Art Review: Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers

Compared with her blockbuster 2018 show, "What Stands Behind the Flowers" is "a different affair"

(Image credit: Vincent West / Reuters)

Over the past dozen years "Hilma af Klint has become a cultural force," said Jay Cheshes in Smithsonian. "Touted as an early feminist, a queer icon, a prophet, a witch—whatever your worldview wishes," the Swedish artist and spiritualist (1862–1944) is foremost known as the forgotten woman who invented modernist abstract painting before the men who were long credited with the innovation. An exhibition of her towering, brilliantly colored paintings toured Europe before their 2018 U.S. debut at New York City's Guggenheim, drawing record crowds at every stop. Af Klint had a skilled hand, said Natalie Haddad in Hyperallergic, and her "gossamer touch" elevates each of the 46 botanical drawings that are appearing in a follow-up exhibition at MoMA. But the artist's technique "can't fully account for the enthusiastic crowds examining the works with MoMA's magnifying glasses," supplied to help reveal every detail of af Klint's renderings.

Compared with the blockbuster 2018 show, "What Stands Behind the Flowers" is "a different affair," said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. It's a show "full of quiet delights, puzzling codes, and a background hum of spiritual intensity that may resonate more with others than it does with me." Af Klint, shortly after World War I, announced that she was tired of being "lectured to" by the spirit guides that had allegedly directed her in the creation of the giant abstractions she's now celebrated for. As she approached 50, she turned to looking for insight into her own soul by seeking its reflection in nature, and from 1919 into 1920, she painted delicate portraits of flowers and other native plants while ascribing to each a particular spiritual state that's noted by the inclusion of a small pictogram or two. "These glyphs must mean something," but af Klint wasn't consistent in her use of this secret language. "Treat these drawings as a code to be cracked and you'll leave the galleries in frustration; savor the randomness and you come closer to the confounding expressiveness of a deeply original artist."

A notebook kept by af Klint translates the pictograms' meaning in "charmingly factual prose," said Walker Mimms in The New York Times. She credits a particular creeping vine with "spiritual initiative that uplifts the organs of our soul and body." She calls sedge a manifestation of gluttony and purple lousewort an avatar of self-interest. These, as well as a few earlier of the artist's works, "reveal her fixation on the possibility that a numinous reality underpins our visible one." This show closes with a wall of energy paintings from 1922, and "they are sloppy and fun, like cannonball dives into the placid surface of a lake." Oddly, "they are also less interesting."