Hilma af Klint
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Studio interior
Signed H. af Klint. Oil on canvas 84.5 x 70.5.
Provenance
Probably purchased in the 1920s. Thereafter inherited within the family.
More information
Together with a few female colleagues, Hilma af Klint shared a studio in the so-called Atelier House on Hamngatan 5 by Kungsträdgården in Stockholm. On the upper floors of the building were workrooms and residences for students who had completed their studies. It was the cultural hub of the time, with Blanch's Café and the Art Salon on the ground floor. Hilma af Klint was a pioneer on many levels. Her artistic career begins in classical painting, and she belonged to one of the first generations of women educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Until her forties, she primarily painted portraits and landscapes, botanical studies, and commissioned works.
Without any progressive transition, she then shifts from traditional painting to creating abstract art in an entirely free and unconventional manner. Long after her death, Hilma af Klint gained international recognition and acclaim as an early precursor of abstract art. From being virtually unknown, she is now equated with the greatest modern painters, and her abstract works are considered groundbreaking. She has redrawn the map of early abstract art, both in Sweden and internationally.
Artist
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish painter, theosophist and pioneer within abstract painting, and already in 1906 had created an abstract visual language. This was several years before Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevitj who are still considered the forerunners of abstract art in the 20th century. Klint began her artist training at the Technical School in Stockholm (now Konstfack), where she also took lessons in portrait painting. After her studies, Klint acquired her own studio by Kungsträdgården where she painted and exhibited landscapes in naturalistic styles.
It was during a trip to Switzerland where she met Rudolf Steiner and was taken by his anthroposophical ideas and thereafter developed a strong interest for the occult. During séances, she received messages, which she transformed into abstract paintings. In 1986 Klint showed her abstract work for the first time in the exhibition, ‘The Spiritual in Art’, Abstract painting 1890-85, in Los Angelese. This exhibition came to be Hilma af Klint’s international breakthrough.
With a solo exhibition at the Modern Museum in Stockholm, Klint started a new phase of her artistic career. This became the most wrote about exhibition in the history of the Modern Museum and made Klint into a well-known name worldwide. Since 1972 her abstract work has been managed by the Hilma af Klint Foundation. The Modern Museum in Stockholm has a room dedicated to Hilma af Klint in their permanent exhibition, where the works shown are regularly rotated. She is even represented by the National Museum, the Royal Library, the Maritime Museum, the Nordic Museum and Uppsala’s University Library.