The Swan No. 9
Hilma af Klint
HILMA AF KLINT, 1915. OIL ON CANVAS.
Hilma af Klint wanted her true work to remain hidden for 20 years after her death, aware of how ground-breaking it was. The instructions of her will were followed; for two decades more than 1200 artworks of one of the centuries most important artists were kept in sealed boxes, seen by no-one, known about by very few. Klint was, by all measures, the very first purely abstract artist – a mystic and a painter with a deep interest and understanding of spirituality, she represented spiritual ideas in a unique visual language of colour, geometry and line. Her work predates those considered the fathers of Abstraction by more than a decade, building an new art movement in total secrecy save for a group of four other women who, together, called themselves The Five. They would meet to discuss spiritualism and mysticism, holding seances where the practiced automatic drawing, where the hand moved free from conscious decisions of the mind. This technique would be picked up and become central to Surrealism some twenty years later. Making her living as a traditional landscape painter, she hid her abstract forms from the world, showing it publicly only a few times in her life at conferences and events on spiritualism and theosophy.