Hilma af Klint: Exploring the Spiritual Connection Through Nature Studies
My first encounter with the art of Hilma af Klint was an accidental one. Five years before the 2018–19 Guggenheim Museum show that made her an art world sensation, in one of the weirdest museum pairings I can remember, an af Klint survey was concurrent with a Martin Kippenberger retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Wandering from one show to the other felt like moving between two worlds, the known and unknown — literally, because af Klint was then still unknown to me and many others, and symbolically, as museum-goers traversed the threshold from Kippenberger’s postmodern performativity to af Klint’s towering esoteric abstracts.
Since then, af Klint has become a cult figure for her radiant non-figurative paintings created in the service of her spiritualism and for the revelation that a woman was pioneering abstract art before the canonical (male) modernists.
What Stands Behind the Flowers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is strictly af Klint’s art, but it reminded me of the Hamburger Bahnhof experience in the way that it moves between the mundane and the ethereal. The show is centered on her Nature Studies, a portfolio of 46 botanical drawings dating from 1919 to 1920, which MoMA acquired in 2022. Before she began her celebrated spiritualist paintings in 1906, the artist studied botanical drawings in school and then worked as an illustrator. Some of these early pieces are on view, along with supplementary materials, including af Klint’s notebooks and other plant guides, and a 1922 series of loose, wet-on-wet watercolors that evoke watery reflections of their natural subjects (On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees).
The Nature Studies drawings are unique as a bridge between the other works and other worlds; each pairs a plant or plants with abstract diagrams. In one, a delicate rendering of a marigold hovers in the top two-thirds of the paper, its wide orange bloom a sunburst improbably attached to a spindly thread of a stem. Beneath it is a square divided in half, with a cryptic shape meandering down its center. Almost equally curious is that the bottom third of the paper is completely blank, as if something is missing. In other works, the plants fill the pictorial space, such as a horse chestnut blossom whose leaves surround it like a peacock’s plume. It floats above two symbols: a triangle and a square divided into a pinwheel formation. In others still, for instance, a drawing of a Wych elm, the plant’s composition is almost balletic.
The exhibition’s title comes from the artist’s writings about the relationship, in her words, “between the plant world and the world of the soul.” Her notebooks on view provide keys to the diagrams, which articulate the spiritual characteristics of the botanicals.
Af Klint’s gossamer touch alone elevates the Nature Studies beyond the utilitarian appeal of conventional botanical drawings, but it can’t fully account for the enthusiastic crowds examining the works with MoMA’s magnifying glasses. Her best-known pieces, ostensibly guided by spiritual entities, inspire intrigue with their numinous beauty and backstory. The portfolio drawings seem to exert a similar fascination, enough to make me wonder — to paraphrase the exhibition’s title — what stands behind them.
Walk through a park — or MoMA’s sculpture garden — and you might find some of the Nature Studies plants. From this perspective, they connect af Klint’s spirit realm not only with her earthly one, but with our own lives. They attest to the persistence of nature in the face of climate change, war, and humanity’s increasing disconnection from the Earth. At the same time, they invoke the promise of something greater, a direct line from the material world to the abstract spiritual experience that art is presumed to offer. Whether or not we share af Klint’s belief system, the Nature Studies map a route to a higher plane of being along a tangible path. It may be that they illuminate some semblance of utopianism that’s still available to humankind, a quality as elusive as the world of the soul.
Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through September 27. The exhibition was organized by Jodi Hauptman with Kolleen Ku and Laura Neufeld, and realized with the participation of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm.
