https://vimeo.com/296493939

Hilma af Klint, the subject of a high profile exhibition at the Guggenheim, does not fit the usual artist-patron mold. She made her paintings to suit a spirit named Amaliel, with whom she connected in a seance. In his 1920 essay, Creative Confession, Klee wrote, “art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

It was a sentiment Klint shared, but the spiritual message encoded in her work was intended for a future audience. She instructed her nephew that her work was to be kept under wraps until twenty years after her death. (She died in 1944, the same year as Kandinsky and Mondrian, but her work was not publicly shown until 1986Color also helps to unlock the narrative. She used blue and lilac to represent female energy, rose and yellow for male, and green for the unity of the two. The Guardian’sKate Kellaway reports that the artist may have been influenced by Goethe’s 1810Theory of Colours.

Moving on to geometry, overlapping discs also stand for unity. U-shapes reference the spiritual world and spirals denote evolution, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized an exhibition titled The Spiritual in Art.).