Hilma af Klint and her Paintings for the Temple

A temple can begin with its walls. Hilma af Klint's began with the paintings intended to inhabit it. Between 1906 and 1915, the Swedish artist developed 193 works organised into groups and series. Guggenheim Bilbao documentation presents this as an attempt to express a spiritual reality beyond the observable. The planned building was never constructed. The images and the ambition to unite them in a journey remained. Project overview and exhibition documentation.

Calling them decoration for an absent building is insufficient. The title proposes that paintings can act: accompany a transformation, organise relationships between worlds and guide the gaze from familiar to unknown. That aspiration helps explain why a spiral or circle could matter as much as a human figure.

Before the great paintings there was a group

The chronology of the Hilma af Klint Foundation places in 1896 the formation of De Fem, "The Five": Sigrid Hedman, Cornelia Cederberg, Mathilda Nilsson, Anna Cassel and af Klint. Their meetings were recorded by automatic texts and drawings. There was a shared practice before the great pictorial cycle existed. The same chronology includes a very different collaboration: around 1900–1901, af Klint and Cassel illustrated a book of equine surgery by John Vennerholm. Chronology of the Foundation.

The closeness of both works is revealing. An illustrator could handle conventions of precise representation and participate, at the same time, in sessions intended to communicate with spiritual entities. It is not necessary to turn these activities into incompatible personalities. Both had hands working on paper, conversations and a willingness to make visible something that should be understood by others.

The automatic drawings belonged to a practice that attributed the origin of the images to an agency other than the conscious will. That was the framework of beliefs of the group. The existence of its records documents an activity and the way in which its participants understood it; it does not verify the existence of the invoked beings. For the history of art, however, that attribution of origin did have concrete consequences: it offered another way of starting an image and assuming its meaning.

A commission that changed while painting

Guggenheim educational material connects the cycle's beginning with a 1906 séance at which af Klint believed she received a commission from Amaliel, one of the beings the group called high masters. Her descriptions of the process varied. Sometimes she described painting as something done through her; elsewhere she retained a more active role. After pausing the project in 1908 and resuming it in 1912, her account gave more space to personal interpretation of the messages. The different descriptions of the process.

This variation makes the image of a medium who merely transcribes inadequate. A series spanning years requires decisions about scale, materials, relationships between paintings and continuity. Spiritual conviction did not remove these studio problems. It could provide impetus, direction or an explanation while painting still required practical solutions.

Nor do all hands disappear behind the artist's name. The Ten Largest, Guggenheim Bilbao identifies assistance from Cornelia Cederberg and Gusten Andersson. It also notes that the works' size makes it likely that at least some painting took place on the floor. These are indications of shared production, although they do not allow us to assign every brushstroke to individual collaborators. Scale, technique and collaboration.

A childhood without a portrait

The Ten Largest, from 1907, moves through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. The first painting measures 322 by 239 centimetres and uses tempera on paper mounted on canvas. Scale changes the relationship with the subject: a stage of life occupies a surface larger than the viewer's body. First painting's entry and explanation of the series.

In the reproduction of number 2, Childhood, reproduced by the Grand Palais, large circles touch, a pink flower-like shape appears and white curves cross a blue ground. Below, an orange disc and a dark blue one meet within a narrow greenish area. Above, forms multiply and overlap. No child's face or posture identifies childhood for us. Identified reproduction of the painting.

Our proposed reading is of life presented through relationships: contact, expansion, repetition and difference. A large form contains smaller ones; some edges open towards encounters while others define compact surfaces. The image invites us to follow these movements without immediately turning them into characters. Its title names a stage of human life, while the painting represents it without illustrating a domestic scene.

That distance between subject and representation matters. Abstraction allows growth to be thought through size, rhythm and proximity. The viewer can experience a feeling of abundance without having a complete dictionary of signs. Painting retains an intensity that does not depend on translating each circle into a phrase.

Forms could also change their meaning

The Moderna Museet explains that the cycle's early phase frequently used natural forms. After the pause, geometry and Christian symbols became more prominent. Its presentation of The Swan, made in 1914–1915, emphasises the exploration of polarities through black and white swans and varying degrees of abstraction. The work did not progress simply by abandoning figures: it could transform and reuse them. Central themes and clusters.

The project thus resembles a laboratory of correspondences more than a door crossed only once. An animal, curve and division of colour can participate in the same investigation. Continuity lies in the problem af Klint pursued, even as formal solutions changed. Reducing her significance to reaching abstraction before other artists would overlook much of that search.

The pending building

According to the Bilbao dossier, a notebook describes an almost circular building, levels connected by a spiral staircase and a raised altar room for the altarpieces. The three Altarpieces of 1915 condensed the project, although the small canvas later added was Human Chastity. Temple design and cycle closure.

The imagined route gave the paintings a duration: moving between them, ascending and gathering earlier experiences. An isolated reproduction cannot fully reconstruct it, but the project changes how we look. Each painting has its own force within a wider conversation. The unbuilt temple remains a question about bringing works together and what experience their encounter might create.

Sources and references

• Hilma af Klint Foundation. About: Chronology.
• Guggenheim. Paintings for the Temple.
• Guggenheim Bilbao. Hilma af Klint dossier, 2024 and The Ten Largest.
• Grand Palais. Paintings for the Temple, 2026.
• Moderna Museet. Central themes and works, 2013 exhibition.