Encountering the paintings of Hilma af Klint for the first time, you may be reminded of gazing through a microscope at a slide of a cell. It’s no coincidence that the modern microscope was the latest tech breakthrough when af Klint was born in Solna, Sweden in 1862.  

But af Klint was commanded by spirits, not science, and produced more than 1,000 works at the behest of several supernatural entities who guided her hand. She also studied Buddhism and Hinduism, which expanded her conceptual vocabulary beyond Eurocentrism.

Viewed as a whole, her remarkable oeuvre reveals a fervent searching for the inherent, archetypal template that shapes all life and all experience, from the meander pattern of a river, to the geometry of a head of sunflower seeds, to the path of the Milky Way, to the then-unseen structures of nerves and neurons, to the hidden formation of thoughts themselves. From Lucretius to Galileo to Lynn Margulis, critical thinkers have long sensed an imago or original imprint which guides all life, and in the quest to find it discovered and revealed how deeply symbiotic all of our existence is. Hilma af Klint belongs among these seekers.

New images and knowledge emerging through technology inform her art indelibly. The artist was a devoted amateur botanist who took an interest in Linnaeus, Darwin, and the natural sciences. She had also worked as a draughtsman for a veterinary institute early in her career as an artist. This technical background might seem a contradiction to her following of Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky, her association with the theosophy movement, and her love for holding séances. This mesh of landmark scientific discovery with the artist’s esoteric leanings makes for enigmatic body of work that may call to us on several levels.

Reports of the day describe af Klint as petite vegetarian who always wore black, and worked alone. According to biographies, the artist was contacted during a séance in 1904 by a voice which told her to make paintings “on an astral plane” in order to “proclaim a new philosophy of life.” The voice belonged to an entity named Amaliel, and af Klint began a course of spiritual cleansing to enable herself to paint the cycle of work named for him.

On January 1, 1906, in accounts meticulously kept by The Five, Amaliel offered af Klint the “great commission” that would shape the rest of her life. She spent the next year purifying herself with an ascetic regimen, and abstaining from any realistic or figurative painting. For three years afterward, she completed 127 paintings in six thematic series. Many were as large as ten feet high, forcing the artist to place the canvases on the floor as she worked, and as Jackson Pollack would do decades later.

Some art historians suggest that séances and the like rose to prominence at the end of the 19th century among middle-class Europeans as a form of regression, to oppose the demystifying influence of emerging science, as well as to offset the effects of the Industrial Revolutions in both Europe and America that would forever upend the old economic order. 

The paintings of Hilma af Klint suggest otherwise. She sought to fuse the new findings of the laboratory with her improvised, eclectic spirituality, reaching for a dual knowledge of the sacred that feels congruent with the most celestial aspects of Jungian thought. We sense that she would have experienced the same degree of wonder in viewing a magnified slide of a diatom, charting the constellations, and kneeling and praying at her own improvised altar in her studio. 

While Spiritualists sought communication with deceased family members or other spirits who chose to demonstrate their presence in the séance room, Theosophists sought esoteric wisdom from great spirits of India and Tibet.  Both Spiritualists and Theosophists hoped their search for hidden truth would complement scientific discoveries of invisible components of matter: the cell, the atom, the X-ray, and radioactivity.

Descriptions of the artist’s process might today be called channeling. She described profound and involuntary guidance, she said, that led to the creation of many seemingly “automatic” paintings. In her carefully kept notebooks, she describes the process as being guided by a “force”, driven by a “higher power” in a sort of “divine dictation.”

In addition to using oil on canvas, she also painted on paper on the floor of the studio, then pasted the paper onto canvas. Working on such a grand scale, combined with the daring eccentricity of her content, marked Hilma af Klint as a radical. She may have lived during the final days of stiff, constricting fashions, stifling collars, starched pinafores, hairpins and whalebone corsets, but af Klint clearly was a re-wilded, disruptive woman who ran with the wolves. She created a shock wave in her time, and remains under-appreciated to this day.

Although she defied formal allegiance to any specific organized religion, af Klint’s best-known works belong to a cycle called The Paintings for the Temple, comprised of nearly 200 works created between 1906 and 1915. Many of these bear the imprint of the natural world, suggesting magnified plankton, cells, germinating seeds, swelling pods, erupting ova, single-cell organisms, and radio waves, all uniting in a seething, symbolic stew. Notably in the 1908 cycle called the “Evolution” and “Seven-Pointed Star” series, Adam and Eve regard each other over a sort of mandala while a tsunami of sperm twitch across the flesh-pink field. Two black serpents loom around the doomed couple, adding a bit of Talmudic gravitas to the allegorical scene.

The vesica piscis or fish-bladder shape figures prominently in her compositions. This almond shape formed by the intersection of two circles is a key element in the geometric art of Arabia, as well as in sacred medieval Christian art. In religious art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Christ figure is often portrayed floating above a scene in the mandorla, or almond-shaped double crescent, signaling his omnipotence.

The concept of the spirit descending to earth and dwelling among us weaves through her collection, disappearing, then resurfacing to gleam like a golden signature on a tapestry. Perhaps influenced by Henrik Ibsen’s groundbreaking play 1884 The Wild Duck, af Klint painted The Swan, No. 1 between 1914-1915, and it serves as a powerful lens into her perception. A yin-yang pair of swans, one white, one black, pause in mid-air to touch beaks and feathers, suggesting gender squabbles to many art critics. Other paintings in The Swan series portray the birds against target-like concentric circles, perhaps suggesting that the birds are prey as well as the alchemical symbol of completion.

Af Klint devoted another cycle to the dove in her series by the same name. In the Old Testament, a dove brings Noah the olive-branch, symbolizing Jehovah’s promise that he would never again try to destroy the world by flood. In the New Testament, the descending dove represents the Holy Spirit of the Pentecost. Although Watson and Crick would not produce X-ray diffraction images of crystallized DNA until 1953, her dove-paintings undulate with double-helix forms. Other patterns suggest electro-magnetic waves and telegraphy. The dove’s feathers further reveal a stylized mother, father and baby triad, tiny lovers, and an armor-clad woman fighting a dragon.

Other work, like her 1916 Altarpiece, No. 1, seems prescient, incorporating pyramids, sunbursts and chakric scales into large, iconic fields, illustrating matter rising into the spirit-realm, and the descent of the numinous to earth. The preface to the catalog of the Hilma af Klint exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, written by Daniel Birnbaum, Ann-Sofi Noring and others, states that “No one painted like this at that time: remarkable color combinations, monumental formats, shapes that are at once both organic and otherworldly.”

By the time of her death in 1944, af Klint had concluded that the world was not yet ready for her vision. Her Paintings for the Temple, originally conceived for the Goetheanum built in Switzerland by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian clairvoyant and medium, languished in storage for nearly a century before their first public reception. She had hoped that Steiner would champion her work, but instead was met with disappointment: he disapproved of the artist’s self-proclaimed role as “medium”, and advised her not to let anyone see the paintings for the next 50 years.

Their encounter obliterated whatever hope she had of showing her work to the public, and she hung up her brushes in frustration. When she did resume painting, she returned to the watercolors that had been her medium of choice as a young artist. Her images were simplified into stains and bleeds, and the trippy occultist references faded away. By then, she had written more than 1,200 pages entitled Studies of the Life of the Soul, detailing her experience as a metaphysical medium, and entrusted her creations to her nephew with the stipulation that they should only be made public twenty years after her death. When af Klint died in a tram accident in 1944, none of her abstract works had ever been seen outside her studio.

The collision of worlds at the end of a century, the modern with the traditional, the seen and the unseen, the physical and the cosmic, charge these largely ignored works with protean energy. Af Klint’s forms burst off the canvas with the force of the natural world unleashed, finding visual context in the scientific breakthroughs of the day, but made holy by her highly personal dialogue with the world she perceived beyond the rising smoke of factories, and the violent birth of a new industrial age.

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.