This episode Megan & Milena cover the first modern abstract painter, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint & the mother of modern environmentalism, American biologist, science writer, and conservationist Rachel Carson

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint is a curious one. Born in 1862 Sweden, the first few decades of her artistic professional career was spent on traditional, respectable oil paintings featuring landscapes and local plant life. Then shit got weird. At a weekly seance held with four other women, collectively known as The Five, it was revealed to Hilma that the High Spirit Amaliel has commissioned her for a series of paintings on the astral plane and the unity of everything. Yup. Little weird. This episode we explore how in the hell that even came about, what happened after Hilma was granted the task and how the resulting artwork has since shaken up Western notions of who really was the first Western modern abstract painter.

Alter created by The Five, Jesus leading the way

Selected Work

Early Paintings

Oil on canvas from 1888

Another oil on canvas from the late 1890’s

Hilma was interested in botany, creating a series of watercolors documenting the plants around her, like this illustration from the 1890’s

Now this is where things get weird…

Seance sketch from 1905 next to a painting derived from those seance ‘communications’

Alterpiece, Group 10, number 1 from 1915, oil on canvas

Painting Picture of the Starting Point, Series 8 from 1920

Exhibition shot from the Guggenheim Museum Hilma’s retrospective this year, 2019, depicting some of her large 10 paintings, the largest from her Paintings for the Temple series

* Royal Academy of Fine Arts – School in Sweden where Hilma was part of the first generation of women graduates * Anna Cassel – Fellow artist and best friend to Hilma* Western Esotericism – Ugh…essentially a blanket term for religious philosophical BS beliefs like alchemy and numerology * Mondrian – Pioneering modern painter in abstraction* Kandinsky – Also a pioneering modern painter in abstraction* Rudolf Steiner – Hot shot leader within esoteric movement of the late 1800’s, early 1900’s* Iris Müller-Westermann – Curator of the Hilma retrospective, as well as director of,