Five women gather around a dimly lit table; their movements hushed, eyes averted down, countenance grave and serious. They clench each other’s hands both to form a ring of summoning power, but—if they’re being honest and willing to tell you—it’s as much a grip of fear, of unlocking a door to the unknown, to the spirit world that makes their fingernails dig into palms. This 1906 Stockholm moment, attended by Hilma af Klint, Anna Cassel, Sigrid Hedman, and sisters Mathilda Nilsson, and Cornelia Cederberg (nicknaming themselves ‘The Five’, or De Fem) had a specific intent to call forth The High Masters: spirits from the invisible world who would instruct them to create, in visual form, paintings of their messages and desires. Once polite portraitists and garden painters, these once proper ladies were entering a dark, potentially dangerous world that would change their destinies—as well as the art world’s.

A voice rang out in the room, heard only in the women’s heads.

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you!”

Af Klint’s body stiffened. She pulled hard on her fellow séance participants’ arms. “It’s Amaliel (her personal spirit that exclusively gave messages to her),” she pronounced with baited breath. “She’s told me what I’m to do!”

Amaliel had commissioned af Klint to create what was to become her magnum opus: Paintings for the Temple, 193 paintings feverishly created from 1906 to 1915, composing a sacred, visual script for the theosophic ideas that af Klint and intellectuals of her day subscribed to. It was a masterpiece of gigantic, twisting forms of colour and pattern, charged with significance and meanings, a dance of geometric forms paired with moralistic hope.

They’re the kind of paintings to adorn a temple of universal optimism and understanding of nature’s true secrets on the smallest level. They’re the kind that—74 years after their creation—The Guggenheim in New York City, arguably the most reputable art institution in the world, staged in temple form, becoming its most visited show ever in its history and drawing in 600,000 visitors to the rehabilitation of af Klint. In fact, her 2013 premiere in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet broke that space’s attendance record as well.

In her time, however, af Klint was ignored: neither the Paintings for the Temple nor the other works of this incredible period were ever shown. What’s worse, Rudolf Steiner, the head of the Theosophical Society and a leader she greatly admired and tried to reach out to, ridiculed her and shook her confidence to the core.

“No one must see this for 50 years,” he admonished her with utter, eviscerating dismissiveness.

Crushed, she obeyed, putting in her 1944 will that the works must not be seen until 20 years after her death. And, even then, with no sponsor or art critic to bring her story into the light, she died utterly penniless, her mental health battered by the rejection and misogyny she encountered throughout her life. It’s a Van Gogh-esque tragedy with similar factors and outcomes, albeit with a feminist twist.

Af Klint would have been completely obliterated from history were it not for her family, who recognised her legacy was soon to be lost as her studio was slated for demolition after her death in 1944. They rescued the 1,300 paintings and notebooks stored in the attic, and set up a foundation to rehabilitate her legacy.

From there, curators at a 1986 Los Angeles show were the first to spread the word of af Klint’s abstraction genius in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985. Her works are now sought after in auctions, often for six-figure amounts. The Moderna and Guggenheim shows have elevated her acclaim, while art zines clamour to critique her work. The rest, as they say, is history.

With the newest show at the MoMA, What Stands Behind The Flowers, the legend of Hilma af Klint takes another rehabilitated leap, making viewers see her life story and work in yet another hagiographic way. These never-before-seen paintings show the beauty of her gentle floral works that she executed over the period of 1919-1920, a form that surprises many who only knew her from her larger, spatial, theosophically driven works.

At first glance, these are small botanical drawings, almost bordering on scientific renderings for a nature book, and certainly not a sweeping discovery of an invisible spiritual truth that underlies our world. It’s certainly true that af Klint loved nature in a deeply cherished way from when she was young, and painted many floral works in her time before joining the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts—the first woman to do so, in fact, in part due to her precision and painting prowess.

The works are aesthetic flowers telling the truth of beauty, yes, but look closer and you’ll see af Klint’s abstract diagrammatic vocabulary, ones like she had done in works such as the 1917 Atom Series, deftly deployed in these botanical works. Symbols that are like hieroglyphs of deep categorical meaning tell the energy and form of these plants, which she then lets her voices create moral truths connected to these signs. Although we can take discussions about her belief in the occult, one thing that af Klint was right about is what we now call quantum mechanics: that, on a subatomic level, there are deep, incredible mysteries and nomenclature that science is just now discovering.

“While we often think of artists of the early 20th century as focused on new technologies—and the hustle and bustle of modern life—for many, the natural world was a crucial touchstone,” says Jodi Hauptman, curator for What Stands Behind The Flowers. “MoMA’s Nature Studies reveal af Klint as an artist uniquely attuned to nature. We hope that attunement—her demonstration of careful observation and discovery of all that stands behind the flowers—encourages our audience to look closely and see their own surroundings, whether here in the city or beyond, in new ways.”

Jessica Högland, CEO of The Hilma af Klint Foundation and someone deeply involved with the MOMA exhibit, adds: “Hilma af Klint had a monistic view of life. That is, the outer sensory reality and the inner spiritual experiences had one and the same origin—they formed a whole. By training her powers of observation, for instance through depicting plants, she was able to sharpen her ability to render reality in an objective way. This ability became valuable when, with the same intensity, she began her super-sensory research method and depicted her own inner spiritual experiences likewise in a way that, for her, was objective. The goal was to reproduce as faithfully as possible the complexity that surrounds us on both planes—the physical and the immaterial/spiritual.”

And if Hilma af Klint has taught us anything, it’s surely that she had an uncanny ability to see things before the rest of us did.

‘Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers’ is on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from now until 27 September 2025.