So who is Hilma af Klint? A Swedish painter from a distinguished naval dynasty, she lived between 1862 and 1944, was highly educated, and enjoyed success with conventional portraits and landscapes. But she also made a huge body of abstract paintings that was almost entirely unknown until recent decades. That obscurity was her choice: disappointed by the reception of her abstractions, af Klint noted in her will that the world was not ready for her work, stipulating it should be hidden away until twenty years after her death. Now, more than seventy years later, af Klint is an international art superstar, whose time has most definitely come. Fortuitously, Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings was secured for Australia by a prescient decision in 2017 by Melbourne curator Sue Cramer – previously at Heide Museum of Art, Melbourne, now independent – to investigate mounting an exhibition here.

Hilma af Klint, Group IV, The ten largest, no 3, youth 1907, tempera on paper mounted on canvas, 321 x 240 cm, courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation HaK104 (photograph via the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden)

And what a splendid show it is: successive rooms present groups of af Klint’s work, from early botanical studies to works from her ten-year collaboration (from 1896) with The Five, a group of women exploring spiritualism through prayers, séances, and automatic drawing, through to later notebooks and intimate watercolours from the last twenty years of her life. The exhibition centres on the innovations of The Paintings for the Temple, hybrid experimental works prompted by spirits that spoke to af Klint and led her to harness a wealth of learning: scientific observation, Theosophy, the ideas of American architect Claude Fayette Bragdon suggesting that architectural form was derived from nature, Buddhism, and, perhaps most importantly, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. Despite being a woman of her times – this mélange of science and spiritualism was one productive symptom of the intellectual and social changes of that turbulent époque – af Klint arrived at a singular and entirely beguiling vision.

The Ten Largest, for example, revel in a gradual progression from childhood to old age that is expressed at first in deeper colours, then in lighter tones; the insistent, delicate colours – pinks, lilacs, yellows – are in tempera, its chalky surface absorbing the light. It helps to know that af Klint designated blue as female and yellow as masculine; that for her pink was the colour of spiritual love, red of sensuous love. We see floral and vegetal forms, and spirals suggesting evolution towards the spiritual plane. (The hermaphroditic snail is honoured here, since it embodies both female and male.) Some of this we intuit, some we can learn, but these esoteric paintings remained something of a mystery even to af Klint herself, who later spent years examining and codifying them. In the end, it is the passionate affirmation of life and energy that really counts here.

Hilma af Klint, Group IX/SUW, The swan, no 1 1914–15, oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation HaK149 (photograph via the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden)

The exhibition is impeccable: the luminous paintings, with their synthetic imageries and fragments of text and diagrams, are supported by excellent texts, including the artist’s diary entries. After the astonishing experience of The Ten Largest, one proceeds to The Swan, another extensive series presenting black and white swans as complementary pairs that eventually suggest harmony, sometimes rendered figuratively but also in radically simplified diagrams of exceptional beauty: The Swan No 17 is as pristine as any 1960s colour-field painting. But Cramer also does justice to later works that are less easily assimilated to established art-historical narratives: her inclusion of forty-two watercolours from af Klint’s last twenty years was particularly perceptive. Small in scale, most of these intimate, flowing, wet-on-wet works have never been shown before; their modesty attests to af Klint’s continuing spiritual and artistic enquiry in old age. (Apparently the spirits asked for larger works, but rheumatism prevented af Klint from complying.)

Af Klint’s story is a kind of contemporary fable. Talented, visionary, and dedicated, she originally appeared to us cloaked in mystery: a radical independent following her own course. (Should we expect a biopic soon, perhaps starring Alicia Vikander?) Af Klint’s paintings were almost unknown until the important exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 in Los Angeles in 1986; the first scholarship on her work, the monograph by Åke Fant (now translated), only appeared in Swedish in 1989; and as Patricia Fullerton’s fabulous memoir (ABR 7 June 2021) reveals, two paintings by af Klint appeared in 1997 in Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination at the National Gallery of Victoria, as part of af Klint’s gradual path to recognition. More recently, the authoritative 2013 retrospective at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the show at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2016, and especially the record-breaking 2018 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with its more than half a million visitors, have made af Klint a contemporary sensation.

 Hilma af Klint, Botanical study 1890s, watercolour and ink on paper, 35.8 x 22.4 cm, courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation HaK1327 (photograph via the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden)

Now we know af Klint was well informed about modern art. She travelled to view art in European museums and was au courant with intellectual and scientific developments in that extraordinary time. We know that the largest paintings were probably inspired by church murals, and wall-sized Swedish interior folk paintings on fabric, and that like many other women, as Cramer points out, af Klint found autonomy, and eventually her own voice, through appealing to mediums. For af Klint’s emergence has stimulated a veritable effervescence of publications – accompanying major exhibitions, a catalogue raisonné in what will eventually be seven volumes, and the authoritative biography by German writer Julia Voss will appear in English in the coming year. The AGNSW’s handsome book, with excellent colour and readable typeface, makes a fine contribution to this expanding body of research, with thoughtful essays by Cramer and Nicholas Chambers from AGNSW, both long-standing scholars of modern abstraction. Voss explores af Klint’s (ultimately fruitless) attempt to effect societal change through her art during her lifetime. Jennifer Higgie contributes an astute account of gender in af Klint’s historical reception, particularly the gendered prejudice against her being a medium. A sparkling essay from Adam Lister of City Gallery Wellington (the exhibition’s New Zealand venue) considers af Klint’s transformative impact on contemporary culture, especially her occult feminism, as an international phenomenon.

Yet after all this, Hilma af Klint’s work remains elusive. Back at the AGNSW, one enters into the strange beauty of these glorious paintings: The Secret Paintings are an ‘ecstatic experience’, as Cramer puts it. Immersive, sensual, this gorgeous installation seems to have arrived, unheralded but complete, with messages from the past. And as very few things now astonish us – or so we think – this exhibition is a particular gift.

Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings is at AGNSW, Sydney until 19 September 2021.

Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings, 2021, edited by Sue Cramer, is published by AGNSW and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi in association with Heide Museum of Modern Art. 256 pages. RRP $45.

This article is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.