Hilma Af Klint ~the Woman Who Painted The Future

THE WOMAN WHO PAINTED THE FUTURE
In the summer of 1986 a Swedish farmer recovered his abandoned country house by his last tenant. In the basement next to the house he found, covered in dust from years, huge wooden boxes.
When he opened them he was baffled. There were 1200 paintings, some very large, with geometric figures of intense colors. He called in a neighbor who supposedly was more educated or informed, but didn’t even understand what they had just discovered. They assumed that the paintings formed an enormous scenography or were illegal, maybe stolen.
The neighbor thought he would call a friend who worked in a museum and asked if the paintings had a signature. "Yes," said the neighbor - on the corner says Hilma Klint."
Some officials and art connoisseurs arrived and took away the boxes.
A few weeks later the Stockholm Art Museum made public an unusual discovery. It was more than a thousand paintings, drawings and theoretical essays, a totally abstract work, with pure color geometric shapes and precise texture, signed and dated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
What was unusual was the dates: they were painted before Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian "invented" abstract painting. Hilma was a clear forerunner. Why did nobody know about her? Why were the paintings hidden?
Hilma af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862. Her father was a mathematician and had a large library in which little Hilma prescribed everything about geometry and art.
At twenty she entered the Swedish Academy of Arts, one of the few schools that admitted women and was part of the first generation of European painters who set up exhibitions and lived off their work. She painted portraits and realistic landscapes that were well appreciated by her clients.
In those years X-rays were invented and electromagnetic waves were discovered, which could send information through air and vacuum. These events blew Hilma’s mind where apparently she came to the conclusion that invisible parallel worlds exist.
She was interested in these alternative realities and different levels of perception. Because in that time the sciences were connected with spiritualism and Hilma went to spiritual sessions.
The possibility of communicating with the most beloved of her sisters, who had already died, was also encouraged. She would attempt to communicate with her sister, but formed a club with five other women; they met every Friday, summoned spirits and had automatic painting and poetry sessions (which the surrealists did years later).
Hilma started creating rare paintings with random spots, pretending to let herself go to other energies, then she went to paint that chaos based on the geometric structures of nature, which she knew well since she was a child.
She spent some days painting her commissions and others locking herself in a country house to unleash a creative passion she kept top secret. Two painters in one person.
So hid away for several years and on the day she wrote her will, she put her grandson Erick as the sole heir, on condition that he kept his paintings in wooden boxes, which could only be opened twenty years after her death
Why did she decide this?
Perhaps she considered her paintings a very intimate and sincere view, only of herself; perhaps she thought her work was completely out of academic rules and making it public would end her successful career.
But here you are, life decided something else: the grandson left this world before the date of the revelation and the paintings remained hidden for many years more than Hilma wanted, until 1986, when the Swedish farmer found it in his basement.
In the eighties, the avant-garde of the beginning of the century were already totally assimilated; art followed its paths, more different than ever.
Amidst this worldly noise, Hilma af Klint returned from the afterlife to take her place as the true mother of surrealism…

 

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