Hilma af Klint
You might have heard that it was Wassily Kandinsky who invented abstract art. Recent research, however, says it was actually the visionary Swedish artist Hilma af Klint who was the first. She began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, several years before Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to free their own artwork of representational content.
The painting we present today belongs to The Paintings for the Temple series that was completed in 1915. It consists of three large canvases that Hilma af Klint called Altarpieces. These works appear to relate to Theosophy’s version of evolutionary theory, in which evolution occurs in two directions, elevating from the physical to the spiritual and descending from the divine to the material world. These works were meant to be shown together in the sanctuary, or in the innermost part of the temple. And so they are, really, a culmination and a bringing together of forms, colors, and motifs. Af Klint sketched her vision for the temple in a notebook dated 1930 to 1931. The building was to be a nearly round, three-level structure connected by a spiral staircase upon which visitors could proceed upward. Its floors were to be connected by a four-story tower with an altar room at the top of the staircase, where these paintings would reside. Af Klint imagined that the construction would resonate with, as she wrote, “a certain power and calm.”
P.S. Misattributing great inventions to men? Sounds familiar! Here are 5 women artists whose work was infamously misattributed to men!
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