Uppsatsen tar upp tretton bilder som Hilma af Klint målade under tidsperioden 1906-1915. Bilderna ingår i en svit som kallas för Bilderna till Templet som omfattar nästan 190 målningar. Under hennes livstid var hennes livsverk okänt för hennes samtid. Hon målade abstrakta, geometriska former och använde klara färger flera år före sina samtida konstnärskollegor. Inom ett hermeneutiskt arbetssätt ingår det olika moment som tolkning, beskrivning och analys av bilder. Uppsatsen vill belysa och ta upp hennes formspråk ur symbolisk synvinkel med hjälp av den hermeneutiska arbetsmodellen. Dels genom att göra hennes bildspråk mer begripligt och dels för att hitta gemensamma nämnare som ökar förståelsen för hennes målningar. Enligt författarens mening hade hon svårt för att förstå innehållet i bilderna, men hade en klar tanke om att bilderna speglade evolutionstanken i Skapelsen. / The essay includes thirteen pictures by Hilma af Klint, who painted these between 1906-1915. The pictures is a part ofa suite namned The Paintings to The Temple which extent almost 190 paintings. During her lifetime her life's work was unknown to her own period. She painted abstractical, geometrical forms and used bright colours many years before her contemporary artistcolleagues. Within a hermeneutical method includes different moments like, interpretation, description and analysis of pictures. The essay wants to illuminate and to lind her idiom out of a symbolic visual angle with help from the hermeneutical workrnodell. Partly making her pictorial language more clear and partly to find common factors which increase the understanding for her paintings. The author of this essay means that Hilma af Klint had some difficulties to understand the contents of her own paintings, but she had a clear thought that the pictures reflected the evolution thought in the Creation.

This dissertation studies the critical reception of Hilma af Klint trough three exhibitions: Spiritual in Art – Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles, 1986), Secret Pictures by Hilma af Klint, (Helsinki, 1988) and Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction (Stockholm, 2013), addressing the crucial prominent figures and voices in the discursive field around af Klint. The aim is carried out through the Critical Discourse Analysis by Norman Fairclough, coupled with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the cultural field and habitus. Judith Butler's theory of gender performance completes the theoretical framework by addressing issues of gender in both af Klint's practice as well as in the analysed critical reviews. The thesis examines how the discourses about af Klint changed during different periods of time in the 1980s and the 2010s. The central hypothesis is that this case study can be used as an example to see how the art field presents women artists as a marginal phenomenon instead of including them in the general art historical canon. But the reception of af Klint cannot be fully understood through the lens of gender; thus, e.g. the closeness to the occult is considered both as a leading mechanism in the artistic practice, creating interest towards af Klint, and as an identity which pushes her to the marginal. The results of this study lead to a better understanding of critical articles' role in the cultural phenomena's narrative creation.

In this essay, the children’s picture book Hilma af Klint: maps of invisibility by Ylva Hillström and Karin Eklund is analyzed with the aim of exploring the picture book as a medium and tool for art history writing. The analysis examines how the artist Hilma af Klint is portrayed and how art history is presented, as well as placing a particular focus on analyzing the interaction between image and text. The content is examined with semiotic image analysis, an inductive literature study as well as reception aesthetics analysis. The analysis concludes that Hilma af Klint as an artist is portrayed as fearless, curious and serious, and her artistic ambition is described as the desire to understand the universe. The design of the picture book and the ability to freely place and combine images and texts in different ways means that it is possible to convey the history of the art in several ways. With the picture book, sometimes several parallel stories are told; sometimes picture and text work together to complement each other, other tims the same thing is presented in both text and picture, or the pictures tell a story of their own or provide additional information that does not appear in the text. Depending on the experience of the viewer/reader, it is possible to derive different things from the picture book, and gaps can be filled as well as be left empty, which creates excitement and curiosity about the rest of the art world. Through the illustrations representation of af Klint's work and Eklund's way of illustrating the works the images in the book relate back to the children's/viewer's own world. The design of the picture book functions as a gateway to what it is like to look at art and art books and it works to create images within the viewer.

This dissertation investigates the way that feminist resistance is expressed in two Swedish and two German so-called New Woman novels from the turn of the twentieth century: Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet (1910, Penwoman), Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895, From a Good Family), Hilma Angered-Strandberg’s Lydia Vik (1904), and Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911). The theoretical apparatus is comprised by the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, and Jessica Benjamin. By introducing a psychoanalytic and feminist perspective, this dissertation seeks to develop the possibilities for agency and resistance within the framework of Foucault’s theories. It investigates four textual and contextually grounded strategies of resistance that are prominent in these novels: individuality, openness, desire, and eugenics. This study demonstrates how Gabriele Reuter, Grete Meisel-Hess, and  Hilma Angered-Strandberg, inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ellen Key, depict feminine individuality in relation to a scientific and philosophical discourse that specifically denied women individuality. The authors anchor individuality in a corporality that was similarly denied to women by a bourgeois and dogmatic Christian discourse. Openness and wit function as resistance strategies in Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet. Humorous rejoinders and narrative comments can disarm a conservative. An open attitude towards the emancipation project could also help to resolve the conflicts between different feminist positions and between different women. Desire functions as an important resistance strategy in each of the novels examined. It is variously represented as a vital instinct, a desire for knowledge, and a sexual desire, as in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie – or as a desire for suffrage, as in Pennskaftet, or for maternity legislation, as in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen. By formulating a notion of feminine desire, turn-of-the-century feminists were able both to seize control of sexuality from the church and to wrest morality from the grasp of the bourgeoisie. These resistance strategies could also have a biopolitical character: in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen, woman is placed at the service of humanity on eugenicist grounds, and her good qualities are seen as capable of promoting humanity’s progress. This dissertation shows that in these novels desire at the individual level serves to reinforce feminine subjectivity. Love is seen as associated with an intensified sense of life and as a precondition of creativity. At the social level, desire also functions as the basis for a feeling of solidarity among women that instils in them courage and an urge to persevere in the suffrage struggle, this latter a highly protracted process. In this way desire acquires political potential. A framing chapter on context provides the intellectual and philosophical backgrounds of the various strategies of resistance. It is followed by four analytical chapters, each of which addresses one novel.