The Brooklyn Rail

Something marvelous happens at the very center of this exhibition. An artist climbs a ladder that she has painstakingly constructed, only to kick that ladder away yet keep rising.

Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) started out as an artist and became something else: investigator, seer, writer, teacher, visionary. She put her artistic training wholly in the service of a cosmotheistic quest for understanding and communication. While still in her teens, she organized séances and later claimed to be in contact with a spirit mentor who directed her work. At her death, she left behind some 1,300 paintings and 26,000 pages of writing. Skeptical of the world’s readiness to accept her teaching, she intended that material from her estate would be shown only to those of a theosophical or anthroposophical persuasion. (That mandate has since been broadly interpreted by the af Klint Foundation as “those seeking spiritual knowledge,” which has made possible exhibitions such as MoMA’s.)

Many of the paintings in this exhibition, the Nature Studies (1919–20), are precise botanical renderings chock-a-block with abstract symbols and explanatory writing. All of this bespeaks a systematizing impulse working toward a description of “everything all at once.” But in a handful of abstract paintings included in the show, the system and its didactic presentation drop away, and af Klint channels an inner experience of nature, resplendent and immediate.

Over the last two decades, Hilma af Klint has been elevated to the status of a pioneer in Western art’s evolution toward abstraction. This exhibition, however, with its title taken from af Klint’s notebooks, makes the convincing case that, for all its trafficking with abstraction and higher powers, her work derives first and foremost from nature study. For what “stands behind the flowers” is ultimately the cosmos itself, and the forms of the natural world, especially plant forms, intensely studied, are her gateway to connections between realms—psychic, emotional, moral, material, atomic, theistic.

Hilma af Klint attended Sweden’s Royal Art Academy as an attentive observer of nature, and the handful of watercolors from her early years display a lovely, impressionistic sense of the outdoors. She exhibited such paintings and continued to sell—let’s call them secular—works even as she set aside more metaphysically oriented series as part of the“ great work,” as she called it. Her botanical illustrations, done with ink and watercolor, display the exactness of Albrecht Dürer and the botanical manuals she studied, but something more profound than precision is going on. Her renderings are first and foremost interpretations, shaped and toned by her developing sense of what these plants mean: what each species communicates to her about the nature of reality.

What is that knowledge? The drawings present at least four levels of representation: the Swedish vernacular name, the Latin name, the image, and an abstract icon or diagram, which she labels “guidelines.” Beyond the visual, in her notebooks she explicates the diagrams in a brief set of terms and sometimes adds more elaborate explanations. For the European mountain ash, a rendering of Japanese delicacy, she adds a guideline that resembles a black and white cross giving off two rays. Her notebook explanation reads: “Longing for balance between sour and sweet. Grouchy resilience toward lack of balance.” Af Klint proceeds by analogy with the plant’s form and behavior to connect it to moral and psychological characteristics and, in other cases, to principles that seem to operate universally to her. Taken together, the guidelines form an intricate symbolic language. Just before she began these nature studies in earnest, af Klint completed a remarkable group of variations on a theme of circles and squares titled the “Atom Series.” In it, she extends her abstract graphic vocabulary to the forces and actions linking the metaphysical and atomic realms.

As compelling as the drawings are—and even more so her gigantic paintings displayed at the Guggenheim in 2018—they carry a whiff of the outsider artist. Hermetic symbols, elaborate and obscure schemes of organization, didactic urgency, and totalizing ambition all bespeak a mind desperately seeking control of its experience. Theosophy itself, which formed her early beliefs, reads like a grab bag of medieval system building, prescientific analogizing, and hypostasizing of the “unseen.” Likewise, it is easy to imagine the corruption of her nature-worship-as-projection into an anti-human ideology because something similar happened in Nazi Germany little over a decade later.

Stepping back from metaphysical extravagance, it is easier to see the larger forces af Klint’s work attempts to reconcile. Like all modern Western artists, she inherited a Kantian awareness of a division between consciousness and the noumenal world, the essential reality independent of human perception. Equally profound was Judeo-Christian theology’s divorce of nature and spirit, a divorce neither Romanticism nor, for that matter, Swedish Lutheranism managed to resolve convincingly. At the same time, scientific discoveries at the subatomic and cosmic levels confirmed a universe of abstract forces not made for human beings or subject to human will. Could any description comprehend an atom, a buttercup, good and evil, and the energy that created the stars? For af Klint and many other followers, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy promised coherence between the known and the unknown. It restored to prominence the knowing, seeking human subject, whose ultimate role was not simply to understand the universe but to complete it.

Yet it is not as a metaphysician, but as an artist, that af Klint truly engages nature. More important than reading nature’s book is expressing its galvanizing reality. This she does in a group of paintings on paper titled “On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees.” She produced them by meditating on the forms of individual plants and making watercolors based solely on her immediate response, a kind of automatic painting. Gone is the categorizing. Gone, too, the tendentious descriptions. Instead: a birch tree is a pulsing red ball; a pansy is a diaphanous wash of yellow and blue; and an oak is a spermlike red cell floating in an ocean of green. Who knows what a birch “means”? Who knows what morality an oak embodies? The first and most compelling fact is that they are there. And she is there. Through the presence of these pictures, she offers us not a final word but a wordless place to begin our own encounters.