SPIRIT DIMENSION
Just over 100 years ago, five Swedish women artists gathered each Friday in a room in Stockholm decorated plainly with a plume of feathers on a table.
The women met to pray, and discuss the latest art and science breakthroughs including new marvels such as X-rays and microscopes, which revealed unseen forms of life.
The group, known as the Five (de Fem), also embraced mystical elements, popular during that period, experimenting with seances to connect with angel-spirits they called the High Masters.
The Five were led by a gifted 34-year-old graduate from Sweden’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Hilma af Klint. The daughter of a Swedish navy admiral, she was an accomplished landscape and portrait painter who founded the group in 1896, and remained a member for a decade.
Af Klint (the “af” denotes a family title) kept meticulous notes of these meetings, including their encounters with the High
