Hilma af Klint The Ten Largest Youth Vase

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a visionary Swedish artist and spiritualist. Graduating with honors from Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, she earned a living through her landscapes and other conventionally themed paintings.

However, behind the scenes, she was creating a radically different body of work fueled by her passionate interest in spiritualism and theosophy. Acknowledged as the first abstract artist, she began painting these vivid, groundbreaking works in 1906, years before her contemporaries Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich started exploring nonrepresentational composition. Her paintings were kept private in her lifetime, and she stipulated they could not be exhibited until 20 years after her death.

Today Hilma af Klint is being rediscovered through recent museum exhibitions around the world. Our vase features Youth, one of her paintings from The Ten Largest (1907), a bold, colorful series of enormous canvases illustrating the stages of life in her own symbolic shorthand of exuberant shapes and forms.

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest - Youth, 1907
Part of The Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915)
Oil on canvas. 129-1/16 x 74-7/16 in.
Hilma af Klint Foundation