The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood

Hilma af Klint trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the 1880s and earned her living as a portrait and landscape painter. Alongside that career, she and four other women, a group called The Five, held séances: meetings where they believed they could receive messages from a spiritual world. In 1906 she began a large body of abstract paintings, pictures that do not show recognizable things, which she called the Paintings for the Temple. That was several years before Wassily Kandinsky and other men usually credited with inventing abstract art made similar leaps. This work belongs to The Ten Largest, a group of ten very large paintings made in 1907 that trace the stages of human life from childhood to old age. It is one of four paintings in the group devoted to adulthood. Af Klint believed the world was not ready for these works and directed that they stay unseen until twenty years after her death. When the Guggenheim Museum in New York finally gave her a major exhibition in 2018–19, it drew more than 600,000 visitors, the most in the museum's history.