Hilma af klint: The woman who painted the invisible
Imagine a winter’s night in Stockholm, 1904. The icy wind howls through the cobbled streets, rattling the windows of artists’ studios. In a modest apartment on Hamngatan, five women sit around a round table, hands clasped, eyes closed. A candle flickers between them, casting shifting shadows on the walls. Suddenly, one of them—Hilma af Klint—leaps to her feet. Her fingers tremble. "Gregor is speaking," she murmurs. "He says I must paint. Not landscapes, not portraits… but the invisible."
By Artedusa
••11 min readThat night, without knowing it, abstract art was born. Three years before Kandinsky, seven years before Mondrian, a 42-year-old Swedish woman, unknown to the art world, began a series of monumental canvases that defied every convention. Golden spirals, concentric circles, geometric forms floating in undefined space—as if she had captured the visual echo of a mathematical equation or a forgotten prayer. Yet no one would see them before her death. No one would know that a woman, in the shadows, had outpaced the great masters of modernity.
Why? Because Hilma af Klint had chosen to remain silent.
01The séance where art changed hands
Let us return to that table, to those intertwined hands. De Fem ("The Five"), the group Hilma had founded with four other Swedish artists, met every Friday for séances. In turn-of-the-century Sweden, the occult was not a fringe obsession but a true counterculture. The Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875, counted among its members intellectuals, scientists, and even artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian. But while the latter sought in abstraction a formal response to the crisis of representation, Hilma af Klint saw it as a mission.
In 1906, after two years of automatic drawings and cryptic messages received during her séances, she began The Paintings for the Temple—193 monumental works, conceived as a single revelation. "I invented nothing," she would later write. "I only obeyed a force that guided me." That force, she called Amaliel, a spirit dictating shapes, colors, dimensions. The canvases were vast—some over three meters tall—as if they had to contain the infinite. The colors were coded: blue for the spiritual, yellow for the masculine, pink for the feminine. The symbols recurred: the spiral (evolution), the swan (transcendence), the eye (divine vision).
And yet, when she completed the series in 1915, no one saw it. Not even her artist friends. "They are too far ahead," she reportedly told her nephew. "The world is not ready."
02The studio of secrets: when painting becomes a coded language
Step into Hilma af Klint’s studio, and you enter a sanctuary. The walls are covered in sketches, diagrams, hastily scribbled notes. On a table, pots of pigment—lapis lazuli, cinnabar, red ochre—sit beside botany books and theosophical treatises. At the center, a blank canvas waits, stretched on a wooden frame. Hilma sits before it, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. Then she begins.
Her process is both methodical and mystical. First, she sketches precise geometric forms in pencil, like an architect drafting plans for an invisible temple. Then she applies layers of tempera—a mixture of pigments and egg yolk—which she spreads with fine brushes, creating effects of transparency and depth. Sometimes she uses gold leaf, as in The Altar (1915), where a golden spiral seems to float above a midnight-blue background, evoking both a galaxy and a womb.
But what strikes most is the precision of her gesture. Unlike the abstract expressionists who would later paint in urgency and emotion, Hilma worked with almost scientific rigor. Her circles were perfect, her lines straight as if drawn with a ruler. And yet, everything breathed life. Look at The Ten Largest (1907), her most famous series: each canvas represents a stage of human life, from childhood to old age, but also a cosmic dimension. Organic forms—cells, embryos, flowers—mingle with geometric structures, as if biology and mathematics were merging.
"She did not paint images, but spiritual equations," writes art historian Julia Voss. And perhaps that is why her work was ignored for so long: it fit no category. Neither fully abstract nor figurative. Neither art nor science. Neither masculine nor feminine. An enigma.
03The curse of invisibility: why no one saw her
Hilma af Klint died in 1944, to general indifference. She was 81, and the world had just discovered abstraction… but not hers. In her will, she stipulated that her abstract works should not be exhibited until twenty years after her death. A strange, almost prophetic clause. As if she had sensed that the 20th century was not ready for her visions.
Why such silence? Several reasons intertwine, like the threads of a spider’s web.
First, gender. At the time, a woman artist was already an anomaly. A woman painting giant spirals and esoteric symbols? A madwoman, or worse, an eccentric. Sweden’s conservative institutions did not know what to make of her work. "Too intellectual," Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, reportedly said when she showed him her canvases. "Too feminine," critics would murmur, without daring to write it.
Then, context. Abstraction in the 1910s and 1920s was a masculine revolution. Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian—all men, all tied to avant-garde movements (the Blue Rider, the Bauhaus, De Stijl). Hilma worked alone, on the margins. She had no manifesto, no group, no gallery to defend her. "Abstract art was born in Parisian salons and Berlin cafés," writes historian Griselda Pollock. "Not in a Stockholm apartment where five women invoked spirits."
Finally, choice. Hilma could have exhibited. She had the connections: she had studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, she sold landscapes and portraits to make a living. But she refused. "These paintings are not for the eyes, but for the soul," she reportedly said. A phrase that sounds like a curse.
And then there is that cruel irony: in 1986, when her works were finally shown to the public, the art world was stunned. "How could we have missed this?" exclaimed the New York Times. "It’s like discovering a lost continent." Too late for her. But just in time to rewrite history.
04The swan and the spiral: decoding Hilma’s secret language
If you had to remember just one work by Hilma af Klint, it would be The Swan (1915). A two-meter-tall canvas where two stylized birds—one black, one white—clash in a whirlwind of concentric circles. At first glance, it is a geometric composition. But look closer.
The swan, in Norse mythology, is a symbol of transformation. It appears in Wagner’s Lohengrin, an opera Hilma loved. Here, the two birds could represent the masculine and the feminine, light and shadow, earth and sky. But they are also in motion: their wings seem to beat, as if the canvas itself were breathing. And then there are those circles. Seven, exactly. The sacred number of the Theosophists, symbol of perfection.
Hilma did not paint images. She painted hieroglyphs.
Take The Altar (1915), another of her major works. At its center, a golden spiral rises upward, like a column of light. Below, two triangles—one pointing up (the spiritual), the other down (matter). Between them, a rose, Rosicrucian symbol of the soul. "It is a map of the cosmos," explains art historian Briony Fer. "But also a map of the human body, from cell to organ."
And then there are the colors. Hilma had her own theory of color, inspired by Goethe and Theosophy. Blue, for her, was the color of the spirit—hence its use in The Ten Largest, where it dominates the canvases representing childhood and youth. Yellow, the color of the masculine and the intellect, appears in works linked to adulthood. Pink, finally, symbolizes the feminine and love, and is found in the canvases devoted to old age and death.
"She did not paint what she saw, but what she knew," summarizes Julia Voss. And what she knew was that the visible world was only a tiny part of reality.
05The temple that would never exist
Hilma af Klint had a dream: to build a temple for her paintings. Not a gallery, not a museum—a temple, in the literal sense. A place where her works would be displayed in a spiral, like in a cathedral, to guide the visitor toward spiritual revelation.
She even drew the plans. A circular building, with a spiral ramp leading upward, like the Guggenheim in New York—built, ironically, by Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect fascinated by the esoteric. "Visitors should ascend slowly, as in an ascension," she wrote. "At each level, a new stage of knowledge."
The temple would never be built. But today, when you enter the Guggenheim to see her paintings, you feel as if it exists. As if her works, at last, have found their place.
In 2018, the exhibition Paintings for the Future drew over 600,000 visitors to New York. Endless lines, people in tears before The Ten Largest, articles in every newspaper. "It’s as if she painted for us," wrote one critic. "As if she had waited a century for the world to understand her."
Yet one question lingers: what if Hilma af Klint never wanted to be understood? What if her paintings were not works of art, but messages—bottles thrown into the sea, sent toward a future she would never know?
06The legacy: when art becomes a time machine
Today, Hilma af Klint is everywhere. Her canvases are reproduced on book covers, posters, clothing. Artists like Julie Mehretu and Olafur Eliasson cite her influence. Designers draw inspiration from her geometric motifs. Even fashion has embraced her: in 2020, designer Iris van Herpen presented a collection directly inspired by her spirals and circles.
But her true legacy lies elsewhere. In the idea that art can be more than an object—an experience, a revelation, a bridge between worlds.
"She opened a door no one had seen," says contemporary artist Tacita Dean. "And once you cross it, you can’t go back."
Take The Ten Largest. These canvases, painted in 1907, seem strangely modern today. Their forms evoke fractals, medical images (ultrasounds, MRIs), even data visualizations. As if Hilma had foreseen, a century in advance, the questions that obsess us today: the boundary between the organic and the artificial, between the visible and the invisible, between the human and the divine.
And then there is that ultimate irony: by refusing to show her work in her lifetime, Hilma af Klint may have saved abstract art. Imagine if Kandinsky or Mondrian had discovered her canvases in 1910. Would they have dared to paint their own abstractions? Or would they have retreated, intimidated by this woman who seemed to already know everything?
07What if abstraction had another face?
We love simple narratives. Kandinsky, the solitary genius, inventing abstraction in a flash of inspiration. Malevich, the revolutionary, reducing painting to a black square. But history, like Hilma’s canvases, is always more complex.
What if abstraction was not born in the cafés of Munich or the studios of Paris, but in a Stockholm apartment, between two séances? What if its true face was that of a woman, sitting before a blank canvas, eyes closed, waiting for spirits to dictate the shapes?
Hilma af Klint never sought glory. She never wanted to be "the first." She only wanted to paint what could not be painted. And perhaps that is why her work touches us so deeply. Because it does not speak of technique, style, or movement. It speaks of mystery.
The mystery of creation. The mystery of the invisible. The mystery of those hands that, one night in 1904, began tracing circles on a canvas, without knowing they were changing the history of art.
"The day will come when these paintings will be shown," she wrote in her journal. "But not in my lifetime."
That day has come. And the world, at last, is looking.