Art Appreciation: Hilma af Klint: Swedish painter, spiritualist and pioneer of abstract art

In this session, you will discover and discuss the art and life of a Swedish painter, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). As we study her career, we will come back on the roots of abstract art as well as the idea of being “the first”. Hilma af Klint trained to become a painter and became known, professionally, for her landscapes and portraits. What most did not know was that she was also a medium, and had embarked on realising a series of ambitious canvases, spiritual in content and abstract in aesthetic. In our session’s first part, you will learn about Hilma af Klint’s art and the different stages in her career. In a second part, we will compare and contrast her abstract paintings and watercolours, as well as her ideas with that of well-known abstract early painters: Kandinsky and Mondrian, but also Kupka and Dove. For all of them, spiritual ideas were crucial in developing an abstract style. We will discuss reasons why Hilma af Klint did not receive the same recognition as the others. Finally, as we seek to understand Hilma af Klint’s position within the history of modern art today, we will come back on the idea of “precedence” and “invention” with a critical eye. As we do so, we will discover the works of another woman and medium who was also an artist and who did abstract spiritualist drawings as early as 1870: Georgiana Houghton.