposes.

Beautifully redesigned by Sweden’s most famous designer, this book is a key contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on this immensely popular painter.

For decades a relatively unknown artist, Hilma af Klint has posthumously claimed her rightful place in art history recently but dramatically: her 2019 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half a million visitors. In 2013, curator Iris Muller-Westermann organized the first retrospective exhibition of af Klint’s work. Now she presents us with an extensive survey show, curated with Milena Høgsberg, at the Moderna Museet in Malmö, which this volume accompanies, supplementing reproductions with the latest information and research on af Klint.

Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium investigates, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by art historians, a quantum physicist, a spiritual teacher and an historian of theosophy and esotericism, among others, provide insights into a world beyond the visible which fascinates us now even more than ever.

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish painter whose simultaneous fascination with art and spiritism led her to produce one of the most astonishing oeuvres in modern art history. Her conventional landscape paintings and botanical illustrations served as her main source of income, but her true lifelong passion lay in the art she created as a result of otherworldly communication. Af Klint’s private works not only demonstrate perhaps the first example of true abstraction in Western painting; they also convey a complex, deeply felt system of spirituality that guided af Klint throughout her life and career.

The 2018 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, introduced the general public to the abstract mystical masterpieces of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Based on a seminar held at the Guggenheim Museum at the opening of this acclaimed exhibition, this volume compiles the insights of the seminar’s contributors alongside reproductions of works, archival photographs and images from af Klint’s journals.

Hilma af Klint: Visionary explores the social and spiritual movements that appeared at the turn of the 20th century, inspiring the pioneers of modernism and abstract art: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and af Klint. What was the zeitgeist that inspired such an eruption in abstract art? What were the conditions that created Hilma af Klint? Academics and experts Julia Voss, Tracey Bashkoff, Isaac Lubelsky, Linda Dalrymple Henderson and Marco Pasi each take a different approach. Voss analyzes af Klint's biography, pinpointing five important events in her life; Bashkoff presents her connection to Hilla Rebay and her plans for the building of a temple; Lubelsky traces the origins of theosophy in New York; Henderson examines the occult and science; and Pasi considers esotericism’s changing role in culture.

This is a blank book with a beautiful Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) painting detail on the cover from her series Paintings for the Temple. This notebook features textured paper over board binding, colored endpapers and a premium, thick ivory paper for drawing, journal writing or note-taking. Produced in two colorways, this edition is predominantly orange and yellow.

This is a blank book with a beautiful Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) painting detail on the cover from her series Paintings for the Temple. This notebook features textured paper over board binding, colored endpapers and a premium, thick ivory paper for drawing, journal writing or note-taking. Produced in two colorways, this edition is predominantly blue and pink.

When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice—one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colorful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalizing world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.

Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art—a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, the site of the exhibition.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.

Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. In 2014, she was a fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her postdoctorate project funded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, brings together medieval art and the modern avant-garde, focusing on the reception of and the construction of medieval art in modernity, specifically in Surrealism.

Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Stockholm University. He was the Co-Curator of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Birnbaum has held the position of Rector at the Städelschule Fine Arts Academy at Frankfurt at Maim in Germany and has also actively written for Art Forum.

Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art. She has written extensively on 20th- century and contemporary art. Fer has also curated numerous exhibitions, such as the recent show of Gabriel Orozco at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013.

Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. She most recently organized the exhibitions Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014) and The Avant-Gardes of Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon, and Their Contemporaries (2013). She has a Ph.D. in art history, with a focus on 19th-century European art.

David Max Horowitz is Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Andrea Kollnitz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on German and Austrian Modernism in Swedish Art Criticism.

This volume reproduces the last abstract images series made by af Klint in the 1920s, which have never before been published in their entirety.

These images are complemented by essays based on lectures delivered during the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2016. Briony Fer, David Lomas, Branden Joseph, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum shed new light on af Klint and her importance for artists today, also addressing the need for a broader conception of art history that her work proposes.

Hilma af Klint graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887, established a studio in the city, and began creating and exhibiting traditional landscapes, botanical drawings and portraits. Privately, however, af Klint was already beginning to discard what she had learned at the Academy in favor of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult.

As early as 1906, af Klint was working with abstract imagery--giving her a lead of several years in the modernist race to be the first to discover abstraction. She joined a group of four other female artists, “The Five,” which held séances and experimented with automatic writing and drawing--decades before the Surrealists would do something similar.

In 1905, af Klint received a “commission” from the mysterious entity Amaliel to create her most important body of work: The Paintings for the Temple. Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen focuses on this important series, consisting of 193 predominately abstract paintings in various series and subgroups. Claiming to act as merely a medium for spiritual forces guiding her hand, af Klint painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds; good and evil; man and woman; religion and science.

Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.