Hilma af Klint: Visualizing the Spirit World
By: Jason Forrest
Tags: Contemporary Art, Spirituality, Painting, Data Visualization, Art

The art world has been knocked off its feet by Hilma af Klint. Shaken by a completely unknown woman artist who, 69 years after her death, challenges the historic timeline and authorship of abstract painting. af Klint’s work is bright, bold, often monumental in scale, and decidedly non-representative in nature. Her paintings flatten 2-dimensional space in a way that pre-dates Wassily Kandinsky and the modernists by a few years that has initiated a debate about who invented abstract painting.

Hilma af Klint in her studio in 1895

It gets even more interesting —shortly after graduating with honors from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Sweeden, Hilma af Klint rejected her formal training in favor of Spiritualism and joined Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society in 1889. There she met four other like-minded women and founded “The Five” in 1896. The group held spiritual séances, regularly communicating with spirits, taking detailed notes and practiced automatic drawing.

Then in 1904, after eight years of esoteric training with “The Five”, Hilma af Klint was instructed by the spirit world to carry out a major assignment: a series of works called the “Paintings for the Temple.” This ambitious vision from beyond was to be a series of paintings installed in a specially designed spiral temple that would facilitate spiritual meditation on the transcendent reality beyond the physical world. This astral plane commission would occupy af Klint for the next nine years.

Hilma af Klint, “The Ten Largest, №4, Youth”, 1907

For the rest of her life, af Klint’s metaphysical research would continue, often extending into semi-scientific visual research, but she never truly exhibited or shared her work with the world. She led a quiet life, largely spent inwardly focused on her mediumistic artwork. When she died in 1944, she left a huge archive of 1,300 paintings and 125 notebooks to her nephew Erik af Klint, a naval officer. She left a note that explicitly stated that her work could not be exhibited until 20 years after her death and that the collection could never be split up.

Now, 74 years after her death, the Guggenheim Museum hosts “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” now on view in NYC until April 23rd, 2019. The first major exhibition of her work in the United States, it’s being hailed as one of the most globally important exhibitions of the decade with preeminent critics lining up to heap praise on af Klint’s fascinating story and newfound place in art history.

Hilma af Klint “Evolution, №15, Group IV, The Seven-pointed Stars”, 1908

Abstraction vs Visualization

My interest in af Klint’s work is to explore her relation to scientific visualization. Many voices in the art world are claiming that af Klint’s works represent the “first” abstract paintings, but I think they are jumping to the wrong conclusion. I think her motivation was actually to visualize spiritual concepts. They see this as presaging abstract expressionism when really it’s part of a movement toward diagramming the immaterial world. The two concepts are very different.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Composition IV”, 1911 link

Abstraction in the visual arts is the practice of focusing on the elements of the work of art itself. We see this in Kandinsky’s focus on color and line as a means to themselves, Mondrian’s gridded compositions, Picasso’s fracturing of the picture plane, and Pollack’s dripping paint. The elements that comprise a painting are the focus of the work, aesthetics the outcome. In 1911, Kandinsky himself refers to the work “Composition IV” as “The relation of the light, delicate and cold to the sharp movement (war) makes the main contrast in the picture.”

Of course, abstraction (or formalism) isn't meaningless either. We know each of the artists above folded additional layers of meaning into their work: Kandinsky’s synesthetic conversion of music, Mondrian’s graphic analogies to the city, Picasso’s inspiration from the invention of the X-ray and Pollack’s interest in the mandala.

Visualization, on the other hand, is entirely different.

The 19th-century was filled with invention. Not only was the term visualization invented in 1883, but various types of visualization shaped how the sciences were presented to the world. Mendeleev’s invention of the periodic table in 1869 was represented in the form of a chart. Tales of mechanical innovation were initially spread by illustration, then by black and white photographs.

A Russian periodic table based on Dmitri Mendeleev’s original, 1869

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term ‘visualization’ as “depicting the formation of mental images of things not actually present in sight.” In Orit Halpern’s great book “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” he elaborates:

“Visualization slowly mutated from the description of human psychological processes to the larger terrain of rendering practices by machines, scientific instrumentation, and numeric measures. Most important, visualization came to define bringing that which is not already present into sight… Visualizations are about making the inhuman, that which is beyond or outside sensory recognition, relatable to the human being.”

Scientific illustration and Theosophical Visualization

Seeing as the Theosophical Society was an organization formed to advance the “study and elucidation of Occultism” and “encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science.” It only makes sense that the Spiritualists would incorporate the language of scientific visualization when transcribing the astral plane. Curator Iris Müller-Westermann explains: “You have to understand this was the age when natural sciences went beyond the visible: Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves [in 1886], Wilhelm Röntgen invented the x-ray [in 1895].”

The Line of Grace from “The Principles of Light and Color” link

One of the best examples of this study can be found in Edwin D. Babbitt, whose 1878 book “The Principles of Light and Color: The Harmonic Laws Of The Universe, The Etherio-Atomic Philosophy Of Force, Chromo Chemistry, Chromo Therapeutics, And The General Philosophy Of The Fine Forces, Together With Numerous Discoveries And Practical Applications.” With a title like that, it’s no wonder Klint was a fan.

“Unity” from “The Principles of Light and Color” link

Babbitt’s first chapter “Harmonic Laws of the Universe”, is essentially a spiritualist translation of scientific theory that spans biology, physics, sociology, and architecture. Each discipline is described using largely artistic terms such as light, shade, and hue and contextualized with similar looking examples. “Unity” is seen in the forms of snowflakes, microsomes, and geometric diagrams. “Gradiation or Progression” “may be seen in the forms of many grasses, leaves, flowers, shells, streams, etc. is called the line of grace, named also by Hogarth, and is a spiral. It is seen in the climbing of vines as they encircle a tree, in many seashells.”

Snowflakes photographed by Wilson Bentley (1902) link

The Theosophical exploration of scientific illustration quickly became entangled with astral visualization. The first photographs of snowflakes became indirect evidence of sublime symmetry. The diagrammed veins of a leaf used to underscore the profundity of divine computation.

af Klint was born into an educated home; her father was a military officer, her two brothers were scientists and she held a life-long interest in Botany. “The Harmonic Laws of the Universe” clearly had an important influence on af Klint, its changing focus from macro to micro evident in many of Klint’s paintings. We see a botanical line in af Klint’s paintings that represent “a parallel world with unities within unities.” Flowers become dimensions become cells become natural forces at play on human consciousness.