Hilma af Klint and the Courage of Conviction
20th-century abstraction in the 21st century
The series starts with a painting of two swans. One’s eggshell white on a black background. The other’s charcoal black on a white one. They’re separated by a horizontal line that bisects the painting. But they meet in the middle: beak to beak, wingtip to wingtip.
The birds aren’t hyper-realistic. Their outlines look more like half-completed Goya sketches, or Rembrandt etchings than a finished Titian work. But there’s restless, barely-contained energy in the brushstrokes that overflow past the swans’ wings. The top swan passes something to the bottom swan with its beak, like God touching Adam’s hand on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. This painter is trying to say something, you understand upon seeing the piece. There’s something she urgently wants us to know.
That message becomes clearer across the next 23 paintings of Hilma af Klint’s The Swan (1915) series. The two swans intertwine and color emerges from their union. It happens like the sunrise: softly at first, and then all at once. Dilute light-pinks radiate from the birds. They’re followed by sky blues and morning yellows. The swans get more abstract and the colors get bolder. Cardinal reds, Aztec golds, and poppyseed blacks. Eventually, the swans morph into semicircles and fit together perfectly. The forces separating them collapse and they become one.
Dissolving distinctions was important to af Klint. “The world is divided into two forces when it should be one,”1 she wrote in her diary in the early 20th-century. She produced over 1200 abstract paintings between 1904 and the early 1940s. But her work only recently became famous, after curator Iris Müller-Westermann displayed it at a solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in 2013.
You might be able to guess some of the reasons she wasn’t famous in her time. Leading abstract thinkers like Rudolph Steiner didn’t take her seriously because she was a woman. Men barred her from some of the social networks she’d need to distribute her paintings because of her gender. But some of the reasons for her secrecy were self-imposed. Af Klint became an artistic recluse in her later years, and drafted an injunction into her will stating her paintings were to be kept from public view for 20 years after her death.
Af Klint’s finally in the limelight, though, after a century’s delay. She’s the subject of an award-winning documentary. Her 2019 show was the most-visited exhibition in the Guggenheim’s history. And her paintings are on a world tour and receive rave reviews. They evoke strong emotional reactions, too. Gallerists in the film Hilma af Klint: Beyond the Visible said they’ve seen people walk through her exhibit and “burst into tears,” or have “a great calm wash over them.”
The documentary does a good job explaining why af Klint was barred from the abstract canon. So I’m going to focus on a different question. Why do unveiled abstract paintings from over 100 years ago speak so powerfully to viewers in 2020 and 2021?
To understand af Klint’s appeal to a modern audience, one needs to where she came from. Hilma af Klint was born to a rich Swedish family in Karlberg Palace, 1862. Her mother was aristocrat Mathilda af Klint, and her father was Swedish naval commander Captain Victor af Klint. Victor taught sea cadets and made sure his daughter learned math, botany, and the natural sciences. Hilma spent summers on the island of Adelsö on Lake Mälaren, amidst verdant pine forests filled with blueberry bushes.
She took up painting in her teens and entered the Royal Academy of Arts in 1882, at age 20. For unmarried Swedish women, art academy training gave them monetizable skills. I suspect part of the reason af Klint chose to be a painter was that she was wary of how marriage could curtail her independence. She’d articulate this years later in her diary: “Within me wells such power that marriage and family life are not my destiny,”2 she wrote.
Af Klint mastered naturalist painting so effectively that the Royal Academy awarded her studio space upon graduation. She was focused on depicting truth even in her early years. Her colors and proportions in her early naturalist works are rigorously exact. In Eftersommar (Late Summer) (1903), her tree coloration perfectly captures how leaves refract light during golden hour. In Spring Landscape: Scene from the Bay of Lomma (1892), her still water mirrors a detailed sky. Her grazing animals are precisely the size they’re supposed to be.
Her work stands in sharp contrast to more nationalist modes of naturalism, exemplified in Thomas Cole’s Home in the Woods (1847) and Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868). In nationalist naturalist works, painters altered reality to manufacture mythic grandeur. They squeezed mountains’ dimensions and distended skies, which made their landscapes look unreal and strangely compressed. This was intentional—painters’ false depictions of an Edenic American West gave settlers a false pretense to colonize it. But af Klint rejected this naturalist school. She hewed more closely to John Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelite school’s work, and “never tried to make people beautiful than they are,”3 according to critic Julia Voss.
Naturalism soon became an insufficient vehicle for af Klint’s effort to depict truth, though. Scientists started making world-altering discoveries in the 1880s, which changed how people perceived reality. Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves in 1886. William Röntgen invented the x-ray in 1895. Einstein said of the time that “if light is neither a particle nor a wave, we don’t know what it is.” The realization made “the earth shift under [his] feet.”4 Precise landscape paintings suddenly seemed superficial to many artists. Af Klint became obsessed with the idea that reality extended “beyond the visible,”5 according to curator Iris Müller-Westermann.
She wasn’t alone in her deep existential discomfort. The era’s accelerating scientific discoveries injected doubt into people’s relationships to governments, God, and the world around them. Even those who profited from these seismic technological changes were disturbed. Thomas Edison wrote to Henry Ford about his misgivings about capitalism in 1912. “Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distribution—all wrong, out of gear,”6 Edison said. Two years later, the First World War would start. It’s hard not to imagine politically aware people of the era as crew members on the Pequod, careening towards a cataclysm they could anticipate but couldn’t control.
Abstract artists became a kind of radio antennae for this ambient cultural anxiety. “Sensuous oneness with nature is replaced by a disunion, a relationship of fear between man and world, a skepticism towards the surface and appearance of things,” William Worringer wrote in Abstraction and Empathy in 1907. He concluded that abstract artists’ search for a new way to represent reality was also a search for peace of mind. “An ultimate truth was sought,” he writes. “These abstract forms... liberated from all finiteness, are the only ones in which man can find rest from the confusion of the world picture.”7
Around 1904, af Klint broke with her old mode of naturalist painting. “If I want to show the world as it is, I must invent it,” she wrote in her diary. And then she started working in abstraction.
One of af Klint’s first abstract series, Primordial Chaos (1906-1907), shows her early attempts to reconcile the new scientific world with the spiritual one of her birth. In the first painting, a yellow world sits on an azure surface. It’s not dissimilar how prior artists prior depicted the world sitting over Genesis’s waters of life. But the next paintings in the series are anything but benevolently divine.
The world stretches and morphs into a snail’s shell. By the sixteenth painting, it’s become undone. It’s dissolved into spirals, like the waves people had just learned pervaded the cosmos. Af Klint started with the bible and injected radioactivity into primordial chaos.
Her work remained rigorously rooted in the scientific natural world, even as she veered away from naturalism. Af Klint painted logarithmic spirals in her work so often that it “might as well be a signature,”8 David Lomas writes. She did this because the logarithmic spiral occurs often in nature: in the arrangement of seeds on a sunflower, or a pinecone, the path of draining water, snail shells, and galaxies.9 She also rigorously studied other parts of the natural world to tease out deeper patterns from them. “Firstly, I shall try to understand the flowers of the earth... then I shall study, with equal care, that which is preserved in the waters of the world... and finally I shall penetrate the forest,” she wrote in her notes.
She seemed dedicated to building a new visual language to communicate what she perceived. But her ambitions outpaced what she’d permit herself to do. “What I needed was courage, which was bestowed on me by the spiritual world,” af Klint wrote in her diary. She found her courage, and her entry point to that world, in Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement.
Theosophy was a late 19th-century spiritualist movement that believed its adherents should be "a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.” This appealed to af Klint as a spiritually-inclined woman who wanted to be taken seriously. Af Klint also adopted the Theosophical belief that there were transcendental High Masters, who weren’t unlike angels or gods. She practiced seances with a five-women artist collective called De Fem and channeled the High Masters to seek artistic inspiration.
Af Klint seemingly found her freedom through ecstatic submission to the High Master Amaliel. “Accept, accept Hilma,” the angel would say to her, per her diaries. And divine power “came through [her], from energies greater than [herself].” Art historian Briony Fer sees Klint’s submission to Amaliel as evidence that she deeply understood herself and what she needed to do to break from naturalism. “[Af Klint is] a female artist who takes possession of herself through the means of her imagination, in a way that enables her to be a very different kind of artist from the one she started out as,”10 Fer writes. Artist Rebecca H. Quaytman agrees. “I believe that af Klint was able... through an elaborate fiction, to get what she wants — a commission to paint something important,”11 she writes.
In Ann Braude’s landmark work Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, she argues that women were allowed to express themselves as mediums in a way they couldn’t as individuals. In a trance, women could do and say things and assume “forms of transgressive agency”12 that they otherwise couldn’t without being punished, Braude argues. Similarly, I think af Klint found it easier to paint with the force of revealed truth when she shared her subject position with a divine commissioner. I also think it allowed her to toy with her ego in a way I find particularly fascinating.
If Freud’s correct and people get self-conscious because the ego “debases and rages against itself,”13 then af Klint seemingly created a religious ritual to temporarily dissolve the ego. Her descriptions of her seances are similar to how psychedelics users would describe ego death decades later. “I feel freed and raised up above my limited consciousness,” she wrote in her diaries. “In order to achieve such as state, it is necessary to achieve stillness; in both thought and feeling.” She believed in a world-force of love called “wu,” and argued that her religious revelations rendered social and gendered hierarchies illusory. “Many a female costume conceals a man. Many a male costume conceals a woman,” she wrote, in language that now seems decades ahead of its time.
Volunteers from a 2016 John Hopkins psilocybin trial for cancer patients used similar language to describe their mushroom trips. “I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist,” one volunteer said. A philosophy professor spoke of having a “cosmic vision of the triumph of love.” John Hayes, a psychotherapist, emerged from his psilocybin experience with his “sense of the concrete destabilized,” replaced by a conviction “that there’s a reality beneath the reality of ordinary perceptions. It informed my cosmology—that there is a world beyond this one,”14 he said.
I think af Klint, Hayes, and others weakened their well-meaning, reflexively defensive egos and found similar ways to reconcile themselves to difficult truths. They knew, subliminally, that the material world was a capitalist dream state. But weakening their egos’ defensive holds allowed them to move beyond that, and into considering new ways of being.
A personal detour: the last time I did mushrooms, I felt enraptured in a web of love. It was knitted so tightly that I knew I couldn’t fall through. “We all love each other so much, but our egos get in the way,” I thought to myself.
It was February 2021 and I’d just been laid off from a job where I wrote user guides for Facebook’s targeted advertising system. It was the only living-wage work I could find during the pandemic. But it filled me with deep trepidation, nonetheless. I’d read about Cambridge Analytica, and I knew that Facebook would let bad-faith actors use my guides to monetize the process of collapsing democracies.
My ambient thoughts went something like this: much like Frankenstein’s monster, social media algorithms are incarnations of their creators’ darkest desires. They divide and atomize us because happy people don’t buy things. Because capitalism profits from weaponizing our egos against ourselves and each other, social media algorithms inject ambivalence, self-consciousness, and doubt into our relationships with an efficiency that ad executives could once only dream of. Now, capitalists’ machine-learning algorithms absorb our attempts to resist even as we foment them.
I don’t know how these algorithms are going to change us. And I don’t think anyone else really does, either. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshanna Zuboff compares the futility of trying to predict the future as being similar to her unwillingness to accept her house was burning down. “Unable to distinguish the unprecedented, all I could do was close doors to rooms that would no longer exist and seek safety on a porch that was fated to vanish,”15 she writes.
The robot knows not what it does, but it does it to us all the same. Hilma af Klint is the closest thing I’ve found to a model for how to deal with it. She was born around a decade before the lightbulb was invented, and she died about a decade before the first satellite was launched. When world-altering technologies sparked two world wars, she doubled down on creating a “highly idiosyncratic, self-generating”16 language to keep her soul and sense of self intact. When her ego got in the way, she created a religious ritual to weaken it. And when she struggled to communicate what she’d learned, she went back to nature to learn a universal visual language so everyone could understand her.
It doesn’t surprise me that people burst into tears on seeing Hilma af Klint’s work. I think it speaks so powerfully to people because it radiates a conviction that feels foreign in our highly-surveilled era. Her paintings are unlike anything that came before them. They anticipated much of what would come after. Her motifs play with “the old idea of geometry as the key to the secrets of the universe, that opens on to the cosmic order”17 by using a naturalist abstract language to invite us to consider new ways of being. I suspect that if I were to take mushrooms before seeing her exhibit, I’d feel love radiating from every painting. The temporal distance would collapse through the medium she knew would last centuries after her death.
“I am able to describe the path of the soul from the beginning of its life to its end,” she wrote near the end of her life. I hope that I can one day approach my death with the same conviction.
Dyrschka, Halina, director. Hilma Af Klint: Beyond the Visible. Zeitgeist Films, Zeitgeist Films, 2019, zeitgeistfilms.com/film/beyondthevisiblehilmaafklint.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Klint, Hilma af, et al. Hilma Af Klint Artist, Researcher, Medium. Hatje Cantz, 2020.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019.
Worringer, Wilhelm, et al. Abstraction and Empathy. Victoria Miro Gallery, 1989.
Klint, Hilma af, et al. Hilma Af Klint: a Pioneer of Abstraction. Hatje Cantz, 2013.
Ibid.
Almqvist, Kurt, and Louise Belfrage. Hilma Af Klint: Seeing Is Believing. Koenig Books; Axel and Margaret Axson Johnson Foundation, 2017.
Klint, Hilma af, et al. Hilma Af Klint: Notes and Methods. Christine Burgin, 2018.
Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Beacon Press, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. Merck, Sharp & Dohme, 1972.
Pollan, Michael. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Penguin Books, 2019.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019.
Almqvist, Kurt, and Louise Belfrage. Hilma Af Klint: Seeing Is Believing. Koenig Books; Axel and Margaret Axson Johnson Foundation, 2017.
Ibid.