Hilma af Klint

Across the spring and summer seasons of 1919 and 1920, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint engaged in a period of intense observation of nature, venturing into forests and fields and drawing the flowers she found there. The resulting 46 sheets comprise her Nature Studies portfolio, recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In pencil and jewel-toned watercolor, af Klint juxtaposed exquisitely rendered blossoms with enigmatic diagrams: a blooming sunflower is echoed by nested circles; lily of the valley is joined by a colorful checkerboard; catsfoot is set against a pair of mirrored spirals. Together, these two modes—representational and abstract—demonstrate the artist’s belief that close observation of nature reveals "what stands behind the flowers": ineffable aspects of the human character.
Published in conjunction with the first public exhibition of this rare portfolio, Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers presents the drawings alongside contextualizing artworks and translations of the artist’s previously unpublished writings. An overview essay by curator Jodi Hauptman explores af Klint’s portfolio and the circumstances of its creation; texts by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Laura Neufeld and Lena Struwe unpack the imagery, materiality and botanical knowledge behind these works.
Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) trained at Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and established herself as a professional artist. In the first decade of the 20th century, she developed a unique abstract vocabulary, some years earlier than her peers. Whether on canvas or on paper, her singular work is informed by her spiritual investigations and, as this project demonstrates, an interest in and attunement to the natural world.

Hilma af Klint’s Nature Studies portfolio (1919–20), rooted in the artist’s close observation of flowering plants and her extensive botanical knowledge, aims to connect the material and spiritual realms. The 46 sheets of this pivotal work present more than 100 flowering plants rendered in exquisite detail, evocatively reflecting what the artist saw in the field and what she knew of their morphology, from the shape of a blossom to the arc of a leaf. Juxtaposed with each is a multicolored diagram, drawn from her own abstract language, which visualizes aspects of the human character. Af Klint imagined her portfolio as an atlas—or in botanical terms, a flora—that details the plants of Sweden, where she lived and worked. Hers, however, is a flora of the spirit, a mapping of the natural world in spiritual terms.
This deluxe facsimile of af Klint’s rarely seen portfolio is published in a limited edition of 500. Each of the 46 drawings is presented on its own sheet at full scale, and the collection is enclosed in a luxe clamshell case. A booklet with a contextualizing essay by curator Jodi Hauptman examines af Klint’s engagement with the natural world.

For decades a relatively unknown artist, Hilma af Klint has posthumously claimed her rightful place in art history recently but dramatically: her 2019 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half a million visitors. In 2013, curator Iris Muller-Westermann organized the first retrospective exhibition of af Klint’s work. Now she presents us with an extensive survey show, curated with Milena Høgsberg, at the Moderna Museet in Malmö, which this volume accompanies, supplementing reproductions with the latest information and research on af Klint.

Hilma af Klint: Artist, Researcher, Medium investigates, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by art historians, a quantum physicist, a spiritual teacher and an historian of theosophy and esotericism, among others, provide insights into a world beyond the visible which fascinates us now even more than ever.

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish painter whose simultaneous fascination with art and spiritism led her to produce one of the most astonishing oeuvres in modern art history. Her conventional landscape paintings and botanical illustrations served as her main source of income, but her true lifelong passion lay in the art she created as a result of otherworldly communication. Af Klint’s private works not only demonstrate perhaps the first example of true abstraction in Western painting; they also convey a complex, deeply felt system of spirituality that guided af Klint throughout her life and career.

When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice—one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colorful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalizing world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.

Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art—a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, the site of the exhibition.

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.

Tracey Bashkoff is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Bashkoff joined the Guggenheim in 1993 and has contributed to over 15 special exhibitions covering a range of 20th-century subjects. She completed her graduate studies at Northwestern University where she received a Mellon Fellowship in Art Objects. In 2014, she was a fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her postdoctorate project funded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, brings together medieval art and the modern avant-garde, focusing on the reception of and the construction of medieval art in modernity, specifically in Surrealism.

Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. He has a doctorate in philosophy from Stockholm University. He was the Co-Curator of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Birnbaum has held the position of Rector at the Städelschule Fine Arts Academy at Frankfurt at Maim in Germany and has also actively written for Art Forum.

Briony Fer is Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Gabriel Orozco: Thinking in Circles, Eva Hesse Studiowork, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, and On Abstract Art. She has written extensively on 20th- century and contemporary art. Fer has also curated numerous exhibitions, such as the recent show of Gabriel Orozco at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013.

Vivien Greene has been a Guggenheim curator since 1993 and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century European art with concentrations in Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. She most recently organized the exhibitions Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (2014) and The Avant-Gardes of Fin-de-Siècle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon, and Their Contemporaries (2013). She has a Ph.D. in art history, with a focus on 19th-century European art.

David Max Horowitz is Curatorial Assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Andrea Kollnitz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She wrote her doctoral thesis on German and Austrian Modernism in Swedish Art Criticism.

This volume reproduces the last abstract images series made by af Klint in the 1920s, which have never before been published in their entirety.

These images are complemented by essays based on lectures delivered during the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2016. Briony Fer, David Lomas, Branden Joseph, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum shed new light on af Klint and her importance for artists today, also addressing the need for a broader conception of art history that her work proposes.

Hilma af Klint graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887, established a studio in the city, and began creating and exhibiting traditional landscapes, botanical drawings and portraits. Privately, however, af Klint was already beginning to discard what she had learned at the Academy in favor of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult.

As early as 1906, af Klint was working with abstract imagery--giving her a lead of several years in the modernist race to be the first to discover abstraction. She joined a group of four other female artists, “The Five,” which held séances and experimented with automatic writing and drawing--decades before the Surrealists would do something similar.

In 1905, af Klint received a “commission” from the mysterious entity Amaliel to create her most important body of work: The Paintings for the Temple. Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen focuses on this important series, consisting of 193 predominately abstract paintings in various series and subgroups. Claiming to act as merely a medium for spiritual forces guiding her hand, af Klint painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds; good and evil; man and woman; religion and science.

Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.