ABOUT HILMA af KLINT
Childhood
Hilma af Klint was born in 1862, in Solna, Sweden, as the fourth of five children of a Protestant couple, Mathilda af Klint and Victor af Klint who was an admiral and a mathematician. Most of her childhood was spent in Karlberg castle, the naval academy where her father was based. During the summer, the family would move to Hanmora, in Adelso, an island in Lake Malaren, where Hilma's fascination with nature and organic life began.
Little else is known about af Klint's childhood and her relationships with family and friends. It is known that she was close to her mother and lived with her not only in childhood but also after her father died in 1898, until her mother's own death in 1920. It seems that she was devoted to her work (both her art and her studies) and to her immediate family. One may speculate that there was no time for romance or too much excitement when following a life of devotion as serious as that of af Klint's. However, this is in artist who kept 1,000 paintings secret for a very long time so one cannot help but wonder what else the world does not know about af Klint; her mystery has become her allure.
Education and Early training
Hilma first attended the Technical School, which is now known as Konstfack, studying classical portraiture under the supervision of Kerstin Cardon. During this time, the artist already had strong leanings towards matters of the spiritual and the occult. These interests grew rapidly following the death of her ten year old sister, Hermina when af Klint was just eighteen years old. It was at this time that she first began attending séances, mystical group meetings that aimed to create a dialogue with the spirit world. At the age of twenty, in 1882, she went to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm. She remained at the Academy for a subsequent 5 years, continuing her classical art training. After graduating with honors, she was awarded a scholarship in the form of an art studio in Stockholm's artist quarter, where her landscapes and portraits quickly became the source of her financial independence and stability. Luckily, the Scandinavian education system already admitted both men and women to their Academies (unlike France and Germany) and it was not uncommon for women to make a living from their art. It was, of course, more unusual for women to become visionaries and to surpass the talents of their male contemporaries.
In 1896, with four female artist friends, af Klint established The Five (de Fem). The group conducted séances every week until 1906, experimenting with free-flowing writing and drawing, and with other spontaneous, unplanned ways of creating (including pseudo-'exquisite corpse' drawings, a term/process later coined by the Surrealists) which aimed to allow for a more intuitive and direct way of making art. Critic Kate Kellaway, explains that these experiences "predated the surrealists by decades". In this way, privately and secretly, Hilma turned to unearthing, and furthermore understanding the unconscious as her motivation to make art. Paradoxically but also most appropriately, these abstract pursuits were rooted in a desire to understand the visible world around her in profound detail.
Indeed, she also began to study plants especially from works conducted by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, and animals, having worked as a draughtsman for a veterinary institute in 1900. Simultaneously, her profound fascination with the invisible world continued (an interest which was echoed by scientific discoveries of the day with the invention of the X-ray machine, electromagnetic waves, and telegraphy) as well as her affinity with spiritual theories being developed across Europe, especially Theosophy, founded by the Russian philosopher, Madame Blavatsky, and Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy was a spiritual movement developed by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, which aimed to define a 'spiritual science', deeply rooted in Steiner's ideas that spirituality could be rationally understood through both science and art.
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SOURCE: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/af-klint-hilma/life-and-legacy/#biography_header
QUOTE BY HILMA af KLINT
Life is a farce if a person does not serve truth.
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
TO BE A FORCE & DARE TO TELL THE TRUTH.