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Hilma af Klint and Yayoi Kusama: Tapping spirituality and visions into art
The lives, work, and legacy of these creatives who dabbled in transcendental expression
Hilma af Klint
Deemed the first modern artist of the Western World, Hilma af Klint was a Swedish creative who credited her creative abilities to a divine, spiritual authority. Her abstract paintings in the 20th century reflected bold, imaginative aesthetics—carrying an essence the world had yet seen before.
Because of this nature, she kept her work incredibly private and only permitted their release twenty years following her passing: a collection totaling 1,200 paintings, 100 texts, and 26,000 pages of notes. Only over the subsequent three decades post-1986 have her paintings and works begun to receive serious attention for their distinctive qualities.
Early Life and Work
During her time at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1882 to 1887, af Klint studied drawing as well as portrait and landscape painting. There, she met colleagues who’d ultimately become founding members of a spiritualist group she’d help form called “The Five.” Meeting regularly over the next few years, their gatherings consisted of prayer, meditation, sermon analyses, and séances during which they made contact with spirits.
af Klint’s first major group of work, The Paintings for the Temple (1905-15), were generated as part of a mission relayed to her through the divine. 111 paintings resulted—made on every fifth day of the year—to articulate transcendental views of reality through geometric forms in composition and scales in color.
In 1986, her work was showcased in public for the first time at the Los Angeles show “The Spiritual in Art.” Her paintings didn’t rocket into international popularity until 2013 when they were shown at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet’s “Pioneer of Abstraction,”…
