/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/86/ea/86ea6ec3-9230-4152-95ca-e941d343bf3b/klint-altarpiece.jpg)
Meet Hilma af Klint, the Occultist Who Believed Otherworldly Spirits Told Her What to Paint. Now, She’s Considered One of History’s First Abstract Artists
The Swedish painter created bold, vibrant works as early as 1906—several years before contemporaries like Wassily Kandinsky. A new exhibition in France celebrates her sweeping “Paintings for the Temple” series
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/Ellen_Wexler.png)
:focal(750x500:751x501)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/86/ea/86ea6ec3-9230-4152-95ca-e941d343bf3b/klint-altarpiece.jpg)
When Hilma af Klint was in her 30s, she began holding séances with a group of women known as the Five. During these rituals, they believed they were communicating with spirits called the High Masters: Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg and Gregor.
In 1904, Georg and Ananda “asked” the Five for a temple, and two years later, Amaliel “commissioned” af Klint to create the paintings that would hang inside. “I answered immediately ‘yes,’” she recalled in her journals. The spirit requested art that would portray “the immortal aspect of man” and deliver “a message to humanity.”
Af Klint completed 193 works over the next nine years. Known as Paintings for the Temple, they are now thought of as among the first abstract compositions. They predate the nascent efforts of artists like Wassily Kandinsky, who is often considered—and who considered himself—the forerunner of the movement. But af Klint never asked for credit. By the end of her life, she had more than 1,200 abstract pieces to her name, and she insisted that they remain hidden from the public for 20 years after her death. The world, she believed, wasn’t ready for them.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/76/c9/76c9eebd-aba2-4f75-9396-8e4d198ca608/chaos_originel_n_12_1906-1907_huile_sur_toile_53__37_cm_hak012_by_courtesy_of_the_hilma.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/09/db/09db2de7-3ead-4d95-ae45-f75f8add3cec/chaos.jpg)
“She created bold compositions in which vivid colors, geometric shapes and organic motifs anticipated the major currents of modern art,” according to Paris’ Grand Palais. “Spirals, circles and beams reflect her total creative freedom and give her paintings a universal and timeless dimension.”
The museum is now hosting “Hilma af Klint: The Temple Paintings (1906-1915),” the artist’s first solo exhibition in France. A collaboration between the Grand Palais and the Pompidou Center, the show spotlights Paintings for the Temple, which the museum calls “her magnum opus.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/ca/74/ca7401c2-afc0-4f40-9765-1e4ca15ee38f/les_grandes_peintures_figuratives_1907_huile_sur_toile_148_x_108_cm_hak038_by_courtesy_of.jpg)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/96/03/96037b90-3fa0-4462-9b68-d81dc8e722c7/les-grandes-peintures-figuratives.jpg)
These artworks are generally organized into ten series, and museumgoers will find eight of them on display. The exhibition positions af Klint as an overlooked artist who was ahead of her time and examines how esotericism, folklore and scientific culture, among other influences, inspired her.
Born in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint started dabbling in the occult at a young age, attending her first séance at 17. When her 10-year-old sister, Hermina, died the following year, she intensified her efforts to communicate with the dead. The artist’s occultist inclinations were grounded in movements like Spiritualism, Theosophy and Anthroposophy, which involve a belief in hidden spiritual worlds.
Quick facts: The rise of Spiritualism
- Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, and adjacent movements became quite popular in the 19th century, “as people sought to reconcile religious beliefs with scientific advances and a new awareness of the plurality of religions,” per the Hilma af Klint Foundation.
- A variety of famous figures—including Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Todd Lincoln and Queen Victoria—participated in séances during this period.
All the while, af Klint maintained the guise of a perfectly conventional artist. After graduating from Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1887, she created largely unremarkable landscapes and portraits that conformed to the norms of her time. As the Grand Palais says, “Hilma af Klint led parallel artistic lives: one conventional, with traditional figurative works, the other clandestine, which remained defiantly avant garde.”
In 1896, she formed the Five, which met regularly to contact spirits and write down their experiences. In her journals, which would eventually total some 26,000 pages, af Klint wrote that she accepted the temple assignment on New Year’s Day in 1906. (She described Amaliel’s directive as a “commission”—though as the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 2018, “I have no idea how this transaction was managed.”)
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/b9/64/b964bddf-04b3-4078-b75e-dc43a49ae537/vue_de_lexposition_hilma_af_klint_-_scenographie_pascal_rodriguez_-_grandpalaisrmn_x_centre_p.jpeg)
She created 111 works—roughly one every fifth day—between November 1906 and April 1908. During this period, the spirits asked for “ten paradisaically beautiful paintings” evoking four stages of life: childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. Pascal Rousseau, the exhibition’s curator and an art historian at the Sorbonne, considers them a highlight of the exhibition.
“They were painted in 1907, but they form a psychedelic panorama that looks like it was done in the 1970s,” he tells the London Times’ David Chazan. “This series is one of the major works of the 20th century. When it was painted, it was radical. Nothing equivalent existed at the time.”
When af Klint died in 1944, many of her paintings went to her nephew. Her will stipulated that they shouldn’t be displayed publicly for two decades. She appears to have “wagered on a more spiritually attuned future audience,” wrote Schjeldahl. “Might that be us? It’s a tall order.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/0d/ec/0dec3e5d-2afd-4f6e-8fd8-fcb054bbaf99/hilma_af_klint_vers_1895_by_courtesy_of_the_hilma_af_klint_foundation__photo_moderna_museet.jpg)
Her paintings then languished in relative obscurity until 1986, when they went on view in Los Angeles. She has since gained recognition from scholars, who realized that her little-known works challenged abstract art’s accepted timeline. In recent years, her pieces have appeared in blockbuster exhibitions in cities like Stockholm, New York City and London. “Af Klint has become a cultural force, touted as an early feminist, a queer icon, a prophet, a witch—whatever your worldview wishes for her to be,” Smithsonian magazine’s Jay Cheshes wrote in 2025.
As her fame grows, curators are hoping to firmly establish her legacy as one of abstract art’s earliest pioneers. Her family, meanwhile, has resisted the commercialization of her work, with one great-grandnephew arguing that the paintings ought to be available primarily to “spiritual seekers.”
“She didn’t want to be exhibited in a museum,” art historian Caroline Levisse tells the Guardian’s Kim Willsher. “She wanted her work to be in a temple. It was the spiritual that appealed to her. I think her attitude was: This is art for the future, and people will get it eventually.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/Ellen_Wexler.png)