From 1856 until the 1960s, schoolchildren in Sweden had to pass annual botanical examinations quite literally in the field. Each spring they roamed the meadows and forests to collect 50 to 150 specimens, then pressed, annotated and classified those plants in the tradition of that late great Swedish naturalist, Linnaeus.
Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, was one such child. Long before she brought the art world to its knees in a posthumous 2018 retrospective that proved a female artist had made serious formal abstractions years before Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, af Klint was a schoolgirl in Stockholm, where, according to her report cards, she made only B’s in the natural sciences but an A in “Attention.”
Fifty years passed. After a public career in illustration and a private one in Protestant occultism, she made attention her theme once more in the floral portfolio she turned to in middle age, with breath-held minuteness, in the spring of 1919, while living on the island of Munso with her ailing mother.
The resulting 46 watercolors, never before exhibited, are now on view in the show “What Stands Behind the Flowers” at the Museum of Modern Art, hung with some 50 other af Klints on paper plus a handful of relevant botanical materials under glass. Ebullient, rigorous and boastfully esoteric, these “Nature Studies,” as she called them, reveal the didactic side of a pioneer in nonliteral art. This is an economical show of some beautiful field exercises, and it suggests the spiritual extremes to which the honorable but often tedious tradition of botanical illustration might be taken.
Hepatica, a relative of the buttercup, comes up first in that northern clime. That plant opens her atlas on April 22 — she dated each species in pencil — with coffee-colored smears of earth. She then paints in noodles and hearts of negative space for the stems and leaves. Then she traces those empties with an earthy-wine spectrum of reds, purples and greens. Hepatica has, like poppies and nettle, hairy stems. So within those stems she picks up the dry edge of her brush with shaggy tweaks, to suggest follicles in sunlight. Up top, in a spot illustration of the blossom, she fills in the bright purple petals but dodges with her brush seemingly microscopic whiskers of stamen.
Detail seems to have increased through summer, sometimes seven plants to a sheet, roots and all. The staccato red dreadlocks of a Lombardy poplar in mid-bloom (May 3), the leaves of a Swedish whitebeam that she has wet-lifted with cloth to achieve the right leathery effect (June 16), the kinked stem of a harebell (Aug. 2).
All on awkwardly skinny paper resembling a diner menu. That choice makes sense when you see the herbal collection sheets from a different Swedish schoolchild of af Klint’s generation, which the show’s curator, Jodi Hauptman of the Modern, has displayed for context. They’re the same size. In her midlife project, af Klint returned to the scale of grade school, and she arranged her compositions in the manner of plant pressing. (With the exception of a bird and some bugs, her hope to include animals and minerals in the project went unrealized.)
Her early professional botanicals, also on display, reveal an important difference in technique. In those she outlined the plant parts in ink. This makes her barleys and thistles look instructional in the manner of an illustrated plant guide. (Several guides from af Klint’s day are here.) But the later, more practiced herbals at the heart of this show are largely inkless, sketched in pencil at most. This creates an effect like sun on a living thing. Color and light.
All very nice. But what keeps you looking is the evangelically mystical bottom half of these paintings. At the foot of each specimen af Klint has penciled and colored a small diagram explaining, hence this show’s title, “what stands behind the flowers.” In crisp geometries, line work and touches of metallic paint, the pictograms imagine the spiritual states and the motives that she believes emanate from these vegetal beings. Her corresponding notebook, under glass nearby, explains these diagrams in charmingly factual prose.
To bird vetch, a creeping vine with hanging clusters of purple flowers, she gives a Fibonacci spiral in brown, gray and black, with colored arrows indicating an inward directional flow. Vetch, we learn, boasts a “spiritual initiative that uplifts the organs of our soul and body.” European anemone, on the other hand — a flower she captures in both its limp and its fully opened states — gives “ignorance.” Her symbol for it is a hexagram, the down triangle blue, the up one yellow. And so on for 119 species.
Some very efficient exhibition design makes this secret taxonomy at the very least legible — with translations from her notebook in the wall text and magnifying glasses on hand for your scrutiny of the illustrations. (You will need them.)
Fall paused the flowers. In January her mother died. By spring, 1920, af Klint resumed her atlas with apparent bleakness. The clammy campion, a fuchsia-colored flower with a sticky stem, stands for “one-sidedness.” Purple lousewort: “self-interest.” A sedge: “gluttony.” A few creatures — an ant, a mosquito, a spider — get upside-down crosses in black, decorated by auras of blood red and gray.
However it worked, this particular expression of her moral logic came at a fulcrum. Af Klint had formerly belonged to The Five, a quintet of mediums who held Biblically induced seances in order to transcribe voices from the beyond. In those sessions she scribbled automatically into sketchbooks, which she later transcribed — sometimes collaboratively — in now-famous canvases circa 1906-1908.
In the MoMA show, which is almost a mini retrospective, several small solo af Klints from that period, from her “US Series” (1908), reveal her fixation on the possibility that a numinous reality underpins our visible one. In this context, their shapes seem cordate and herbal, like petals. The same kind of search, though expressed in the harder geometries of quartered squares and Pac-Man-like forms, appears in a wall of her “Atom Series” (1917) interpreting quantum physics.
By her Munso era, she had directed that investigation back toward the visible. Divorced from The Five, she had discovered the Christian occultist Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf Schools, who, in the old spirit of Protestant mystics dating back to Jakob Böhme, championed the private relationship to God’s Word but also pined for the symbolism and mystery of Catholicism.
In her Nature Series you can feel those conflicting desires. For one, she is aggressively obscure. Like a Latin mass, the Star of David yin-yang she gives to the pot marigold hides as much from us as it reveals. But at the same time, her herbals want to interpret God’s work with the simplest, most public of all evidence. They prove she is a microcosmic thinker in the company of Francis Quarles’s poetic “Emblems,” Walt Whitman’s “every atom,” Joni Mitchell’s “We are stardust” — and an abstractionist, like Georgia O’Keeffe, who based her experiments upon strict observation of her emotional response to the seasons.
The odd humility of these paintings makes all the more sense when we consider that this is an artist who had already reached the stratosphere of visual avant-garde. Recall John Cage, who after writing the headiest piece of nonmusic in history devoted himself to the study of mushrooms. Try for yourself: MoMA has planted several of these species out back in its sculpture garden. Better yet, take the train north to Fort Tryon Park, and study untried ones.
At MoMA, a wall of bright and hasty energy paintings from 1922 wraps the show — wet-on-wet watercolors with only vague kinships to their herbal titles: “Oak,” “Pansy,” “Birch.” After her years transcribing tendrils and anthers, they are sloppy and fun, like cannonball dives into the placid surface of a lake. They are also less interesting. But they are edgy in their way, and representative of the proto-New Age paintings she would make under the spell of Steiner’s theories on color and comparative religion (she owned 120 titles by him) until her death in 1944.
These days, galleries are full of the mystical vocabulary that af Klint did much to create: a whole easy-bake coven of painters quoting the Zodiac and Mother Earth in millennial hues that reproduce well onscreen. Like any pioneer, she paid that first tax of rejection. In 1926 she submitted her “Nature Studies” and notebook to Steiner’s headquarters in Switzerland, in the hope of publication. They declined. (MoMA acquired it in 2022.) But a Steiner librarian, writing to her in 1927, did express the consolation that her floral atlas might eventually be “recognized for its value when the time came for it” and someone “would have the means to make the work accessible to the public.” High time.
Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers
Through Sept. 27, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400; moma.org.
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