Hilma af Klint
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"Sotarpojkar Stigberget"
Signed H. af Klint and dated 1890. Oil on canvas 80 x 117 cm.
Provenance
Acquired in the early 20th century.
Thence by descent.
Literature
"Hilma af Klint, Catalogue Raisonné", volume 7, Bokförlaget Stolpe, Stockholm, 2022.
More information
Hilma af Klint was a pioneer in many respects. Her artistic career began in classical painting, and she was among the first generations of female students admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm.
In this painting, Hilma af Klint depicts a team of chimney sweep boys on Stigbergsgatan in Söder, Stockholm. It is an academic work from the period after her graduation from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1888. Along with a few female colleagues, she shared a studio at Hamngatan 5 near Kungsträdgården in Stockholm. In the upper floors of the so-called Atejéhuset, there were studios and residences for students who had completed their studies. It was the cultural hub of the time, with Blanchs Café and the Art Salon on the ground floor.
Historian Dick Harrisson described the fate of the "chimney sweep boys" in an article in Svenska Dagbladet in 2017: "Chimney sweep boys and lads are mentioned in Swedish sources as early as the beginning of the 18th century, and they were still common at the end of the 19th century. They received ridiculously low wages: food, lodging, work clothes, and a sum of money that did not even guarantee they could eat their fill. According to the law, apprentices were supposed to be at least 14 years old, but this rule was ignored within the chimney sweeping industry. It is also worth noting that many chimney sweep boys did not work voluntarily. Often, chimney sweeps sourced their labour from orphanages and made foster children their employees."
Until her 40s, Hilma af Klint primarily painted portraits and landscapes, botanical studies, and commissioned works. Then, without any progressive transition, she shifted from traditional painting to creating abstract art in an absolutely free and unconventional manner. Long after her death, Hilma af Klint became internationally recognized and celebrated as an early pioneer of abstract art. From being virtually unknown, she is now equated with the greatest modern painters and her abstract works are considered groundbreaking. She has redrawn the map of 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.