Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers at MoMA
May 11 – September 27, 2025
Images courtesy of MoMA
In Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers at MoMA, the quiet wonder of drawing becomes a gateway into the metaphysical.
Af Klint’s floral drawings from 1919–1920, newly acquired by MoMA as a gift of Jack Shear, via the Committee on Drawings and Prints Fund, occupy a small, jewel-toned gallery on MoMA’s second floor. Yet their impact is anything but modest: these works tighten the lens on the terrain between representation and revelation, between botanical observation and inner geometry.
Viewed in sequence, she seems to walk us through an intimate botanical atlas — except that the atlas is also a spirit map. A sprig of sedge or marsh marigold will be drawn with botanical delicacy, but alongside it appears a spiral, a mirrored curve, a nested circle. The natural and the symbolic clasp hands. “I have shown,” she once wrote, “that there is a connection between the plant world and the world of the soul.”
At times, these pieces evoke the detailed rigor of nineteenth-century flora; at others, they conjure abstraction’s coded geometry. What’s so surprising is not that an artist of her stature would turn to flowers, but how she treats them — not as final forms to record, but as thresholds of translation. Compositionally, one senses a binary logic — drawing versus diagram, seen versus known — but also a synthesis. A flower held in watery pigment resists flatness; a spiral overlaid with ink challenges illusion.
Jodi Hauptman, MoMA’s Richard Roth Senior Curator of Drawings and Prints, remarks in the catalog that “af Klint’s drawings recognize the interconnectedness of all living things” — not metaphorically, but as a felt topology. This is not a botanical exercise for its own sake, but one in which representation becomes a device for worldview.
Late in life, af Klint’s reputation has converged with modernism’s larger reckoning — with the spiritual turn, the problem of gender, and art’s oscillation between inner life and outward form. Yet here, in this modest portfolio, she does not strike a pose of transcendence so much as uncover a silent architecture of things. The exhibition’s modest scale works in its favor: the gallery setting invites concentration, scrutiny of line weight, and meditation. Her diagrams do not always yield easy answers: they ask the viewer to linger in the perturbations between science and spirit, between what is visible and what is felt.
Nature Studies, as this portfolio is titled, is — as MoMA frames it — a flora of the spirit as well as of the earth. Even if one enters expecting delicate floral studies, one departs thinking of correspondence: petals and arcs, blossoms and circles, the seen and that which lies behind.