Hilma af Klint - the mother of the abstract art

Vasily Kandinsky, the award-winning father of abstractionism, began to work in this style and created in 1910 his Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor) considered the first abstract painting. We know that the mother is always known and recognized, unlike the father ... But that does not happen with the work of a woman whom we can rightly say is the mother of this trend in modern art - Hilma af Klint. This is probably due to the fact that the artist, who creates his first abstract works four years before Kandinsky, demands in her will that her creative heritage be shown to audiences 20 years after her death. So she went incognito in the 20th century, and in 1986 her works were shown in the exhibition "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Paintings 1890-1985" presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Hilma af Klint was born in 1862, and is the fourth of Admiral Viktor von Klint's and Matilda Sontag's five children. Since Little Hilma is the "black sheep" in the family - liberal and talented, so her parents decide to invest in her education. Hilma studied at the Technical School (today School of Applied Arts), took portrait painting lessons and continued her studies at the Swedish Royal Academy of Arts. From the late 1880s to 1908 she worked at her own atelier in Stockholm. During this period her creativity was strongly influenced by expressionism. The artist is painting landscapes, portraits and plot paintings, conducting her first exhibitions.

Hilma starts to be interested in spiritism after losing one of her sisters, barely ten years old. She studies occult sciences, develops as a medium, manifests clairvoyant abilities. Later, she created a spirited "female circle", recording each message at each session of the messages received "from that world". Together with her adherents, according to her reports, they are contacted with spirits of different names. In 1904, Hilma receives a message from Ananda in which the spirit wants her to create "on the astral plane," her paintings depict the eternal and unchanging, what is preserved in people after their death. Years later, the spirits sent a message again: "You must proclaim a new understanding of life and become part of the new Kingdom of the earth" (according to the artist's diary). All of this she illustrates in her works, which in the early twentieth century abandoned the academic world and transformed completely.

120a0068web_0 (1).jpg

In 1906 Klint created his first series of abstract paintings - unusual, strange, strange until then. Yes, there are artists who dare to paint something abstract, but not at such a depth. Klint proposes abstraction years before Kandinsky, Malevich, Kupka and Mondrian, but that does not guarantee recognition of her work. Hilma presents her paintings to a narrow circle of people in closed collections and provokes reactions that persuade her to take the radical decision noted in her will. The artist continues painting to a deep age. She died in a car accident at the age of 82 in 1944. Over the years her estate has been handed over by the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm. In 2013, she organized her first retrospective exhibition, subsequently shown in Germany, Spain, Denmark, Norway and Estonia. This allows Klint's work to become available to the general public. Nowadays, the doors of world-famous museums are widely open for a long time unrecognizable innovations that have surpassed men in abstract art.