What Stands Behind the Flowers

By Hilma af Klint "At the turn of the Twentieth Century, the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before the movement’s male luminaries Kandinsky, Malevich, or Mondrian. More than a mere “pioneer of abstraction in art,” Hilma af Klint focused her rigorous attention on the micro and the macro, the perceptible and invisible worlds of nature and the universe, mobilizing her artistic talent into a unique vocabulary in service of her vision and the dissemination of information. Her intense observation of and spiritual engagement with the flora of her native Sweden, across the spring and summer seasons of 1919 and 1920, is the focal point of What Stands Behind the Flowers—a truly wonderful volume, in content and design—which, together with Notes and Methods from 2018, stands among my favorite books about af Klint’s artistic investigations into invisible relationships and hidd