This exhibition is the first major retrospective in Asia of Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), a pioneer of abstract painting. The painter from Sweden has been reevaluated in recent years as a creator of abstract paintings that preceded her contemporaries, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. For many years, her oeuvre of more than 1,000 works was known only to a very few people. As late as in the 1980s, several exhibitions began to introduce her works, and by the turn of the 21st century, her presence became international all at once. Her 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, attracted more than 600,000 visitors, the largest attendance in the museum’s history. _{^{*As of 2019}}

Including The Ten Largest (1907), a set of ten paintings over three meters high, all 140 works in this exhibition will travel to Japan for the first time. Centering on her representative accomplishment, The Paintings for the Temple (1906–15), the exhibition will provide an overview of af Klint’s career in five chapters, while introducing materials left by the artist and diverse sources of her inspiration, including the esotericism and the women’s movements of her time.

Hilma af Klint（1862－1944）

Hilma af Klint grew up in a wealthy Swedish family, graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Art and worked as a professional painter. At the same time, she was devoted to esotericism and, through her experience of séances, created abstract expressions that differed from academic painting. She is considered an extremely important figure in the history of modern art for her pioneering nature of expression and meticulous systematization.

Hilma af Klint: The Beyond

Date of Issue: March 4, 2025 
Price: 3,850yen（including tax） 
Size and Number of Pages: A4 variant, paperback, 288 pages. 
Languages: Japanese-English bilingual 
Publisher: Nikkei Inc. 

Contents

Paintings from the Beyond
Miwa Kenjin (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) 

Plates

Chapter 1 From an Education at the Academy to a Career as an Artist 
Chapter 2 Immersion in the Spiritual World 
Chapter 3 The Paintings for the Temple 
Chapter 4 After The Paintings for the Temple: A Journey to Anthroposophy
Chapter 5 Toward Perfect Systematization 

Rungs on the Ladder of Cognition: Paintings by Hilma af Klint 
Okazaki Kenjiro (Artist, Critic) 

Documents 

Lecture by Hilma af Klint at the Anthroposophical Society in Stockholm (probably on 6 December 1924) 
An Introduction to the Presentation of My Paintings to the Anthroposophical Society on 16 April 1937 
Hilma af Klint and Her Oeuvre

Chronology
Selected Bibliography 
List of Works 

Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm on October 26, 1862, the fourth child in a wealthy family. Her father, Victor, was a naval officer who provided Hilma with encounters with astronomy, navigation, mathematics, and other disciplines that later shaped her artistic endeavors.

In 1882, she entered Sweden’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she received an orthodox art education. Although the academy had admitted women since 1864, female artists were still a rarity at the time of af Klint’s enrollment. Her early mastery of artistic techniques can be seen in works such as drawings of the human physique that demonstrated a precise understanding of form, and detailed sketches believed to be from her academy years that look like pages right out of a botanical guide.

After graduating with honors in 1887, Hilma successfully launched a career as a professional painter who mainly dealt in portraits and landscapes. She also created illustrations for children’s books and medical manuals, among other works. Her broad range of pursuits also included clerical work as the secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists, which was founded in 1910.

Af Klint was fascinated with spiritualism, the belief that humans comprise both physical matter and a spiritual being, and that the spirit continues acting upon the real world after the body’s demise. This interest is believed to have emerged when she was 17, around 1879. Parallel to her studies at the Royal Academy, spiritualism shaped her thinking and expression and was also a factor in her decision making. Stockholm in this era was home to several societies that practiced mysticism, the belief that intuition, visions, meditation, and revelations are vehicles for coming closer to the divine or the mystical. She was particularly influenced by the theosophical teachings of Helena Blavatsky (1831-91). She deepened her knowledge of the spiritual by frequenting the meditations and séances.

In 1896, af Klint formed a group called De Fem (The Five) with four close female friends, including fellow Royal Academy graduate Anna Cassel. This group, which remained active until around 1908, would hold séances where they entered trances and received messages from spiritual beings that they recorded through automatic writing or automatic drawing. Many of those drawings still exist and span a wide spectrum of images, ranging from simple forms such as wavy lines running together to concrete motifs such as plants, cells, and celestial objects. Through these experiences, af Klint began developing a new visual language that departed from the naturalistic style of her academic training.

Following the completion of The Paintings for the Temple in 1915, af Klint’s artistry began evolving in several new directions. Works such as The Atom Series (1917) and the A Work on Cereals (1920) retain the same dual fascination with the natural sciences and the spiritual world, and continue the quest to perceive the invisible, but in terms of expression they show a more geometrical and schematic approach.

After the death in 1920 of Hilma’s mother, whom she had been caring for, the artist turned more toward anthroposophy, an offshoot of theosophy that had interested her for some time. From that year to 1930, she frequently made long stays in the center of anthroposophy, Dornach, Switzerland. With her thinking and artistic ideals profoundly influenced by anthroposophy founder Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), af Klint shifted her style of expression away from geometrical and schematic works and moved toward paintings that focused on color itself and made use of the randomness resulting from watercolor blooms.

The watercolor-focused creative activities that af Klint began in the 1920s continued on into her late years, with the artist returning to specific motifs drawn from anthroposophy, religion, and myths. Among her works of this era was A Map: Great Britain (1932) that perhaps could be seen as a portent of World War II, an aerial view of a figure blowing an ominous wind toward the UK from the southeast (Germany).

As she continued with her artistic endeavors, af Klint also began editing and revising her past notes on her thinking and expression in the latter half of the 1920s. Her new undertaking as an editor and archivist may have been more important to her than her creative pursuits in the latter half of her life. Of particular note is her concept for a “temple” to house the works of The Paintings for the Temple. In the 1930s, more than 15 years after that group of paintings was completed, she described on paper her ideal for a spiral-shaped building, and repeatedly contemplated the details of how she would arrange the various paintings within that temple. Ultimately, this vision never came to fruition, but her unending process of compiling and refining her thoughts bears witness to how she sought to rigorously systematize not only her production of paintings but also her career as a whole.

In 1944, af Klint died at the age of 81, leaving behind to her nephew a collection of well over 1,000 works, notebooks, and other reminders of her life.