Women Artists excluded from History, Hilma af Klint
Hilma af Klint: The Woman Who Invented Abstraction and then was forgotten
In the early 20th-century narrative of European abstract art, the names Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich often dominate the conversation. Yet one of the most revolutionary pioneers of abstraction was not a man, it was Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist whose vast, spiritually driven body of work predates many of her celebrated contemporaries. For decades, however, she remained largely unknown, hidden away from museums and art history books. Her story challenges not only the gendered acknowledgment of artistic innovation, but also how we understand abstraction itself.
A Radical Vision Rooted in Spiritualism
Born in 1862 in Solna, Sweden, Hilma af Klint had training in landscape, portrait, and botanical painting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. But her true calling lay elsewhere. Deeply involved in mysticism, Theosophy, and later Anthroposophy, she believed she was channeling instructions from “higher intelligences” to create her art. Alongside a small group of women known as The Five, she held seances, sketched automatic drawings, and listened for messages from the beyond, all of which she interpreted visually.
Between 1906 and 1915, she produced a massive œuvre known as The Paintings for the Temple, nearly 200 works ranging from small, diagrammatic pieces to monumental altarpieces. Her most famous subset is The Ten Largest (1907), a suite of towering tempera paintings (each over three meters high) that outline the spiritual evolution of human life.
The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood 1907 Public domain in many jurisdictions. Hilma af Klint
The Ten Largest”: A Spiritual Map of Life
In The Ten Largest, each painting corresponds to a phase: Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, and Old Age. According to Klint’s own colour symbolism, blue represents the female spirit, yellow the male, and pink/red physical and spiritual love. By weaving together circles, helixes, and organic forms, she visually maps human consciousness, not just in social or emotional terms, but in spiritual, esoteric ones.
One particularly striking example is The Ten Largest, No. 7: Adulthood (1907). The painting overflows with geometry and symbolism, capturing a moment of maturity where emotional complexity, karmic forces, and spiritual insight merge. According to Klint, many of these paintings were created under the direction of spiritual “masters” who guided her hand.
Another powerful work is from her series Primordial Chaos (1906), which explores creation and duality. In Chaos No. 7, she depicts the fertilization moment using “W” and “U” symbols to represent matter and spirit, male and female. Her paintings are alive with polarity, union, and transformative unity.
The Ten Largest, No. 2 – Childhood 1907 Faithful photographic reproduction of a public-domain work. Hilma af Klint
Why She Was Erased from Art History
Despite her innovation, af Klint’s work was not publicly shown during her lifetime. Why? For one, she believed the world was not ready. She explicitly requested that her paintings be kept private for 20 years after her death, and for decades much of her work remained stored in her family’s care.
Art historians also ignored her for other, more systemic reasons. As a woman, her spiritually inspired abstract art did not fit the male-dominated, rationalist narrative of abstraction that defined modernism. Her work was not considered part of mainstream “progressive painting” because she herself said it was not art, she saw it as a religious or mystical mission.
Moreover, her refusal to exhibit publicly, combined with her esoteric beliefs, made it easy for the male-dominated art world to sideline her. Her message was too metaphysical, too symbolic, and too feminine for the art establishment of her time.
Series No. VII, No. 3f 1920 Public domain. Hilma af Klint
Resurgence and Recognition
It wasn’t until the late 20th and early 21st centuries that Hilma af Klint’s work began to re-emerge. Retrospectives and renewed academic interest finally gave her the place she deserves. In 2018–2019, her Guggenheim exhibition “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” drew record crowds, transforming her status from obscure mystic to canonical pioneer.
Today, her legacy is studied through a feminist, spiritual, and cosmic lens, inspiring new generations of artists, writers, and thinkers. Her notebooks (over 120), filled with geometry, spirals, and automatic writing, have been published and archived, offering a window into her spiritual methodology.
Why She Matters; Then and Now
- Historical Correction: Recognising af Klint corrects a twofold historical myth: that abstraction was birthed by men, and that innovation ostensibly ignored women.
- Spiritual Depth: Her work doesn’t simply look abstract; it means something. Her colour codes, symbols, and forms are deeply intentional, drawn from mystical practice.
- Art + Science + Mysticism: She bridged science and spirit, nature and geometry, individual and universal. Her paintings are not decorative, they’re philosophical, designed to help us see “invisible reality.”
- Legacy of Inclusion: Her story encourages us to explore who is left out of art history and why. She is also a reminder that many “outsider” or “esoteric” artists may have shaped the course of modernism far more than previously acknowledged.
Further Information & Works to Explore
“The Ten Largest, No. 7: Adulthood”, you can read more about its colour symbolism and spiritual meaning at Artn Context. Art in Context
Primordial Chaos, No. 7, My Modern Met offers an excellent breakdown of this series, including how she used gendered symbolism. My Modern Met
Her spiritual practices and notebooks are documented in detail in a Smithsonian Magazine article, including how she claimed to transmit her visions from other realms. Smithsonian Magazine
The Colour Club published a thoughtful piece on how af Klint visualized the unseen through colour, a great read about her palette and symbolic logic. THE COLOUR CLUB
Conclusion
Hilma af Klint was not just ahead of her time, she created a new visual language entirely. Through her spiritual practices and her deep belief in the unseen, she painted what she saw in other dimensions. And while the art world marginalized her, history is now catching up.
Recognizing af Klint is more than just adding another name to the canon; it’s correcting the narrative. She invites us to consider how much we miss when we define art only through certain lenses: male, rational, visible. Her radical, mystical abstraction reminds us that art can be a pathway to the unknown and that sometimes, the most revolutionary voices are those who waited to be heard.
Sources:
Hilma af Klint Official Catalogue Raisonné
Guggenheim Museum Hilma af Klint Exhibition Page (2018–2019)
https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint
Tate Modern Female Abstract Artists / Women in Abstraction
Moderna Museet (Stockholm)
MoMA History of Abstraction