Sale of paintings by Hilma de Klint

Born on 26 October 1862 in Stockholm, Sweden, Hilma af Klint was the fourth child of Mathilda af Klint (née Sonntag) and Victor de Klint. Like his parents for several generations, Victor was a naval officer.

Like her father, Hilma was a mathematician, but she soon proved to be extremely gifted in the field of artistic creation. In particular, she took painting lessons. At the age of 18, she enrolled at the Stockholm Technical School of Art and later at the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts, a place where women were rare at the time.

To earn a living, Hilma af Klint used the skills she had acquired in her studies by painting traditional landscapes inspired by her summer holidays on the island of Adelso. At the same time, from 1906 onwards and before the pioneers Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, she produced an initial series of symbolic and abstract works. Her non-figurative painting was not linked to the contemporary modernist movements. In 1909 Hilma met the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, who introduced her to his own vision of art and also influenced her work. She explored Abstraction while pursuing her quest for spirituality in art. Some notable paintings are Altarpiece no. 1, Svanen and The swan.

Hilma af Klint died in 1944 as a result of a traffic accident at the age of 82. She left behind a body of work comprising more than 1,000 works. She sold and exhibited her classical paintings, but did not show her abstract works to her peers. Believing that the world was not ready to understand them, she declared in her will to her nephew Erik, to whom she left her work, that she would not reveal it until 20 years after her death. In 1985, Hilma Klint's abstract work was first shown to the public in Los Angeles.