East Village Workshop

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose work explored spirituality, science, nature, and the unseen forces she believed shaped human life. Working in the early 1900s, she created bold abstract paintings years before artists like Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich became famous for abstraction.

In 1907, she created The Ten Largest, a monumental series of paintings exploring the stages of human life, from childhood to old age, through color, symbols, spirals, flowers, and geometric forms.

She decreed that her paintings should not be released until 20 years after her death, leaving behind a body of work that would later challenge the history of modern art.

The Ten Largest, No. 10, Old Age (1907)

No. 10 shares the pale pink ground of No. 9, but the composition is even more spare. Many of the symbols from the preceding nine paintings reappear — the spiral, the grid, the vesica piscis — but rendered small, held inside a single egg or droplet form in the lower half of the canvas. Wide, empty surfaces create what the Moderna Museet describes as “a harmonious calm.”

The full arc: from the dense abundance of Childhood, through the kinetic orange of Youth, the layered lavender complexity of Adulthood, to this — open space, and a few symbols held quietly at the center. Blue and yellow, female and male, spirit and matter: finally, briefly, still. She painted this for a world that hadn’t arrived yet.

“The art history canon wasn’t ready to accept Hilma af Klint at the time of her death in 1944. I think she understood that her work was really for a future audience.”
— Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

The Ten Largest, No. 9, Old Age (1907)

The loose, proliferating forms of Youth and Adulthood are gone. In their place: symmetrical arrangements, overlapping circles in yellow and blue, two wheat-kernel forms, and compass-constructed flower diagrams — precise, almost architectural. The Moderna Museet notes that af Klint later wrote this painting depicts a divinity that has incorporated both the male and the female principle. Yellow and blue are no longer in tension; they are held together. Old age, for af Klint, is not decline. It is resolution.

“By The Ten Largest, No. 9, Old Age, details have dissolved: infinity is intimated in a dreamy expanse of delicate, scumbled nothingness.”
— Jennifer Higgie, Frieze

The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood (1907)

No. 8 is quieter than its predecessors. The organic forms begin to settle, the frenetic letter-clusters of No. 6 are absent, and the composition feels more resolved. Blue and yellow, which moved through tension and collision across the four Adulthood paintings, appear here in more considered balance. The vesica piscis — the almond of two overlapping circles, af Klint’s symbol for development toward unity — recurs. It reads as a threshold: the complexity of adult life not abandoned, but distilled.

“Hilma af Klint’s abstract work predates the work by artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, Malevich — artists that we have long considered the pioneers of abstraction.”
— Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (via Smithsonian Magazine, 2018)

The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood (1907)

Against the lavender ground, a luminous yellow central form — hourglass-shaped, double-lobed — anchors the composition. Yellow carries its full weight here: male energy, spiritual illumination, the active principle. Soft pastel circles and organic forms orbit it in a rhythm that feels simultaneously botanical and cosmological. The word “vestalasket” reappears, grounding the spiritual in the personal. Af Klint painted this without any preparatory sketch, directly onto a large sheet on the studio floor, in four days.

“The exhibition makes an airtight case for Klint’s being the first modernist artist to paint entirely abstract.”
— Jerry Saltz, art critic

The Ten Largest, No. 6, Adulthood (1907)

Across the lavender ground, invented letter-forms and words scatter across the surface. These are not decorative — af Klint kept a manuscript, Notes on Words and Letters, cataloguing their meanings. A single letter could carry multiple readings depending on context. “U” for spirit, “W” for matter. Some she suggested should be read as sound, like mantras — portals to altered states. The blue-female and yellow-male poles remain embedded in the composition beneath all of this surface activity. Adulthood, here, is a field of meaning still being worked out.

“Invented words and the shapes of strange letters are scattered wildly across the stony pink background like a babble of cosmic graffiti.”
— Jennifer Higgie, Frieze, on No. 6, Adulthood

The Ten Largest, No. 5, Adulthood (1907)

Adulthood spans four paintings (Nos. 5–8) — more than any other life stage. The purple ground suggested transcendence and spiritual depth. The organic forms of Childhood and Youth now take on more weight and complexity: fruits, seeds, eggs, and botanical shapes arranged alongside blue (female) and yellow (male) in increasingly intricate configurations.

At the top of No. 5, a five-petaled pink flower appears. In her 1907 notebooks, af Klint inscribed the names of the members of her group, “The Five,” into this same flower form — suggesting that adult creative life was, for her, inseparable from spiritual community.

“Her paintings definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.”
— Roberta Smith, art critic, The New York Times

The Ten Largest, No. 4, Youth (1907)

Spirals and biomorphic forms accumulate — coils (af Klint’s symbol for psychological development), intersecting circles, and scattered cursive letters she described not as language but closer to mantras: sounds rather than words, vibrations rather than meanings. “U” (spirit) and “W” (matter) recur throughout the series, and Youth is where their tension is most unresolved. This is af Klint’s portrait of becoming — not yet settled into the complexity of adulthood, but carrying all of its seeds.

“It was not the case that I was to blindly obey the High Lords of the mysteries but that I was to imagine that they were always standing by my side.”
— Hilma af Klint, from her notebooks

The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth (1907)

Youth (Nos. 3–4) is the most kinetic phase of the series. The organic forms — spirals, petals, seed pods — move with more force and less order than in Childhood. The orange ground, warm and expansive, carries the feel of outward energy pushing into the world. Blue (female) and yellow (male) still structure the symbolic field, but here they compete rather than complement.

Af Klint painted each of the ten works in four days, as she had been instructed, laying the paper flat on the studio floor. No preparatory sketches. Just reception and paint.

“Every time I succeed in finishing one of my sketches, my understanding of humanity, animals, plants, minerals, or the entire creation, becomes clearer. I feel freed and raised up above my limited consciousness.”
— Hilma af Klint

The Ten Largest, No. 2, Childhood (1907)

Where No. 1 had a deep blue ground and the quiet symbolism of conception, No. 2 is louder. An enormous orange sphere intersects a near-indigo one, bleeding into green where they overlap — a visual vesica piscis, af Klint’s symbol for development toward unity. Kurbits (flowering gourds from Swedish folk tradition, associated with fertility) fill the composition alongside spirals — her sign for psychological and physical growth. Blue (female) and yellow (male) are caught inside larger, more dynamic forms.

“An enormous orange ball intersects with an identical near-indigo one and bleeds into verdant green, whilst euphoric spirals threaten to dissolve into a delirium of pale fresco blue.”
— Jennifer Higgie, Frieze, on No. 2, Childhood

The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood (1907)

The Ten Largest (Group IV, 1907) is Hilma af Klint’s most monumental series — 10 paintings, each over 10 feet tall, completed in 40 days. Together they map the full arc of human life: Childhood (Nos. 1–2), Youth (Nos. 3–4), Adulthood (Nos. 5–8), and Old Age (Nos. 9–10), all part of her larger cycle Paintings for the Temple.

No. 1 opens on a deep blue ground, blue being af Klint’s fixed symbol for the female principle, alongside the lily. Pink rose forms (male, associated with yellow) float alongside spirals representing evolution and development, and the word “Vestalasket”, a term from her spiritual notebooks denoting her own inner identity. At the center, a yellow circle holds a vesica piscis: the almond of two overlapping circles, an ancient symbol of unity and completion.

Af Klint described the commission in her notebook: “Ten paradisiacally beautiful paintings were to be executed; the paintings were to be in colors that would be educational and they would reveal my feelings to me in an economical way.”
— Hilma af Klint, from her notebooks