Hilma af Klint’s The Ten Largest: Meaning, Symbols and the Four Stages of Life
In 1907, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint began work on ten paintings unlike almost anything being produced in European art at the time. Each was more than three metres high. Their surfaces filled with enormous flowers, spirals, circles, letters, seeds and strange geometric forms in blue, orange, pink, yellow and violet.
Together they became The Ten Largest, one of Hilma af Klint’s most remarkable series.
The paintings follow human life from childhood through youth and adulthood to old age. Yet af Klint was not trying to illustrate what people look like as they grow older. Her subject was inner development: consciousness, creation, duality, love and the possibility that seemingly opposing forces might eventually become whole.
More than a century later, the paintings can still look startlingly contemporary. To understand them, however, it helps to know that the flowers, colours, letters and abstract forms were part of a symbolic language that Hilma af Klint had been developing for years.
In this guide, we follow all ten paintings in sequence and look at what their symbols may tell us about Hilma af Klint’s extraordinary vision of a human life.
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Who was Hilma af Klint?
Hilma af Klint was born in Sweden in 1862 and trained at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She was thoroughly educated in traditional painting and established herself professionally with landscapes, portraits and botanical subjects.
At the same time, another side of her artistic life was developing.
Af Klint was deeply interested in spiritualism and later studied ideas connected with Theosophy, Rosicrucianism and Anthroposophy. These movements attracted considerable attention in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, when questions about science, religion, evolution and invisible forces were increasingly being discussed together.
In the 1890s, af Klint and four other women formed a group known as De Fem, or The Five. They held spiritualist meetings and experimented with automatic drawing, allowing lines and forms to emerge without conventional artistic planning.
According to Moderna Museet, af Klint believed that in 1905 she had received an assignment from one of the spiritual beings she called the High Masters. The resulting project became known as The Paintings for the Temple.
Created between 1906 and 1915, the project eventually comprised 193 works. The Ten Largest belongs to this much larger undertaking.
What is The Ten Largest?
Hilma af Klint painted The Ten Largest in 1907. According to Moderna Museet, the ten monumental works were completed in only around forty days, with each image taking approximately four days to produce.
The paintings were made in tempera on enormous sheets of paper that were later mounted on canvas. Because of their scale, the sheets appear to have been laid directly on the studio floor while af Klint worked. Cornelia Cederberg, a member of The Five, and Gusten Andersson assisted her during the process.
The original paintings are roughly 3.2 metres high and 2.4 metres wide. Their size matters. They were conceived as environments that could physically surround the viewer rather than simply as pictures to be observed from a distance.
The ten works are divided into four stages of human life:
- No. 1–2: Childhood
- No. 3–4: Youth
- No. 5–8: Adulthood
- No. 9–10: Old Age
Moderna Museet emphasises that the series is concerned especially with spiritual and mental development. The progression through life is expressed through changes in colour, rhythm, symbols and composition.
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force.”
A language of colours, flowers, spirals and letters
There is no simple dictionary that translates every Hilma af Klint symbol into one fixed meaning. In fact, Moderna Museet points out that the same letter could take on different meanings depending on its context.
Still, af Klint’s notebooks give us several clues.
- Blue and yellow frequently represent complementary female and male principles in af Klint’s symbolic system.
- The rose and the lily are also associated with these complementary principles.
- Eggs, seeds and grains suggest beginnings, creation, growth or potential.
- Spirals and shells can represent development and spiritual evolution.
- Pink is connected in her notes with Eros and creative love.
- U and W frequently signify spirit and matter.
These meanings are important, but they should not turn the paintings into puzzles that need to be “solved”. Hilma af Klint often allowed several ideas to exist within the same image.
The better way to approach The Ten Largest is to watch how her visual language changes as a human life progresses.
No. 1, Childhood: life begins
The Ten Largest No. 1, Childhood opens the entire sequence.
The background is blue and the composition seems to float. Flowers, curling lines and organic shapes occupy the enormous surface. Near the centre is a circle containing two forms resembling grains of wheat, seeds or eggs.
Everything suggests potential. Life has started, but its final form is still unknown.
The rose and lily appear within the painting, introducing one of the ideas that runs throughout the entire series: the relationship between complementary principles. Af Klint associated the rose with the masculine and the lily with the feminine.
The letters a and v also appear. In her symbolic vocabulary they were connected with the ascetic and the vestal, concepts that again belonged to contrasting but complementary forces.
It is a remarkably complex image for something called Childhood. Af Klint does not present childhood as empty or undeveloped. The structures that will shape life are already present.
View The Ten Largest No. 1, Childhood →
No. 2, Childhood: circles of growth
In The Ten Largest No. 2, Childhood, the blue world continues, but the forms become larger and more confident.
Huge circular structures dominate the composition. Orange and blue meet within the picture, colours that continue the theme of complementary forces introduced in the first painting.
The forms can recall flowers, cells, planets and microscopic organisms at the same time. That ambiguity is typical of af Klint. She had a lifelong interest in nature and botanical forms, yet she repeatedly transformed them into images that could equally belong to the biological, cosmic or spiritual world.
Childhood in these first two paintings becomes a period of formation and expansion. Something is growing.
View The Ten Largest No. 2, Childhood →
No. 3, Youth: movement enters the series
The change is immediate when we reach The Ten Largest No. 3, Youth.
The quiet blue of childhood is replaced by a vivid orange ground. Spirals, circles and curved forms appear to move across the surface.
Moderna Museet identifies the spirals and shell-like forms with spiritual development. Within the Theosophical ideas that interested af Klint, evolution could extend beyond Darwinian biological evolution to include the development of human consciousness.
That idea makes the spirals particularly appropriate for youth. They move outward, change direction and create new centres.
Egg-shaped forms appear again, suggesting that youth itself contains new beginnings. Pink also becomes more prominent. Af Klint associated pink with Eros, understood here in a broader sense connected with love and the creative forces of life.
View The Ten Largest No. 3, Youth →
No. 4, Youth: energy without stillness
No. 4, Youth continues the warm orange palette and energetic character of the previous painting.
Egg-like shapes return alongside sweeping lines and rounded forms. Yellow, blue and pink remain part of the visual conversation between duality, creation and attraction.
There is relatively little visual rest in the two Youth paintings. Forms overlap, grow and push into one another. The compositions seem less settled than Childhood and far less ordered than the final images of Old Age.
Seen together, No. 3 and No. 4 give youth its own visual tempo.
View The Ten Largest No. 4, Youth →
No. 5, Adulthood: the five-petalled flower
Adulthood occupies four paintings, making it the longest stage of the series.
The background changes again. The Ten Largest No. 5, Adulthood introduces the violet and purple tones associated with this part of the sequence.
A five-petalled pink flower appears prominently in the painting.
Its meaning is unusually interesting. Moderna Museet notes that a similar five-petalled flower appears in one of af Klint’s 1907 sketchbooks containing the names of the members of The Five.
The form may carry another layer of symbolism. Five could represent earth, fire, air and water together with a fifth element, the quintessence. In older philosophical and alchemical traditions, quintessence was understood as the concentrated essence of existence.
Once again, af Klint leaves several interpretations operating at once.
View The Ten Largest No. 5, Adulthood →
No. 6, Adulthood: when letters become images
No. 6, Adulthood is filled with letters and letter combinations.
Af Klint recorded possible meanings of letters and words in her notebooks, but there was no universal code. A symbol could change meaning according to the image surrounding it.
Two letters occur repeatedly in her work: U and W. Moderna Museet explains that they often denote spirit and matter.
This gives the painting the appearance of a message written in an unfamiliar alphabet. Yet it may be more useful to experience the letters visually. They have rhythm and movement. They are part of the composition before they become language.
Moderna Museet has even suggested that some letter combinations may have been intended to be sounded, almost like mantras.
View The Ten Largest No. 6, Adulthood →
No. 7, Adulthood: one of Hilma af Klint’s most complex visual worlds
In The Ten Largest No. 7, Adulthood, forms, letters and organic structures spread across the violet field.
The letters U, W and S appear again, together with the term vestalasket, combining concepts that recur elsewhere in af Klint’s symbolic language.
The density of the composition fits the position of the painting within the series. Adulthood has become the most complicated part of the life cycle. Ideas introduced during childhood and youth now overlap.
It is also one of the clearest examples of af Klint moving freely between recognisable organic shapes and pure abstraction. Flowers can become diagrams. Letters can become forms. Lines behave like growing organisms.
View The Ten Largest No. 7, Adulthood →
No. 8, Adulthood: blue and yellow meet again
The final adulthood painting, The Ten Largest No. 8, returns strongly to blue and yellow.
According to Moderna Museet, the relationship between these colours, and therefore between the female and male principles in af Klint’s symbolic system, is central to the composition.
This theme has been present since Childhood. Here, however, the two sides have travelled through most of the human life cycle.
That repeated search for reconciliation is one of the most persistent ideas in The Paintings for the Temple. Opposites appear again and again: spirit and matter, male and female, visible and invisible.
Af Klint was fascinated by the possibility that apparent opposites were parts of a larger unity.
View The Ten Largest No. 8, Adulthood →
No. 9, Old Age: the forms become quieter
The transition into old age produces another dramatic change.
The playful organic shapes of the previous paintings begin to disappear. In The Ten Largest No. 9, Old Age, symmetry and geometry become much more important.
The background is pink, the colour af Klint associated with Eros. At the bottom are spirals containing overlapping blue and yellow circles. Above them sit two seed-like shapes, probably grains of wheat.
Further up, intersecting circles create an almond-shaped form known as a vesica piscis. The ancient geometric symbol has long been associated with intersection and unity.
Near the top of the painting are two flower-like diagrams whose outer circles are blue and yellow.
According to notes af Klint made later, the image concerned a divinity that had incorporated both the male and female principles.
The dualities introduced at the beginning of the series are moving towards reconciliation.
View The Ten Largest No. 9, Old Age →
No. 10, Old Age: the series ends in space and silence
The Ten Largest No. 10, Old Age brings the sequence to an unexpectedly quiet conclusion.
Many symbols from the earlier paintings remain, but the composition is restrained. Large pale areas separate the geometric forms, giving the painting a sense of openness that was almost absent from the restless Youth and Adulthood paintings.
Near the lower part of the work is a small egg or droplet shape. Inside it, elements from the larger composition appear again in miniature.
It is almost as though the enormous journey contained within all ten paintings has been compressed into a tiny seed.
A horizontal figure eight also appears. Moderna Museet identifies it as a symbol of infinity.
Old age therefore does not simply produce an ending. The final painting contains suggestions of continuation, repetition and another beginning.
View The Ten Largest No. 10, Old Age →
The hidden structure of The Ten Largest
Viewed separately, the ten paintings can look like spectacular experiments in colour and abstract form. Viewed in sequence, a structure becomes much clearer.
Childhood begins in blue with seeds, flowers and potential.
Youth turns orange and begins to move.
Adulthood becomes violet, dense and complicated, filled with letters, symbols and overlapping systems.
Old age becomes pink, geometric and increasingly calm.
The series moves from growth through complexity towards concentration.
One particularly beautiful feature is the persistence of the seed or egg. It appears near the beginning of life, returns during youth and appears again near the end.
The life cycle begins with potential and closes with another image of potential.
Why do The Ten Largest still look so modern?
One reason Hilma af Klint continues to fascinate viewers is chronological.
She created The Ten Largest in 1907, before abstract painting had become an established movement in European modern art. Artists now routinely associated with the development of abstraction, including Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, became famous for abstract work somewhat later.
That has encouraged the popular question: Did Hilma af Klint invent abstract art?
The history is more complicated than a race for first place. Af Klint developed her paintings within a very particular spiritual, scientific and artistic context, and most of this work was seen by very few people during her lifetime. It therefore did not influence the development of modernism in the same way as artists who exhibited and published their work internationally.
What can be said with confidence is remarkable enough. In 1907, a professionally trained Swedish painter was making monumental works built from abstraction, biological forms, diagrams, colour systems and symbols on a scale that still feels radical today.
The Guggenheim Museum now describes af Klint’s work as pioneering, while Moderna Museet has played a central role in bringing her paintings to an international audience.
Which Hilma af Klint poster from The Ten Largest should you choose?
The ten paintings were created as a sequence, yet each has a very different presence in a room.
If you prefer cool, gentle colours, the two Childhood paintings have luminous blue backgrounds and softer organic forms.
The Youth paintings are much warmer. Their orange grounds and energetic curves make No. 3 and No. 4 particularly expressive choices for a room that can carry stronger colour.
The four Adulthood paintings offer the richest and most complex compositions. Violet backgrounds, lettering, flowers and intertwined symbols give them a more mysterious character.
The two Old Age works move in the opposite direction. Their pink grounds, geometry and increased negative space give them a calmer and more meditative quality.
They also work particularly well in pairs because af Klint conceived each life stage as part of a larger progression.
See all Hilma af Klint art prints →
Hilma af Klint and a painting made for the future
Perhaps the strangest thing about The Ten Largest is how little they resemble our mental picture of art made in 1907.
There are no people. No Stockholm streets. No carefully observed landscape.
Instead we find enormous cells, flowers, spirals, letters and coloured geometries describing an entire human life.
Hilma af Klint was searching for a visual language capable of showing something she believed could not be seen directly. Whatever one thinks of the spiritual ideas behind the project, that ambition gave her an extraordinary freedom.
She could treat a flower as a biological organism, a spiritual symbol and an abstract form within the same painting. A spiral could describe growth, movement and evolution at once. An egg could belong to childhood and return at the end of life.
That is why The Ten Largest rewards more than a quick look. The series becomes stranger and more coherent the longer you spend with it.
Ten paintings. Four stages of life. And a visual language that, more than a century later, still feels as though someone has only just begun to decipher it.
Frequently Asked Questions about Hilma af Klint’s The Ten Largest
What does The Ten Largest by Hilma af Klint represent?
The series represents four stages of human life: Childhood, Youth, Adulthood and Old Age. Hilma af Klint was particularly interested in spiritual and psychological development rather than simply physical ageing.
When did Hilma af Klint paint The Ten Largest?
She created the series in 1907 as part of her larger project The Paintings for the Temple.
How large are the original paintings?
The works are approximately 3.2–3.3 metres high and around 2.4 metres wide, making them among the largest paintings Hilma af Klint ever created.
What do blue and yellow mean in Hilma af Klint’s paintings?
Within af Klint’s symbolic system, blue and yellow frequently represent complementary female and male principles. Their interaction appears repeatedly throughout The Ten Largest.
What do the spirals in The Ten Largest mean?
Moderna Museet connects the spirals and shell forms particularly with development and spiritual evolution. Spirals are especially prominent in the paintings representing Youth.
What do the letters U and W mean?
In Hilma af Klint’s notebooks, U and W often refer to spirit and matter. Their meaning is not completely fixed, however, because af Klint could use the same letters differently depending on context.
Was Hilma af Klint an abstract artist before Kandinsky?
Hilma af Klint was producing highly abstract works by 1906–1907, before abstraction became established as a major European art movement. Whether any single artist should be described as the “inventor” of abstraction is more complicated because artists worked in different contexts and did not necessarily know each other’s work.
Where can I learn more about The Ten Largest?
Excellent primary museum resources include Moderna Museet’s guide to The Ten Largest and the Guggenheim Museum’s Hilma af Klint archive.
Sources and further reading
- Moderna Museet – Hilma af Klint: The Ten Largest
- Moderna Museet Guide – The Ten Largest, 1907
- Moderna Museet – Childhood, No. 1–2
- Moderna Museet – Youth, No. 3–4
- Moderna Museet – Adulthood, No. 5–8
- Moderna Museet – Old Age, No. 9–10
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future