Hilma af Klint by Hilma Af Klint

Hilma af Klint by Hilma Af Klint

In the 1920s, Hilma af Klint spent extended periods in Dornach, Switzerland, where Rudolf Steiner had established an international centre for the anthroposophical movement – the Goetheanum. 

At the Goetheanum, af Klint took part in the centre’s rich cultural life. Among other things, she studied Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theory of colours. In 1922, at the age of 60, she completely abandoned her geometrical way of working for the ‘wet on wet’ watercolour method inspired by anthroposophy, and developed by Steiner and his circle. An example of this is her series On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees from 1922. Most of the series presented in this, the sixth volume of Hilma af Klint’s Catalogue Raisonné, have no titles.
 

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a pioneer of art who made a turn away from visible to spiritual reality. Already in 1906, she had made abstract paintings. Hilma af Klint perceived a spiritual dimension and envisioned contexts beyond the perceptions of the ordinary senses. When painting, she alleged that she was in contact with beings of higher levels of consciousness that spoke and conveyed messages through her. Like her, later, modernist contemporaries were influenced by the spiritual movements of spiritualism, theosophy and later anthroposophy. Her mission was to understand and communicate the various dimensions of human existence.