Hilma af Klint and the paintings that waited

In 1906 a Swedish painter named Hilma af Klint began a series she called The Paintings for the Temple. Over the next nine years she made 193 works: spirals, petals, diagrams, letters, vast pastel fields that look decades ahead of their time. The ten largest stand over three metres tall.

She showed almost none of it. When she died in 1944, she left instructions that the work should not be shown for at least twenty years. She believed the world was not ready.

The practice behind the painting

Af Klint did not arrive at abstraction through a theory of form. She arrived through practice. With four other women she met for years in a group they called The Five, holding séances, recording messages, and making automatic drawings. She was drawn to Theosophy, and later to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy.

Whatever one makes of the messages, the method is recognisable to anyone in a contemplative tradition. Regular sessions. A vow of seriousness. Images received rather than designed, then worked into finished form with great care.

Paintings for a temple

The word temple is the key. Like a yantra or a thangka, these were not made to decorate a wall. They were meant to be used: arranged in a specific building, walked through, contemplated in sequence. The temple was never built, so the paintings waited in storage, rolled and stacked, for decades.

When they were finally seen widely, the response was overwhelming. Her 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York became the most visited exhibition in that museum’s history.

What I take from her

Make the work the practice asks for, not the work the market asks for.
Keep records. Her notebooks are half the reason we can understand the paintings at all.
Trust the slow audience. Some images need their viewers to arrive.

I don’t expect anyone to wait twenty years for my paintings. But I think about her whenever I am tempted to make something simply because it will be liked this week.