Images of the Life That Exists Beyond Everything

Priya Gandhi explores Hilma af Klint’s studies of nature.

By Priya GandhiAugust 4, 2025

• Art & Architecture

I have shown that there is a connection between the plant world and the world of the soul.
—Hilma af Klint

THE LAST 20 YEARS have witnessed increasing momentum in the art world for highlighting work by artists from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups, principally women and people of color, in order to reimagine art’s past and present. Consider, for example, the establishment of the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007; the growing acceptance of craft, a historically feminized tradition, as a fine art genre; or the embrace of socially engaged and community-based art by some of the leading art institutions in the world, such as the New York City Museum of Modern Art’s 2010 presentation of Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement, an exhibition of architectural projects on five continents responding to the needs of underserved communities. It’s no exaggeration to say that the very conception of what constitutes “art”—and its histories—has changed drastically in recent decades.

This unearthing of neglected histories has canonized few, if any, artists as quickly and thoroughly as Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, who in the early 20th century was creating abstract compositions before Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Malevich. Currently the subject of the exhibition What Stands Behind the Flowers at MoMA, af Klint was largely unknown in the United States until her Guggenheim retrospective, Paintings for the Future, in 2018–19. Before that, the best chance an American viewer had of encountering her work would have been in the survey The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986–87, or The Secret Pictures by Hilma af Klint, a brief exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 1989. A growing interest in af Klint in Europe beginning in the 1990s—particularly in Sweden—led to a sequence of significant museum presentations this century. Paintings for the Future, the first major solo exhibition of her work in the United States, attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-visited show the Guggenheim has ever presented, pushing af Klint into the spotlight 74 years after her death.

In 1862, af Klint was born into an affluent family in Solna, Sweden, a municipality just northwest of Stockholm’s city center. She became deeply involved with 19th-century Spiritualist movements. A follower of such occult belief systems as Rosicrucianism, Helena Blavatsky’s theosophy, and anthroposophy, she began attending séances in Stockholm at 17. At these séances, led and attended mostly by women, the voices of spirits would speak through the participants, issuing messages regarding the state of the world and its future. In 1896, af Klint established De Fem (The Five), a group consisting of close friends that would hold séances and meditations regularly between 1896 and 1908, channeling messages from a group of spirits they called the “High Masters.” In hallucinatory states, they would use automatic writing and drawing to record these messages.

In one such séance in 1906, a High Master spirit named Amaliel commissioned af Klint to take on a larger project, which became The Paintings for the Temple, a series of 193 works that would occupy her for the next 10 years. In swirling colorful patterns and bold shapes, these grand geometric compositions developed an individual visual language to express spiritual knowledge. The Paintings for the Temple mapped stages of life, from birth through old age. Af Klint’s visual language often combined abstract forms with more recognizable natural ones: for example, in Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood (1907), curved abstract forms are positioned against a pale purple background as three yellow almond shapes overlap each other like petals of a flower. Concentric lines give the yellow petals dimensions, and a red curving line with more almond shapes, like buds of a flower, creeps up the left side of the painting. Bubbles of swirling pink, white, yellow, and blue circles surround the central yellow figure. A pink bubble contains a white swirl that looks like a snail’s shell. In her notebooks, af Klint marked the meanings of these recurring forms drawn from the natural world: spirals that represent evolution, almond shapes that stand for development toward unity. Af Klint said that these large canvases “were painted directly through [her], without any preliminary drawings and with great force.” She intended them to be shown in a spiral temple, something the Guggenheim’s presentation was able to bring to life. She attempted to portray what she called “images of the life that exists beyond everything.”

By 1917, af Klint was exhausted by the spirits that worked through her and the fervent nature of the project she had completed for them. She stopped producing art for a higher power and looked toward the natural world for answers. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, she had worked as a scientific illustrator, commissioned to draw fungus specimens and illustrate a textbook on equine surgery. Drawing on these experiences, af Klint turned her head from the heavens to the earth. With botanical watercolors, diagrams, and exacting studies of the atom, What Stands Behind the Flowers focuses on these lesser-known years in af Klint’s practice, from 1917 to 1922. Though still deeply informed by her Spiritualist beliefs, these works chart the artist’s movement away from the large-scale, spiritual heights of Paintings for the Temple and toward a close study of nature.

The Atom Series, 22 works on paper created in 1917, was af Klint’s first step in this direction. In the series, she utilized scientific charts and tables to dissect not only the physical attributes of the atom but also its human qualities, including inscriptions about the atom’s character throughout. No. 2, for example, comprises two watercolor squares, each divided into four quadrants variously shaded with black, pale purple, gray, and pale green, and containing intricately drawn geometric designs. An inscription in the top corner reads, “Every atom has its own center but each center is linked directly to the center of the universe.” In No. 7, the four-paneled squares each hold a circle in their center; one is half full, the other three-fourths full. The inscription reads, “The atom is simultaneously limited and capable of development. When the atom expands on the etheric plane, a spark arises in the physical part of the earthly atom.” Across the series, inscriptions note the differences in atomic character between the etheric plane (the first plane of consciousness in theosophic thought) and the physical plane. Such intertwining of science and spirit, locating the soul in the atom, was characteristic of af Klint. “The atom finds within itself Truth and Justice,” an inscription in in No. 18 reads.

For af Klint, even the smallest thing existing in nature reflected a spirit, something bigger than matter. The visible and the invisible were interconnected—a notion not entirely at odds with scientific developments of the early 20th century. From J. J. Thomson’s 1897 discovery of electrons to Niels Bohr’s 1913 theory of the structure of the atom, bounds of progress were being made in the understanding of subatomic particles and the composition of matter. Marie and Pierre Curie were awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize, along with Henri Becquerel, for their work in radioactivity, and Albert Einstein introduced general relativity in 1915. In 1908, af Klint was introduced to Rudolf Steiner at one of his lectures on Rosicrucian teachings. In Steiner, af Klint found a bridge between the natural, observable world and the ineffable spirit. Steiner developed the system of anthroposophy, a movement founded out of theosophy, focusing on the individual’s spiritual journey instead of the following of spiritual guides. The soul was to be found in the plant world’s blossoms, and nature played an integral role as a gateway into understanding the manifestations of a higher spirit. For af Klint, the atomic and the cosmic existed within each other: from the atom to the plant to the human to the stars, everything in existence could be understood through diagrams of spirit.

In Nature Studies, a 46-sheet portfolio created in 1919 and 1920, blooming botanical drawings are juxtaposed with the meticulous lines of colorful abstract diagrams. Each plant specimen was observed on the Swedish island of Munsö, west of Stockholm, where af Klint lived during this period. Each accompanying diagram, which she called “riktlinier,” the Swedish word for “guideline,” distills a spiritual condition—a human feeling or character descriptor—that can be used to describe the botanical entity. Using af Klint’s 1919–20 notebook Blumen, Mosse, und Flechten (“Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens”) as a decoder for these symbols, MoMA’s presentation thoughtfully includes a key with each of the portfolio sheets, explaining the characteristic or behavior indicated by the included symbol. Through these symbols, each plant is supplied with a spirit. The riktlinier are striking—geometric shapes and swirling curves in various colors, reminiscent of af Klint’s earlier abstract works but taking the form of meticulously drawn, small-scale codes. Sheet 6, a diagram of a blackthorn, is accompanied by a light-pink circle within a square, representing “the immutability of the law” and “the inexhaustibility of the gospel.” In Sheet 22, a common linden is juxtaposed with a rainbow of stacked circles in various states of shading, representing “power distribution” and “power transmission.” In Sheet 26, a pot marigold is tied to the symbols for “overcoming your hostility to God in the personality” and “love of truth in material terms,” expressed by two halves of a star meeting in the center of a square, with each side of the square shaded differently. These botanical drawings provide a map of the ungraspable, connecting the elusive realm of spirit and human feeling to the observable, literal, grounded realm of botany. In af Klint’s words: “Studying nature uncovers truths about the human condition.”

Af Klint continued her exploration of flora through the 1922 series On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees. In it, af Klint utilizes a much less exacting technique of wet-on-wet watercolor. In these abstract, fluid paintings, flowers, once drawn with meticulous detail, are now vibrant, fuzzy circles. In Birch, a red circle holds a smaller purple circle, and inside the purple shines a dash of yellow. Throughout the series, the flowers and trees depicted with concentric circles remind one of the atom study, expressions of the interrelation of shared characteristics between the material, the human, and the spiritual.

In 1932, af Klint tagged her notebooks written after 1905 with the symbol “+ x”. On the first page of another notebook, she wrote “+ x,” followed by its meaning: “All works which are to be opened twenty years after my death bear the above sign.” Af Klint believed her work was of deep value and contained spiritual truth but recognized that the people of her time would not be ready to face it. Her works survived in the Stockholm attic of her nephew Erik, who, in 1966, brought the boxes down and cataloged their contents. The Swedish anthroposophists agreed to store the works, and it was not until LACMA’s 1986 exhibition on spirituality in art that her work was publicly displayed.

Af Klint was not exactly lost in history or completely unknown to the world. She showed some of her conventional paintings in Stockholm in her lifetime and some of her abstract ones in Spiritualist salons. Still, the circumstances of her neglect have much to do with her being a woman at a time when women were functionally barred from the possibility of artistic achievement. Her visual language is inextricable from her message, that life is an untethered, ever-changing energy that pulsates around us and, more importantly, with us, from the earth we stand on to the atoms we are made of. Through the physical, we can reach the spiritual. Her works are a search for truth in flowers, in the heavens, and on earth, a search for eternal human meaning in a vast universe.

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Featured image: Hilma af Klint. Tilia × europaea (Common Linden). Sheet 22 from the portfolio Nature Studies, July 29, 1919. Watercolor, pencil, ink, and metallic paint on paper, 19 5/8 × 10 5/8 in. (49.9 × 27 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Drawings and Prints Fund and gift of Jack Shear, 2022. Courtesy of MoMa.