She was courageous in so many ways.

JOSIAH McELHENY: What's astounding is her bravery.

There was nothing being made like this in the whole world.

TRACEY BASHKOFF: The leap into full, nonobjective abstraction—

that just turned things on its head.

NARRATOR: At the turn of the 20th Century,

the world was on the brink of dramatic change.

Political, scientific, and cultural

evolution fundamentally changed reality.

Art was changing too.

Painters like Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian

began to replace perceived reality with signs,

natural color with symbolic color,

representation with abstraction.

A new expressive form emerged.

In 1944, as war again raged in Europe,

these two icons of abstract art died—

their legacy secured.

But that very same year, another artist passed—

one whose work was yet unknown to the public,

a female artist who worked to make the invisible visible.

Who was she?

Hilma af Klint: an artist for the future.

In a career spanning six decades,

Hilma af Klint produced hundreds of paintings

and thousands of pages of writings and notes

that are as confounding as they are revelatory.

But she may have left the world

with more questions than she did answers.

BASHKOFF: Hilma af Klint's abstract work predates

the work by artists that we have

long considered the pioneers of abstraction.

Af Klint, working apart from those artists,

just doesn't fit into our story.

NARRATOR: Born in Sweden in 1862,

af Klint was among the earliest women to study

at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm.

She painted botanical studies, landscape paintings—

here's a self-portrait.

But her experience with spiritualism and the science of the day

sparked her interest in new ideas.

CHRISTINE BURGIN: Whether it's Christian, Rosicrucian, Theosophical,

she explored many different spiritual realms.

NARRATOR: Af Klint began to conduct séance sessions

with a group of likeminded women.

They called themselves “The Five.”

Here's the table they met at. Here's an altar they built.

Together they would communicate with spirits as mediums.

The guides they encountered would send them messages,

which eventually took the shape of art.

One of these séance sessions proved to be fateful.

In 1906 a spiritual guide commissioned af Klint

to prepare an artistic message for humankind.

From January to November of that year,

she did just that, in secret.

BASHKOFF: This commission that she receives

becomes really her life work.

NARRATOR: In the period between 1906 and 1915,

af Klint produced 193 paintings that attempted

to represent the spirit of the world.

BURGIN: She had complete and total

faith that it contained meaning and meaning

that was essential to how the universe is put together.

NARRATOR: A mystical, idiosyncratic geometry emerged.

CIANCIOLO: They look like sacred geometric languages.

So, it's living, It's a living being, her work.

NARRATOR: Colors took on gender roles:

blue, female; yellow: male;

green, the unity of the two.

Forms began to interlock or even come into collision,

like this series of swans.

Botanical studies stood beside watercolors

of the energy of those plants.

Words and letters, sometimes indecipherable,

populated the frame.

Af Klint charted and codified these images and her

philosophy in an expansive series of notebooks.

BURGIN: It's beautiful, I mean

it's poems what she's writing.

McELHENY: She was creating

a kind of library of ideas.

NARRATOR: “The Ten Largest” are among

her earliest abstract paintings

and some of the first ever made.

BASHKOFF: The scale of “The Ten Largest”

is really remarkable.

McELHENY: These gigantic, beautiful, bright, bright pink images.

BASHKOFF: The subject is just as monumental

as the paintings themselves.

The ten paintings go through the life-span of humans,

from birth to old age.

McELHENY: And it's suddenly like

the world might be different.

NARRATOR: Af Klint rarely exhibited this work,

keeping these paintings and hundreds like them

from public view for her entire life.

She even stipulated that her works

not be shown for twenty years after her death.

Why af Klint withheld much of her work

from contemporary criticism remains a mystery.

Was the public simply not ready?

Did she break too much ground?

CIANCIOLO: I wish that I could ask her myself.

BURGIN: I don't think she wants it to be clear.

It's a journey. It's for you to figure out.

It's more complicated than that.

McELHENY: There's something so powerful in Hilma's work.

It's really wonderful that she allowed us

to save the message until now.

BASHKOFF: She was looking to the future for

a time when there would be a viewer who

would understand the messages that she felt

she was putting out in these paintings.

NARRATOR: Ideas always expanded beyond

the edge of the canvas for af Klint.

The spiral, an ever-occurring motif across her paintings,

extended to her plans for the works' eventual exhibition.

She made sketches for a circular building

to house her paintings, where viewers would

take in the work as they ascended

a spiral staircase towards the heavens.