Hilma af Klint: artist, medium, spiritualist

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Last edited Sun Apr 6, 2025, 08:33 AM - Edit history (1)

They called her a crazy witch': did medium Hilma af Klint invent abstract art?

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/06/hilma-af-klint-abstract-art-beyond-the-visible-film-documentary?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Years before Kandinsky, the Swedish artist was painting circles, sunbursts and looping lines – instructed, she believed, by spirits. Now, over 75 years since her death, she is being recognised as a pioneer

Stuart Jeffries
Tue 6 Oct 2020 10.53 EDT

In 1971, the art critic Linda Nochlin wrote an essay called Why have there been no great women artists? The question may be based on a false premise: there have been, we just didn’t get to see their work.

The visionary Swedish artist Hilma af Klint exemplifies this clearly, argues Halina Dyrschka, the German film-maker, whose beautiful film Beyond the Visible, about the painter’s astonishing work, is released on Friday. When I ask her why af Klint has been largely ignored since her death in 1944, Dyrschka tells me over video link from Berlin: “It’s easier to make a woman into a crazy witch than change art history to accommodate her. We still see a woman who is spiritual as a witch, while we celebrate spiritual male artists as geniuses.”

When Dyrschka first saw Hilma af Klint’s paintings seven years ago, “they spoke to me more profoundly than any art I have ever seen”. She was beguiled by the grids and intersecting circles, schematic flower forms, painted numbers, looping lines, pyramids and sunbursts.“It felt like a personal insult that those paintings had been hidden from me for so long.”

Af Klint had three strikes against her. She was a woman, she had no contacts in the art world, and, worst of all, she was a medium who believed her art flowed through her unmediated by ego. She worked for many years in quiet obscurity on a Swedish island where she cared for her mother as the latter went blind. Today, her work is being appreciated, but not bought up, by collectors because it is held by her descendants. As Ulla af Klint, widow of the nephew who inherited the artist’s work, says in the film: “You can’t make money out of Hilma.”

Beyond the Visible

Hilma af Klint (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈhɪ̂lːma ˈɑːv ˈklɪnːt]; 26 October 1862 – 21 October 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first major abstract works in Western art history.[1] A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.[2] She belonged to a group called "The Five", comprising a circle of women inspired by Theosophy, who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the so-called "High Masters"—often by way of séances.[3] Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.[4]
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilma_af_Klint


Portrait photo of Hilma af Klint by an unknown photographer, photograph published in 1901

She finally got the recognition she deserves.
❤️pants