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# Hilma af Klint’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/hilma-af-klint-ten-most-famous-paintings/
- Published: 2026-09-15T12:39:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T18:45:52.000Z
- Description: The Ten Largest, The Swan, Altarpiece No. 1 and more: the ten works by the Swedish painter who made abstract art years before anyone else — and hid it for a lifetime.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and spent her public career making perfectly respectable portraits and botanical studies. In private, from 1906, she was doing something else entirely: large, wholly non-representational paintings of spirals, discs, and glyphs, made several years before Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malevich produced the works usually credited with inventing abstraction.

She did not present them as personal expression. Af Klint belonged to a group of five women who held séances together, and she described the early paintings as commissions received from beings she called the High Masters, executed with what she understood to be guided hands. She left more than a thousand works and instructed that they not be shown until twenty years after her death, believing the world was not ready. They stayed largely unseen until the 1980s. A 2018 retrospective in New York became the best-attended exhibition in that museum's history. Here are ten of her most famous paintings.

## [The Ten Largest, No. 4, Youth](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-4-youth-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Ten Largest, No. 4, Youth by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/the-ten-largest-no-4-youth-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-4-youth-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Ten Largest, painted in 1907, is the series that makes the case for af Klint's priority. Each of the ten canvases is over three meters tall — she worked on paper laid out on the floor of her studio — and together they chart a human life in four stages. Youth is built from looping blue and orange forms, spiraling tendrils, and passages of writing-like script that never resolves into a readable language. The scale is what surprises visitors most: these are wall-sized abstract paintings made in the same year Picasso was finishing Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

## [The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-8-adulthood-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/the-ten-largest-no-8-adulthood-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-8-adulthood-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The adulthood canvases move away from the loose organic curves of the earlier stages toward tighter, more geometric arrangements — concentric discs, grids of small circles, forms that suggest diagrams more than growth. Af Klint kept extensive notebooks assigning meanings to her shapes and colors, with blue standing for the feminine and yellow for the masculine, and the interlocking pairs throughout this section are meant to be read as a system rather than admired as design.

## [The Ten Largest, No. 9, Old Age](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-9-old-age-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Ten Largest, No. 9, Old Age by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/the-ten-largest-no-9-old-age-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-9-old-age-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

In the final stage the palette cools and the compositions quieten. The exuberant tangles of the youth panels give way to balanced, symmetrical arrangements on darker grounds, with fewer and larger elements. Af Klint completed all ten canvases in a matter of months in 1907, working at extraordinary speed on a physically demanding scale, and the sequence from the first to the last is one of the few places where her private system becomes legible to a viewer who has read none of her notebooks.

## [The Ten Largest, No. 10, Old Age](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-10-old-age-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Ten Largest, No. 10, Old Age by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/the-ten-largest-no-10-old-age-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-ten-largest-no-10-old-age-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The last panel of the series, and the resolution of it. Circular forms sit within a field of soft violet and grey, and the botanical energy that drove the early canvases has settled into something static and symmetrical. Af Klint's training as a draughtsman of plants is visible throughout The Ten Largest — the curling forms behave like tendrils and seed heads — and here at the end the growth has stopped. The series was intended to be shown together, in sequence, in a spiral temple she designed but never built.

## [Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 1](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/group-ixsuw-the-swan-no-1-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 1 by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/group-ixsuw-the-swan-no-1-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/group-ixsuw-the-swan-no-1-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Swan series of 1914–15 opens with something almost figurative: two swans, one white and one black, meeting beak to beak across a horizontal division, the upper half dark and the lower half light. It is a diagram of opposites — a alchemical image of the union of contraries — and af Klint uses the pair to set up the whole sequence. Over the following canvases the birds are progressively abstracted until nothing recognizable is left, so the series functions as a demonstration of how to arrive at abstraction from a symbol.

## [Group IX/SUW, No. 17, The Swan](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/group-ixsuw-no-17-the-swan-no-17-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Group IX/SUW, No. 17, The Swan by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/group-ixsuw-no-17-the-swan-no-17-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/group-ixsuw-no-17-the-swan-no-17-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

By the seventeenth canvas of the Swan series the birds have gone entirely, replaced by hard-edged geometry: interlocking quadrants, precise arcs, and flat unmodulated color. The change in handling is as striking as the change in imagery. Where the 1907 canvases are washy and gestural, these are ruled, controlled, and closer to the geometric abstraction that would emerge in Europe a decade later — painted by an artist working alone in Sweden with no gallery and no audience.

## [The Swan, No. 18](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-swan-no-18-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Swan, No. 18 by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/the-swan-no-18-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-swan-no-18-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Among the most reduced paintings af Klint ever made: a small number of geometric elements, sharply divided fields of color, and nothing left of the original motif at all. Placed at the end of a series that began with two recognizable birds, it reads as the conclusion of an argument. She numbered and grouped her works obsessively, and the sequence matters — individual canvases were never meant to be encountered on their own.

## [Altarpiece No. 1, Group X](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-altarpiece-no-1-group-x-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Altarpiece No. 1, Group X by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/2-altarpiece-no-1-group-x-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-altarpiece-no-1-group-x-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Painted in 1915, the Altarpieces were conceived for the apex of the spiral temple af Klint imagined for her work. A stepped pyramid in bands of orange, yellow, blue, and violet rises toward a golden disc, on a ground divided between dark and light. The construction is severe and diagrammatic, closer to a plan than a picture. She thought of these as the summit of the whole project — the point where the ascent traced through the earlier groups arrives — and their design anticipates hard-edged geometric abstraction by many years.

## [Tree of Knowledge, No. 5](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/tree-of-knowledge-no-5-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Tree of Knowledge, No. 5 by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/tree-of-knowledge-no-5-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/tree-of-knowledge-no-5-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Tree of Knowledge series consists of watercolors on paper, much smaller and more delicate than the huge canvases, and it shows the botanical draughtswoman clearly. A central trunk-like axis supports branching forms, birds, and interlocking circles, all rendered in transparent washes with fine ink outlines. Af Klint made hundreds of works on paper alongside the large paintings, using them to work out symbols and color relationships, and they are the best evidence of how systematically she was building her vocabulary.

## [Group IX/UW, No. 25, The Dove, No. 1](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/group-ixuw-no-25-the-dove-no-1-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Group IX/UW, No. 25, The Dove, No. 1 by Hilma af Klint](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/09/group-ixuw-no-25-the-dove-no-1-hilma-af-klint.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/group-ixuw-no-25-the-dove-no-1-hilma-af-klint.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Dove series, painted alongside the Swans in 1915, works through Christian symbolism the way the Swans work through alchemical opposites. Doves, crosses, and radiating forms are set against fields of blue and yellow, and figures appear and dissolve across the sequence. Af Klint drew on theosophy and later on the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and her ambition throughout was to make the structure of the spiritual world visible as a picture rather than to describe anything seen.

Af Klint died in 1944 after a traffic accident, leaving her paintings to her nephew with instructions to keep them hidden. They were offered to a Stockholm museum in the 1970s and turned down. Since her rediscovery, the standard account of who invented abstract art has had to be rewritten around her.

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