Who Painted the First Abstract Picture? The Race Nobody Knew They Were In

Its most spectacular part, The Ten Largest, is a set of paintings more than three meters tall, mapping the four ages of life: childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. Lavender, pink and dusty orange; spirals, flower-like shapes, forms that look like handwriting.¹

Nothing like it was being shown anywhere. Af Klint herself felt the work came from an external force rather than from her own imagination.¹

Wassily Kandinsky has traditionally been described as the first modern artist to paint purely abstract pictures, in 1910–11.¹ Soon after, Kazimir Malevich in Russia and Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands became the pioneers of “pure” abstraction, between about 1910 and 1920.²

Af Klint showed her landscapes and portraits in public, but her abstract work only in spiritual circles. Convinced the world was not ready, she left instructions that it should not be shown until twenty years after her death.¹

She died in 1944. Her abstract paintings were not seen again until 1986, in an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.¹ In 2018 the Guggenheim in New York gave her a major show, Paintings for the Future. It became the most visited exhibition in the museum's history.¹

By date, af Klint. But she worked in isolation, for a spiritual purpose rather than to invent a new kind of art, which makes her hard to place in the usual story.¹ Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, on the other hand, showed their abstract work in public, and Tate counts them among its pioneers.²

Perhaps the fairest answer is that abstraction was invented more than once, by people who did not know about each other.