nature<\/a> which would go on to inspire much of her work.<\/p>\nHer father taught navigation\u00a0and astronomy to naval cadets\u00a0and her grandfather was a cartographer who mapped the many islands of the Swedish archipelago.<\/p>\n
At 20, she won a place at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (the Swedish academy began accepting women artists in 1864 but they were deemed only capable of copying \u2013 or minor arts such as needlework or tapestry \u2013 rather than creating any original art in their own right).<\/p>\n
Art shaped by unseen forces <\/p>\n
She became a skilled figurative artist in the formal tradition of her time and began to exhibit her more conventional landscapes.<\/p>\n
But she also began making drawings shaped by unseen forces.<\/p>\n
From an early age she was drawn to science and spirituality, the esoteric and the arcane.<\/p>\n
As a teenager she joined a mediumship circle to deepen her connection to the spirit world \u2013 an\u00a0interest that became all the keener after the sudden death of her sister Hermina at the age of 10 in 1880.<\/p>\n
In 1896 she began meeting with \u201cThe Fem\u201d, a group of four other female friends, who shared her deepening interest in spirituality and art.<\/p>\n
At first a couple of them \u2013 but not Af Klint \u2013 made automatic drawings, becoming receptive to their guides, who they called the \u201chigher masters\u201d, by entering into a light trance and allowing their hands to move freely over the page.<\/p>\n
They considered their drawings to be part of a collective, simply signing them \u201cD.F.\u201d for \u201cDe Fem\u201d (The Five).<\/p>\n
![\"Altarpiece,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Retable-n-1-1915-huile-et-feuille-d-or-sur-toile-237-5-179-5-cm-HaK187-By-courtesy-of-the-Hilma-af-K.jpeg\")
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Altarpiece, No. 1, 1915, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 237.5 \u00d7 179.5 cm, HaK187. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Moderna Museet, Stockholm \u00a9 Moderna Museet, Stockholm <\/p>\n
Then in 1903, Af Klint herself began drawing with graphite and coloured pencils before receiving the commission in January 1906 from her guide Amaliel to begin work on the \u201cPaintings for the Temple\u201d.<\/p>\n
For one of the series, she made no preparatory sketches and the pictures simply poured onto the page. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke,\u201d she wrote in her notebooks.<\/p>\n
\u2018Paradisaically beautiful paintings\u2019 <\/p>\n
For the series, the \u201cTen Largest\u201d, her guides gave her precise instructions.<\/p>\n
They asked her to create \u201cten paradisaically beautiful paintings\u201d that would give the world a glimpse of the four stages of life: Childhood,\u00a0Youth,\u00a0Adulthood,\u00a0and\u00a0Old Age. They told her to paint them in 40 days and what size the paintings were to be (they measure a monumental 3.28 x 2.40 metres).<\/p>\n
She painted with egg tempera\u00a0\u2013 known for its fast drying and luminous quality \u2013 and therefore ideally suited to the urgency of the painting \u2013 a technique used mainly by religious painters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.<\/p>\n
This \u201callowed her to work quickly, but also to intensify the pigments without using any varnish\u201d, said Rousseau.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe light comes from within. That was her intention. The painting itself reveals its own spirituality, in a way. So it is a technique tailored to the urgency of the creation, but one that also allows for enormous freedom in the act of execution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Each of the \u201cPaintings for the Temple\u201d are laid out in a clear, logical sequence. In a global first, eight of the 10 series of paintings are now on display in Paris.<\/p>\n
Some of them are highly structured with neatly ordered geometric shapes and symbols while others feel more fluid, with organic forms unfolding or floating across the surface. There are mysterious, hybrid creatures \u2013 a woman is grafted onto a swan\u2019s body \u2013 ; in others it\u2019s almost as if she\u2019s observing the inner life of plants.<\/p>\n
![\"Swan,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Cygne-n-1-1914-1915-huile-sur-toile-150-150-cm-HaK149-By-courtesy-of-the-Hilma-af-Klint-Foundation-p.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Swan, No. 1, 1914\u20131915, oil on canvas, 150 \u00d7 150 cm. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint foundation. \u00a9 Moderna Museet, Stockholm <\/p>\n
The sequence of paintings looks like maps of unseen worlds, where colour, shape and form are freely blended as she invites the viewer into a contemplative cosmic harmony and a deeper interconnectedness of all things.<\/p>\n
Paintings for the future <\/p>\n
But Af Klint always knew that recognition of her work would be a long time coming.<\/p>\n
For though she was able to exhibit her more conventional figurative paintings \u2013 small, post-Impressionist landscapes \u2013 when she tried to show her more radical, spiritual works, she met with resistance.<\/p>\n
In 1932, she prophesied that the world, steeped as it was in materialism, capitalism and formal academic tradition, simply wasn\u2019t yet ready for her work.<\/p>\n
When she died in 1944, she left her many paintings and notebooks to her nephew Eric, having insisted they should only be shown at least 20 years later. The paintings were hidden away in a secret vault, where they were miraculously well preserved.<\/p>\n
In 1970, her great nephew, Johan af Klint, offered to give her entire collection to Sweden\u2019s leading Modern Art Museum, the Moderna Museet, but the donation was refused.<\/p>\n
It was only in 1986, some 42 years after her death in 1944, when they were shown to an international audience in Maurice Tuchman\u2019s landmark exhibition in Los Angeles, that her work first caught the world\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n
Retrospectives then followed in Stockholm and in Berlin. In 2018, the Guggenheim\u2019s show of her work, \u201cHilma af Klint: Paintings for the future\u201d, drew hundreds of thousands of visitors.<\/p>\n
For though her paintings were well ahead of their time, her work also remains incredibly relevant\u00a0today, said Rousseau.<\/p>\n
\u201cEco-spirituality, women\u2019s work, the collective, the question of gender fluidity that she embodied in her works, but also in her own life \u2013 these are all subjects that today, in fact, put her in tune with, I would say, the current affairs of contemporary society.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe holds a very, very unique and particular appeal even for young artists,\u201d he said, adding that that the \u201cPaintings for the Temple\u201d were finished in 1915, a year into World War One \u2013 pointing out the connection with the many global conflicts today.<\/p>\n
This exhibition not only shows how she can engage seamlessly with Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, said Rousseau and be integrated with striking modernity and freshness into the grand narrative of modern art: it also shows that her prophecy has now come true.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Hilma\u2019s rehabilitation today really does coincide with the era she was waiting for, in fact. Even if it is a very difficult time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He hopes that the exhibition will encourage visitors to seek out a deeper relationship with nature, that it will inspire more collaboration and greater interconnectedness with all things.<\/p>\n
It is a wish that Af Klint, who described her mysterious paintings as \u201cthe one great task I carried out in my life\u201d, would surely be proud of.<\/p>\n
\u201cHilma af Klint: Paintings for the Temple\u201d<\/a>\u00a0opens on May 6 at Paris\u2019s Grand Palais.<\/p>\n![\"Dove,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Colombe-n-2-1915-huile-sur-toile-155-5-115-5-cm-HaK174-By-courtesy-of-the-Hilma-af-Klint-Foundation-.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Dove, n\u00b0 2, 1915, oil on canvas, 155,5 \u00d7 115,5 cm, HaK174. By courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation. \u00a9 Moderna Museet, Stockholm <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the autumn of 1907, a reclusive Swedish artist unfurled a vast roll of paper on her studio…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1897,6225,6485,6486,1120,96,10993,242,18173,819,548,13772,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-568246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibitions","tag-features","tag-feminism","tag-france","tag-nature","tag-paris","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Les-Dix-plus-grands-n-2-Enfance-1907-315-234-cm-HaK103-By-courtesy-of-the-Hilma-af-Klint-Foundation-.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Hilma-af-Klint-vers-1895-By-courtesy-of-the-Hilma-af-Klint-Foundation-photo-Moderna-Museet-Stockholm.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n