Hilma af Klint’s Flora

Hilma af Klint’s Nature Studies portfolio (1919–20) comprises 46 sheets, tall rectangles measuring approximately 19  1/2 by 10  1/2 inches (50 by 27 centimeters). Each sheet presents a drawing or drawings of flowering plants—one, several, or many to a page. Rendered in pencil and jewel-tone watercolor in exquisite and precise detail, they evocatively reflect what af Klint observed in the forests and fields near her home and what she knew of a plant’s morphology and metamorphosis, from the shape of a blossom to the reach of a stem to the arc of a leaf to the crawl of a root. Combining the conventions of a botanical atlas and a herbarium, af Klint identified her 114 subjects, indicated the date she observed each one, and often included visual details that make perceptible the most minute of their features. But what distinguishes these works from botanical art or illustration is that alongside her carefully drawn and vividly colored naturalistic renderings, af Klint composed equally exacting and colorful abstract diagrams. The radiant blossom of a common sunflower (Helianthus annuus; sheet 27) is echoed by nested circles: a central dot, concentric filaments of pencil, a solid red line, and a ring of points. The delicate white flower of a poet’s narcissus (Narcissus poeticus; sheet 34) is crowned by a pinwheel of softened primary hues. A cluster of budding branches is accompanied by “checker-board” boxes of flecks and strokes (sheet 6). Af Klint applied the same rigor to the subjects she imagined as to those she observed. The diagrams’ formal language—squares within squares, triangles, circles, pinwheels, and myriad combinations of these—is meticulously deployed in a palette with heavy doses of roses and purples and sparkly additions of gold and silver metallic paint. Dotted lines, spirals, repeated forms, and arrows put the diagrams into motion, suggesting nature’s force: emerging, evolving, transforming, rotating (figs. 1–3).

What is the relationship between floral abundance so lush in color, so precise in detail that we can practically smell its wafting scents and feel its prickly, sticky, or downy foliage, and geometries that are almost (but not quite) familiar from scientific textbooks, maps, and charts? And why put these distinct approaches to image making—figurative and diagrammatic—together? Side by side, they encourage comparison, a search for consistencies across shape and hue, curve and angle, and spark a yearning to crack what seems to be a secret code. A related notebook offers clues: page by page, af Klint linked each flower and diagram with a human emotion, characteristic, spirit, or state of consciousness.

Figs. 1–3. Hilma af Klint. Diagrams for woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca), horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), and Nottingham catchfly (Silene nutans), details of sheets 9, 12, and 16 from the Nature Studies

The modest size of each sheet and the coincidence of two seemingly divergent modes of image making make these drawings appear worlds apart from the large-scale abstract paintings for which af Klint is best known, but the Nature Studies portfolio is an absolutely central work: it is the pivotal element in a complex project to which the artist devoted considerable time and resources, one that reflected her ambition to take on big ideas, and one that would serve, she hoped, as a way to share those ideas with a broad audience. While she never completed the project, we know from the portfolio and the other extant components—multiple notebooks and extended essays—that af Klint imagined the result of her investigations as a flora, or botanical atlas, detailing the plants of Sweden, where she lived and worked. Af Klint’s version would be, however, a flora of the spirit, a mapping of nature in spiritual terms meant to stand alongside (or even to supersede) any scientific resource. “When we turn our gaze toward the plant kingdom,” she wrote in an introduction to the planned volume, “it gives us information about the composition of our own being.”¹

Af Klint’s project was rooted in close observation of flowering plants, based on her extensive botanical knowledge, and aimed at connecting the material and spiritual realms. In its concatenation of plant drawing, diagram, and spirit, the artist’s unpublished flora conjoins two modes of investigation, two ways of knowing. It may seem that examining the visible world and envisioning a world that cannot be seen are at odds, but together they offer a perspective shaped by interconnectedness, a recognition of the immanence of all living things.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers today.

Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers is on view at MoMA May 11–September 27, 2025.