The Ten Largest, No. 10, Old Age (1907 CE)

The Ten Largest, No. 10, Old Age is a vast, softly radiant pink canvas that feels almost weightless despite its monumental scale. Standing before it, the viewer is enveloped by a perfect bilateral symmetry and a hushed, luminous atmosphere that seems to slow time itself. Where earlier works in the cycle pulse with movement and vivid contrasts, this painting has reached complete stillness: every line is measured, every circle drawn with a compass, every form balanced as though the entire universe has finally come to rest in harmonious resolution.

Created in the winter of 1907 in Hilma af Klint’s Stockholm studio, No. 10 was the final canvas she painted in a rapid, trance-like burst of activity that autumn. She experienced the work as guided by a higher force and understood it as the visual embodiment of spiritual old age – not physical decline, but the moment when all opposites dissolve into unity. In her later notes she described the painting as the point where “duality has ceased” and the pink ground had become “pure love without desire”.

At the very bottom centre of the composition, almost hidden against the pale pink, af Klint placed a minute alchemical symbol: a circle containing a cross with a dot at its heart (⊕). This ancient sign of the sun and of the completed Great Work appears only here, marking the quiet culmination of an entire spiritual journey. In 1920 she returned to the painting in her private writings and reflected: “Here the masculine and the feminine are one. Everything has returned to unity.” During the Guggenheim’s 2018–2019 exhibition, the painting was installed around a corner so that visitors had to turn deliberately to meet it – an echo of af Klint’s original temple sketches in which the final revelation of wisdom required a physical turn of the body.

No. 10 represents the moment when abstraction becomes contemplative rather than exploratory. The earlier exuberance of curving lines and overlapping forms has given way to strict geometry: two flower-like circles (one yellow, one blue) hover like twin suns and perfect spirals and circles interlock in crystalline order. Blue and yellow – af Klint’s symbols for the feminine and masculine principles – no longer compete but complete each other against the rose-pink field that she associated with unconditional love. The painting is less a picture than a diagram of enlightenment, a silent declaration that old age, far from being an ending, is the phase in which every contradiction is reconciled and the soul returns to wholeness.

The work is executed in egg-oil tempera on paper mounted on canvas, a technique that gives the surface a delicate, almost porcelain-like glow while allowing large areas of translucent colour to breathe. It measures 328 × 240 cm (129 × 94½ inches), a scale chosen to immerse the viewer physically in the presence of the image. The composition is governed by ruler-straight lines and compass-drawn circles; the pink background is applied in thin, luminous layers that let the white of the paper shimmer through, creating an inner light that seems to come from within the painting itself rather than from any external source.

The painting remained in Hilma af Klint’s studio until her death in 1944, then passed to her nephew and finally, in the 1970s, to the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, where it is still held today. It was first shown publicly in 1986 and achieved worldwide recognition with the Guggenheim retrospective in 2018–2019. Since then it has travelled in its full monumental size to major museums, yet it has never left the foundation’s ownership and has never appeared on the market.