Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Hilma af Klint: The Woman Who Painted the Future, Then Hid It in a Box

In 1906, a woman in a long skirt and buttoned-up blouse stood in a candlelit studio on a Swedish island, channeling messages from the other side. Her brush moved in sharp, ecstatic gestures across the canvas. Loops, spirals, eyes without faces. Shapes that looked like they belonged in the 1960s, not in a world still ruled by oil lamps and corsets. Her name was Hilma af Klint, and she had just cracked open the door to abstract art.

But then, quietly, she closed it again.

She locked away hundreds of her radical paintings — brilliant, vibrating, oversized works that predated Kandinsky’s abstraction by years — and left a note: Do not show these until at least 20 years after my death. The world, she insisted, was not ready.

And for a long time, it wasn’t.

To say Hilma af Klint was ahead of her time is like saying Tesla had a thing for electricity. She wasn’t just early. She was somewhere else entirely — perched on a ledge between mysticism and modernism, talking to spirits, painting what she claimed were visions from higher planes. And unlike the men whose names now dominate the narrative of modern art — Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich — Hilma was not trying to destroy form. She was trying to reveal the divine.

Born in 1862 into a well-off naval family in Sweden, Hilma was raised between maps, mathematics, and mysticism. A strange cocktail that would ferment, decades later, into a theory of art that was closer to the cosmos than to the canvas. She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm — one of the few women there, of course — and quickly became a skilled portraitist and botanical illustrator. She could render a beech leaf so precisely you’d swear it rustled.

But in the margins of her notebooks, other things grew.

She joined spiritualist circles. Held séances. Heard voices. She and four other women formed a group they called The Five — think of them as a metaphysical girl band who used automatic drawing to transmit messages from other realms. They received a directive: to create a “Temple” of paintings that would convey complex spiritual truths. Hilma was to be the vessel. She agreed.

The spirits did not go easy on her.

Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma created 193 works known as The Paintings for the Temple. These weren’t polite little oils to hang in salons. Some were ten feet tall. They pulsed with biomorphic forms, coded diagrams, pastel swirls, runes, flowers that might also be chakras. There was an entire visual language: snails, crosses, cosmic eggs, twin serpents locked in some yin-yang ballet. They were both gorgeous and uncanny, like something you’d find painted inside a time-traveling observatory. Critics today call it spiritual abstraction — but back then, no such genre existed.

And here’s the kicker: when Kandinsky published On the Spiritual in Art in 1911, claiming abstraction was born in his studio, Hilma had already been deep in the waters of non-objective painting for five years. But no one knew. Because Hilma never told.

She never sought exhibitions. She didn’t sell her canvases. While the men of modernism were busy staging manifestos and self-mythologizing over wine, Hilma af Klint quietly stacked her works in a storage unit and walked away.

Why? Why create a body of work so immense, so strange and luminous and full of purpose — then bury it?

One answer is spiritual. Hilma believed her work was part of an unfolding divine evolution. The world wasn’t yet ready to see it. And maybe she wasn’t ready to be seen. She didn’t want the art world, with its ego and commerce, pawing at her visions.

Another answer is gendered. Imagine being a woman in 1910 telling the male gatekeepers of art that you paint messages dictated by spirits. Imagine doing it without irony. The risk of being dismissed as a hysteric or a crank wasn’t hypothetical — it was historical fact.

So Hilma waited. She painted. She took care of her blind sister. She filled notebooks with diagrams, writings, and spiritual texts — over 26,000 pages of them. She never married. Never stopped listening to the invisible.

And when she died in 1944, she left her art to a nephew, with strict instructions: Keep it sealed until at least 1964.

It would take until the 1980s for art historians to begin decoding the mystery. And it wasn't until 2018, when the Guggenheim Museum in New York unveiled Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, that the world finally gasped — collectively — in recognition. The show became the museum’s most visited exhibition ever. Visitors stood in front of her colossal spirals and cried.

Suddenly, people were asking different questions. Not who is she — but why haven’t we known her all along?

She had cracked open abstraction years before it was fashionable. She had explored spiritual consciousness through visual codes before psychedelics hit the shelves. She’d even, arguably, anticipated elements of feminist art theory. But she did it all while invisible, off the map, whispered about only in esoteric circles.

Some call her a visionary. Others, a prophet. Either way, Hilma af Klint is now — finally — considered one of the pioneers of modern art. A forgotten foremother. A cosmic rebel. The ghost in abstraction’s machine.

Of course, the art world doesn’t love to admit it got scooped. Especially not by a woman. Especially not by one who never asked for its approval. But Hilma’s belated fame is more than just a correction of history. It’s a rupture — a shimmering crack in the linear story we’ve been told about progress, genius, and who gets to shape culture.

She didn’t need Paris or Vienna. She didn’t need Picasso. She had the voices. The visions. The void.

And maybe — just maybe — she was right. Maybe we’re only now beginning to see what she saw.

A century late. But glowing.