On a record-breaking June day of 106F in Paris, beneath a heat dome enveloping all of Central Europe, I found myself in this loud, crowded metropolis. I braved the sweltering heat and the unreliability of the Deutsche Bahn (German Train-system) to travel to Paris from Berlin for Hilma af Klint—the austere Swedish painter of the turn of the century who invented, or perhaps discovered, abstract art. (While Kandinsky painted his first abstract piece in 1911, Hilma was already doing so in 1906).
From her 40-year creative period, she left behind a massive body of work. Currently on display in a comprehensive retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, it features a selection from a total oeuvre of over 1,200 paintings and thousands of sketchbook pages. This was a unique opportunity to personally see these astonishing images—including The Ten Largest and the Altar Trilogy—and to pay my respects.
Her paintings are truly monumental: 3.30 meters high (10.8 feet) for The Ten Largest, and still nearly 2.40 meters (7.8 feet) in height for the Altar Trilogy. They are large enough that Hilma had to lay the canvases directly on the floor before painting them with egg tempera, much like the religious Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary by Duccio, Mantegna, or Botticelli.
It is fitting that these works are now exhibited together in one of the grandest temples of the muses, the Grand Palais, as af Klint had originally envisioned during her lifetime. She stated that the paintings were dictated to her and four other women of her spiritualist group, De Fem (The Five), by spiritual entities with names like Amaliel, Ananda, and Gregor, intended for a great temple that was ultimately never built. Now, they reside here in this temple of culture, admired—if not quite worshipped—by crowds of mostly young visitors. The admiration comes 80 years after her death. She knew during her lifetime that the world was not yet ready for her art, so she decreed that her paintings should not be unveiled or exhibited until 20 years after her passing in 1944.
When the crates were finally opened in the 1960s, the art world was still unwilling to acknowledge them, because her work did not fit into the purely rational, male-dominated narrative of Modernism (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich). It was not until 1986 in Los Angeles, that the art world understood that the cradle of abstraction lay not just in the intellect, but deeply within theosophy and spirituality. It may have taken a bit longer, but Hilma af Klint has now safely arrived in the pantheon of the great artists of the 20th century, with groundbreaking milestones at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim Museum, and now the Grand Palais.
“Hilma af Klint emerges here as an essential figure, capable of transcending the boundaries between art, science, and spirituality, and of continuing to inspire new generations. A unique experience to discover an artist who, while firmly rooted in her time, seemed to be in dialogue with the future,” said Pascal Rousseau, Professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
I personally discovered Hilma af Klint in 1987, while attending a lecture by Maurice Tuchman about his seminal exhibition, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Af Klint’s paintings were a revelation to me. Since then, I have taught about her repeatedly in lectures and art history classes, inviting as many people as possible to discover her art. That has certainly happened now, and I could not miss the chance to finally see these paintings—about which I have read and spoken about for so long—in person.
Before reaching the monumental climax of the Altar Trilogy, the true core of her cosmic cycle unfolds within the Grand Palais. In the series The Ten Largest (De tio största), af Klint celebrates the cyclical rhythm of human existence, divided into the four stages of life: childhood, youth, maturity, and old age. On giant rolls of paper, organic forms, floral ornaments, spirals, and fragile, almost calligraphic letters explode in soft pastel tones—a visual crescendo of becoming and passing away so vibrant that it completely overwhelms the viewer.
In No. 4, Youth, against a vibrant, swelling orange background, she uses organic geometry to chart the soul’s awakening. Twin pink spirals loop in the upper corner as symbols of spiritual evolution, while interlocking egg-shapes suggest the dawn of consciousness. Central to the piece are massive pink petals representing Eros—the cosmic force of love tasked with reconciling the eternal dualities of the masculine yellow and the feminine blue.
The 10 Largest are followed immediately by the 24-part Evolution series (Evolutionen), where organic lightness gives way to a stricter, almost diagrammatic geometry. Here, the focus is no longer on earthly life, but on the spiritual evolution of the cosmos and the overcoming of dualities. Af Klint orchestrates the dialectical drama of creation: the struggle between light and darkness, spirit and matter. Symbols like the swan or the dove appear repeatedly, standing in their strict iconography for the division and the yearning for reunion of the sexes—the masculine and feminine principles. It is the arduous evolutionary ascent of the soul that paves the way for the final, transcendent synthesis that ultimately confronts us in the three altar paintings.
At the end of the exhibition, the altar trilogy forms a kind of triptych. The first painting depicts an ascending, sixteen-stepped pyramid made of seven rainbow colors—including gold—which brightens increasingly toward the summit. Gold is also the color of the disc into which the pyramid merges. For Hilma, gold embodied the color of spiritual perfection, and the pyramid represented the progressive spiritualization of humanity. The golden disc is surrounded by a green halo of rays. In af Klint’s iconography, green signifies the union of the feminine blue and the masculine yellow, resulting in a dissolution of opposites and the emergence of a new being. The scene is staged against a dramatic black background.
The second painting consists of an inverted pyramid against a red background—red here serving as the color of purification—representing ascending dark forces and ending once again in a golden disc. The black pyramid is broken open in the center by a widening white stripe containing 14 golden loops, which lead into a spiraling orbital path circling the golden sphere.
The third altar painting features the golden sphere centrally and alone, surrounded by radiating colors and spirals. In the center of the disc, a circle filled with nestled triangles recalls tantric mandalas. As a follower of theosophy’s Madame Blavatsky, Hilma would certainly have known about Tibetan mandalas. The innermost part of the circle offers a glimpse into the heart of the image, which continuously strives inward.
How ever one chooses to interpret these images—and even Hilma af Klint herself was unsure of their exact meaning, given they were supposedly channeled to her by spiritual entities, prompting her to twice visit anthroposophy founder Rudolf Steiner to unsuccessfully beg him for an explanation—the result is astonishing.
In modern art, and for the contemporary viewer, the focus is often more on form than on the subject of a painting. For Hilma af Klint, the subject was of paramount importance—it’s just that her subject was not worldly, but an invisible, spiritual one. She did not want decorative abstraction; she wanted to draw diagrams of the soul and the cosmos. She wanted to convey messages, but we can also simply gaze at her incredible compositions. Her forms interact dynamically within the compositions, exerting a powerful effect on the observer. Whether her paintings were dictated to her by spiritual beings or rose up from her subconscious remains an open question, but the final result and the profound impact they have on the viewer are undeniable.
At the Grand Palais, Hilma af Klint successfully rivals a Henri Matisse exhibition. The crowds of mainly young visitors prove that even a century after their creation, a potent force emanates from Hilma af Klint’s art—one that is almost impossible to resist.
Hilma af Klint, May 6 until August 30, 2026, Grand Palais, Paris
