Hilma af Klint's Celestial Abstractions of "Childhood."

By Elle Borissow

Diagrammatic; organic; botanical; and spiritual. The “self-generating occult symbol-system” Swedish Artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) produced speaks across her body of work as though through a prism of abstract tongues. Heralding the future, whilst murmuring in deep connection with her Swedish ancestry, af Klint’s imaginative fascination with the Universe’s spiritual and cellular origins are epitomised in her depictions of ‘childhood’ as the first evolutionary stage of The Ten Largest Series (1907). Creating and glossing symbols, her imagery is transcendent of temporal boundaries. Embedded with a pictorial language to describe youth’s ephemeral glow, her abstracted imagery draws from botany, inclusive of fungal spores, flora, fauna, and seedpods; scientific empiricism and embryology; the realm of philosophy and theology; and the Dalarna Swedish folk-art tradition, to produce a uniquely complex iconographic lexicon.

Figure 1: Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood, Group IV, approx. 328 x 240cm, egg tempura on architect’s paper, 1907.

Populated by fallopian-esque flower rosaries, floral eggs, and swathes of orange script Childhood No. 1 (fig. 1) visualises in its layered subject a moment of ‘conception’ within The Ten Largest series - both in cellular subject, and its introductory position as the first painting of the series. Esoteric in its complexly coded abstractions, it has been well documented since the artist’s posthumous entry to the art-scene that these compositions were strongly influenced by the Helene P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy, complemented by the deeply pervasive currents of Spiritualism at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout the series we can note a balanced use of reciprocal yellow and blue, which relate to Spiritualist assertions of gender’s duality, male being yellow and female being blue. These colours were believed to correspond antithetically, as was the inversion of sex in the real/astral world. In No. 1 the pink rose adorned egg forms also reference her involvement with Rosicrucianism, whilst signifying the significance of spiritualism in theosophy through the use of “peach blossom,” or pink. Yet, these intellectual facets to af Klint’s abstractions were nuanced vitally by additional and perhaps lesser known factors, with contemporary atom science, emergent DNA revelations, Darwinian evolution, and embryonic microbiology also informing her symbolic lexicon. In No. 1 at the centre of the composition, af Klint visualises what we might deem the moment a blastocyst is fused. The two, conjoined, integrated, and poised to divide hover amidst the swathes of blue tempura beneath egg-halos. Holding the potential for all human and mammal life, it is befitting of her depiction of life’s origins in this moment, imagining the universe’s symbolic ‘childhood’ phase. The central conjoined form, encased within a protective orb or egg cell is also inscribed ‘a’ / ‘v’ [trans. asket/ vestel], which refers to the self-defined masculine gender of the artist’s spirit (asket) and her reciprocal counterpart Anna Cassel’s feminine counterpart (vestel), Anna being Hilma’s lifelong lover and friend.

Figure 2: Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest, No. 2, Childhood, Group IV, approx..328 x 240cm, egg tempura on architect’s paper, 1907.

Following No. 1’s pictorial site of symbolic fertilisation and interrelated evolutionary themes, af Klint’s visual lexicon in Childhood No. 2 (fig. 2) draws in additional layered symbols of springtime, cultural crafts, and botanical abundance from Swedish folk traditions. St. Lucia Day (the Swedish Festival of Light) has an association with the kurbits, which in Dalarna folk art is an imaginary flowering gourd synonymous with fertility and rebirth. Af Klint’s visual citation of the kurbits radiates from these bouncy pastel florals, which also evoke qualities of Gagnefsdräkten embroidery, the local traditional costume created by seamstresses in the Gagnef community. In No. 1 and No. 2, a multitude of floral/ ovum shapes waft and blossom successively from one another in reference to this Springtime celebration. By honouring the craft-tradition in her Gagnef inspired floral forms, af Klint can be said to be “embedding the anonymous artistry of generations of Swedish women designing and colouring their lives,” in her images, layering a depiction of “women’s invisible working lives” into her new aesthetic language for painting. Her subjects centre primarily on depicting that which is beyond the visible, which is fitting of her cultural influences too.

In essence, af Klint’s mission to “develop an elaborate diagrammatic language” and create a spiritually animated codification of each earthly being’s “energetic and emotional signature” – be they flower, moss, lichen, human or animal is encoded in these two works, and can be more broadly exptrapolated across the series. Childhood as a stage, therefore, symbolises a shared moment of universal infancy; the cellular origins of nature in symbiotic harmony, evolving and unfurling alongside one another – expressing the artist’s interest in that which exists beyond the superficial visibility of our naked-eye, and torpedoing from micro to macrocosm across her serialisation of The Ten Largest paradisaic canvases.

Bibliography:

Bashkoff, Tracey. “Temples for Paintings.” In Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Future. Edited by Tracey Bashkoff. Guggenheim Foundation, 2018.

Birnbaum, Daniel., and Emma Enderby. “Painting the Unseen.” In Hilma af Klint, Painting the Unseen. Edited by Julia Peyton-Jones, and Hans Ulrich Obrist.  Serpentine Galleries: Koenig Books, 2016.

Burgin, Christine, ed. Hilma af Klint, Notes and Methods. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Fer, Briony. “A Vegetal Universe.” In Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life. Edited by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Briony Fer and Laura Stamps. Tate Publishing, 2023.

Verbeek, Caro. “An Eye for Pink: On Recurrent Colour in the Work of Piet Mondrian and Hilma af Klint.” In Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life. Edited by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Briony Fer and Laura Stamps. Tate Publishing, 2023.

Voss, Julia. Hilma af Klint, A Biography. University of Chicago Press, 2022.