The Painter Who Asked to Stay Hidden for 20 Years

In 1906, in a Stockholm studio, a 44-year-old Swedish painter named Hilma af Klint started a series she called Paintings for the Temple. They had no horizons, no figures, no sky. By 1915 she had finished 193 of them. The textbook story that Kandinsky invented abstract painting in 1910 or 1911 was, by then, already four years late.

She did not show them. Af Klint worked inside a Theosophist circle of five women known as De Fem — "The Five" — who took dictation at seances from what they called the High Masters. "The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings," she wrote, "and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict." In 1908 Rudolf Steiner came to her studio, looked at the work, and told her that her contemporaries would not understand it for fifty years.

She believed him. Her will instructed that the paintings stay sealed for at least 20 years after her death.

She died in 1944 after a tram accident. The boxes opened around 1970. When the Moderna Museet in Stockholm was offered the donation that year, it declined; the museum had no idea what it was looking at, and the paintings did not fit the canon it was busy writing.

The canon caught up slowly, then all at once. Her 2018 Guggenheim retrospective, Paintings for the Future, became the most-attended exhibition in the museum's history. Steiner's fifty years was off by about thirty.