Hilma af Klint
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Summer day at Adelsö Church
Signed H. af Klint. Panel 46 x 61 cm.
Provenance
Purchased in the first half of the 20th century. Thence by descent.
More information
Hilma af Klint was a pioneer in many ways. She grew up in a naval officer family in Stockholm and Adelsö in Lake Mälaren. She belonged to one of the very first generations of women to be educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. After graduating, she shared a studio with some of her female colleagues in the so-called Ateljéhuset on Hamngatan 5, near Kungsträdgården. It was the cultural center of the time, with Blanch's Café and Art salon on the ground floor.
The painting in the auction is an early work, created during this period. The motif is taken from Adelsö and depicts the gate to Adelsö cemetery. Around the northern and western parts of the cemetery, there is an old wall made of cut gray stone. Inside the wall, maple and ash trees grow. The realistic execution of the painting gives no hint of the dramatic development towards abstract painting that would follow.
Until her 40s, Hilma af Klint painted mainly portraits, landscapes, botanical studies, and commissioned works. Without any progressive transition, she then shifted from traditional painting to creating in an absolutely free and unconventional way.
Hilma af Klint has taken the art world by storm. From being practically unknown, she is now considered on par with the greatest modern painters, and her abstract works are considered groundbreaking. Long after her death, she has redrawn the map for early abstract art, both in Sweden and internationally.
Artist
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish painter, theosophist and pioneer within abstract painting, and already in 1906 had created an abstract visual language. This was several years before Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevitj who are still considered the forerunners of abstract art in the 20th century. Klint began her artist training at the Technical School in Stockholm (now Konstfack), where she also took lessons in portrait painting. After her studies, Klint acquired her own studio by Kungsträdgården where she painted and exhibited landscapes in naturalistic styles.
It was during a trip to Switzerland where she met Rudolf Steiner and was taken by his anthroposophical ideas and thereafter developed a strong interest for the occult. During séances, she received messages, which she transformed into abstract paintings. In 1986 Klint showed her abstract work for the first time in the exhibition, ‘The Spiritual in Art’, Abstract painting 1890-85, in Los Angelese. This exhibition came to be Hilma af Klint’s international breakthrough.
With a solo exhibition at the Modern Museum in Stockholm, Klint started a new phase of her artistic career. This became the most wrote about exhibition in the history of the Modern Museum and made Klint into a well-known name worldwide. Since 1972 her abstract work has been managed by the Hilma af Klint Foundation. The Modern Museum in Stockholm has a room dedicated to Hilma af Klint in their permanent exhibition, where the works shown are regularly rotated. She is even represented by the National Museum, the Royal Library, the Maritime Museum, the Nordic Museum and Uppsala’s University Library.