Hilma af Klint
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Portrait of Viktor Almquist
Signed H af Klint. Watercolour and chalk, image area 44 x 37 cm.
Provenance
Director General Viktor Almquist.
Thence by descent within the family.
More information
Viktor Almquist (1860 - 1951) was a Swedish civil servant, Director-General, and head of the Prison Administration. Almquist was a lifelong chairman of the literary society Samfundet de nio. Under the pseudonym Hans Vik, he published three collections of poetry: Målerier (1889), Rimlek och färgspel (1894), and Vågsvall (1898). Hilma af Klint was the same age as Almquist. According to family tradition they were friends and grew up together.
Hilma af Klint was a pioneer on many levels. Her artistic career began in classical painting and she was one of the first generation of women to train at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Until her 40s, she mainly painted portraits and landscapes, botanical studies and commissions. Without any progressive transition, she then moves from traditional painting to creating in an absolutely free and unconventional way. Long after her death, Hilma af Klint is now internationally recognised and celebrated as an early pioneer of abstract art.
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.