The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood
One of ten huge paintings on the stages of human life, made in 1907. Hilma af Klint painted abstractly several years before Kandinsky but almost never showed the works in public.
Spirals, flower shapes and letters – a symbolic visual world, not a depiction.
Hilma af Klint painted The Ten Largest in the autumn of 1907. She had trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and earned her living partly as a portrait and landscape painter. Alongside this she took part in spiritualist séances with other women, in a group called The Five. Through these séances she understood that she had been commissioned by spiritual beings to paint a series of pictures for a temple.
The Ten Largest forms part of the large series The Paintings for the Temple, on which she worked from 1906 to 1915. The ten paintings depict human life from childhood to old age. No. 7 belongs to the group on adulthood. Each painting is more than three metres high, which was very large for its time.
The picture is full of organic forms: spirals, rounded flower-like shapes, winding lines and letters or signs. The forms float freely on a coloured background. There is no perspective and no object is depicted. Instead the forms make up a kind of symbolic language, in which each colour and shape may carry a meaning.
The colours are bright and strong: pink, orange, yellow, blue and purple. Hilma af Klint used colour symbolically. In her notes, for example, blue may be associated with the feminine and yellow with the masculine. The bright palette gives the paintings a light, almost festive character despite their size.
The paintings are executed in tempera on paper, later mounted on canvas. Because of their size she probably worked with the paper lying on the floor. She painted the ten works in just a few months, which she herself described as working under guidance rather than to a plan of her own. When the paintings are shown together in one room, the life cycle can be followed from picture to picture. Their size means that the viewer is almost enveloped by the colours.
The works have been interpreted in the light of Theosophy and spiritualism, movements that sought a hidden, spiritual reality behind the visible one. Hilma af Klint wanted her abstract works to be shown only long after her death, as she believed her contemporaries would not understand them. She showed the pictures to Rudolf Steiner, who, according to her notes, was doubtful about them.
After her death in 1944 the works were looked after by her family and later by a foundation. They became known to a wider public only in the 1980s. The major exhibition at Moderna Museet in 2013 and the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition in New York in 2018–2019 made her world-famous. The fact that she painted abstractly before Kandinsky has sparked debate about how the history of modernism should be written, although how her spiritually motivated pictures should be compared with those of the other pioneers is disputed.