Hilma af Klint’s Telescopic and Prophetic Vision

Editor’s note: this piece was submitted in response to a piece published on Nasty Women Writers in 2023. Cristian Horgos is not a native speaker of English. The piece was edited some but not beyond what was needed to get the author’s point across while retaining his natural voice.

 

“But it would take many more years after her death before the world would fully appreciate the works of Hilma af Klint in their fullness.”

Those are the last words of the visionary essay “Nasty Woman Artist Hilma af Klint: How the World Works” (Nov. 2023), which I suggest you read first.

The similarities I want to emphasize between paintings made by Hilma af Klint before 1915,  and pictures that were made decades later, using modern telescopes, suggest that we are still far away from truly understanding af Klint’s work.

I’m not the right person to say whether Hilma af Klint communicated with the “high spirits” named Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, George and Gregor or if her beautiful “astral planes” were merely a creation of her very own personal extraordinary spiritual power. Either way, the thrilling question remains: how is it possible that Hilma af Klint painted cosmic phenomena and remote galaxies that were not perceptible to the human eye or regular telescopes of her time?

One thing is sure, the symbols of Hilma af Klint are not simply about fun, futuristic design or hypnotic games. They are about the cosmos.

“She was dedicated to receiving from her spirit guides what she believed to be critically important information about how the universe was formed and how it evolved,” is another  quote from the “Nasty Woman Writers ” piece mentioned at the beginning.

In The Guardian article “Hilma af Klint: a painter possessed,” curator Leah Dickerman compares af Klint with Leonardo Da Vinci:

“Hilma is like Leonardo – she wanted to understand who we are as human beings in the cosmos.”

Also, according to the book Hilma af Klint: Occult Painter and Abstract Pioneer, by Fant Åke, Hilma af Klint herself states:

“Above the easel, I saw a powerfully illuminated Jupiter symbol ♃, which appeared for several seconds. Then my work began at once, in such a way that the images were painted directly through me, without any preliminary sketches but with great vigor. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict, yet I worked swiftly and confidently, without altering a single brushstroke”(29).

Obviously, the planet Jupiter symbol puts things in an astronomical light.

And, by searching on the internet for the keywords “Hilma af Klint, cosmic”or “Hilma af Klint, cosmology” you can find multiple articles that are exploring this theme.

“The Ten Largest” similarities with the modern astro-physics

Let’s consider some of the “The Ten Largest”, which were painted, as Hilma af Klint told, in a state of trance.

Firstly, let’s compare an animation of “gravitational waves” https://www.sciencenews.org/article/gravitational-waves-explained and compare it with Klint’s “The Ten Largest no.6”.

Now let’s compare images of “Betelgeuse showing asymmetrical pulsations with corresponding spectral line profiles”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse and look at the third picture, the one with the text “1998/9 UV HST to “The Ten Largest No. 10”.

Quite similar with a fragment of “The Ten Largest No 7” is similar to the merging galaxies NGC 456 and NGC 4568. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_4567_and_NGC_4568 ,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_456_and_NGC_4568

But the biggest object of “The Ten Largest No 7” is a reflection in the supernova picture posted at the address https://www.ibtimes.co.in/universe-could-already-be-dying-no-chance-recovery-false-vacuum-theory-780747

The Ten Largest No 6 versus pictures returned by searching based on “two black holes collide”:
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-black-holes-collide-puzzling-flash/
and
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Visualization-of-the-grazing-collision-of-two-black-holes-computed-by-the-Cactus-code_fig3_220781532

Hilma af Klint’s point of view

From Hilma af Klint’s perspective it is quite explicable how she had predicted scientific cosmic information. “The body is capable of rising above its earthly ties by listening to the supernatural energies . . . I am an atom in the universe that has access to infinite possibilities of development, and it is these possibilities I want, gradually, to reveal”(qtd in Voss 211), she wrote in her journal.

If you prefer to not take literally this belief of Hilma af Klint then let’s observe that there are also a few interesting examples from other artists who depicted objects in the cosmos before they were perceptible or explainable by scientific measures.

A new study published in the journal “Physics of Fluids” suggests that Vincent van Gogh’s painting “The Starry Night” aligns with Kolmogorov’s mathematical theory of turbulence, which describes patterns of fluid dynamics. And Van Gogh couldn’t have known about Kolmogorov’s theory when he created The Starry Night, as he died 13 years before the mathematician was born.(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/)

Also, the abstract artist Jackson Pollock, in his book My Painting, revealed he painted in a kind of trance :

“When I am in my painting I am not aware of what I am doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through”. 

This sounds a bit like the Hilma af Klint quote from above.

From Dr. Carl Jung’s perspective

More than that, in the book Man and His Symbols by Carl Gustav Jung, Aniela Jaffe explains:

“The paintings of Jackson Pollock were painted in a trance (unconsciously ) as are the works of other modern artists such as the French ‘action’ painter Georges Mathieu. The chaotic but powerful result may be compared to the massa confusa of alchemy, and strangely resembles the hitherto hidden forms of matter as revealed in microphotographs”(265).

In other words, the paintings of Pollock are similar to the modern electronic microphotographs of the micro-matter like atoms. Again, it is noticed the power of an unconscious to paint replicas of scientific phenomena.

In the same book, Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, gives other examples of how scientific formulas can be intuited in a dream state.

“For example, the French mathematician Poincare and the chemist Kekule owed important scientific  discoveries as they themselves  admit to sudden pictorial ‘revelations’ from the unconscious. The so-called ‘mystical’ experience of the French philosopher Descartes involved a similar sudden revelation in which he saw in a flash the ‘order of all sciences’”(38).

On the same page, there is an old picture of the Ouroboros snake with the remark:

“the 19th century German chemist Kekule, researching into the molecular structure of benzene, dreamed of a snake with its tail in its mouth. He interpreted the dream to mean that the structure was a closed carbon ring.”

And, now, the explanation provided, by Jung, for scientific intuitions:

“Later I shall describe in more detail how such material arises from the unconscious, and I shall examine the form in which it is expressed. At the moment I simply want to point out that the capacity of the human psyche to produce such new material is particularly significant when one is dealing with dream symbolism, for I have found again and again in my professional work that the images and ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of memory. They express new thoughts that have never yet reached the threshold of consciousness”(MS 38.)

In the end, I would like to believe that Dr. Carl Gustav Jung would have included Hilma af Klint in the top of his exclusive and short list of genius people who made great scientific discoveries by “dreaming with open eyes.” The only impediment was that the work of Hilma af Klint was not known by Jung at this time.

Hilma af Klint is a Nasty Woman Artist and Mystic.

© Cristian Horgos

Pictures by courtesy of Hilma af Klint Foundation https://hilmaafklint.se/ 

Works Cited

Dickerman, Leah. “Hilma af Klint: a painter possessed.” The Guardian. (Need date)

Fant, Ake. Hilma Af Klint: Occult Painter and Abstract Pioneer. Translated by Ruth Urbom. Bokforlaget Stolpe,  Sweden. First English edition. 2021

Jung, Carl Gustav. ”Man and His Symbols”:https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/man-and-his-symbols.pdf

Pollock, Jackson. “My Painting,” Possibilities no. 1 (Winter, 1947–48); quoted in The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries, 1958–1959 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959)

Yinxiang Ma, Wanting Cheng, Shidi Huang, Francios G. Schmitt, Xin Lin, Yongxiang Huang “Hidden turbulence in van Gogh’s The Starry Night” published in  “Physics of Fluids” (September 17 2024)https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article-abstract/36/9/095140/3312767/Hidden-turbulence-in-van-Gogh-s-The-Starry-Night?redirectedFrom=fulltext