The Dove, No.2 (1915 CE)

Hilma af Klint’s The Dove, No. 2 is one of the most striking and enigmatic paintings in her monumental Paintings for the Temple cycle. Against a vast, velvety black field that absorbs most of the canvas, a radiant geometric form descends from above and comes to rest in the lower third, where pale yellow and blue cubes seem to meet a quiet horizon line. Around this point of contact, red and white energy flares outward, giving the impression that light has just broken through darkness. Painted with unusual intensity over only a few days, the work stands as the darkest and most dramatic image in the fourteen-part Dove series, and as a powerful meditation on the moment when spirit touches matter.

A Late Work in Paintings for the Temple

The Dove, No. 2 was painted in Stockholm between 20 and 25 March 1915. It belongs to the late phase of Paintings for the Temple, the spiritual commission Hilma af Klint believed she had received in 1906 from higher beings, or “High Masters,” during séances with the women’s spiritualist group De Fem (The Five). The cycle, consisting of 193 paintings made between 1906 and 1915, was intended for an imagined spiral temple of spiritual ascent. The Dove series, comprising fourteen large oil paintings, follows directly after The Swan series and explores the bird as a mediator between heaven and earth, with particular emphasis on the triumph of harmony over duality. Af Klint’s notebooks show that The Dove, No. 1 was completed on 19 March 1915 and that No. 2 began the very next day, an exceptionally rapid pace for a canvas of this scale.

“Now the Night Is at Its Deepest”

On 25 March 1915, the day she completed the painting, af Klint wrote in her notebook: “The second picture of the Dove – now the night is at its deepest, but the light of morning has already touched the earth. The dragon has lost its power and lies hidden in the darkness.” This is one of the rare moments in which she offered an explicit personal interpretation of a single work. In the same notebook, she noted that the painting had been guided in real time during séances, and that the spirit Amaliel dictated the exact moment when the descending form should burst into color at the bottom of the canvas.

Spirit Descending into Matter

Hilma af Klint created fully non-objective paintings years before artists such as Kandinsky, Malevich, or Mondrian are usually associated with the emergence of abstraction, yet her work remained largely unknown until the 1980s because she believed the world was not ready for it. The Dove, No. 2 brings together Christian iconography, with the dove as a sign of the Holy Spirit, Theosophical ideas of cosmic evolution, Anthroposophy, and Goethe’s color theory in a highly personal symbolic language. The painting stages the instant of incarnation, the descent of spirit into matter, and the overcoming of dualism: light and dark, masculine and feminine, good and evil. Within the imagined temple, it was intended for the descending spiral, marking the visitor’s return from pure spirit into the material world. Today, it is regarded as a major work of spiritual abstraction and as an important feminist contribution to early twentieth-century modernism.

Black Glaze, Floating Cubes, Hidden Dragon

The painting is executed in oil on canvas and measures 151 × 114.5 cm, or 59 1/2 × 45 inches. The immense black field is built up from many thin transparent glazes of indigo, Prussian blue, and lampblack, creating a deep, almost velvety surface that shifts with the light. The colored lower section is painted wet-on-wet with generous oil, giving the yellow and blue cubic forms a luminous, slightly glossy presence, as though they were hovering before the matte darkness. Fine metallic gold and silver lines, barely visible in reproduction, trace sacred geometries and recall the surface of medieval icons. A dark red serpentine form, the defeated dragon, is painted so thinly that it nearly disappears into the black ground and becomes fully visible only under angled light or in very high-resolution images.

Preserved by the Foundation

Hilma af Klint kept the entire Paintings for the Temple cycle in her studio and stated in her will that the works should not be shown publicly until twenty years after her death in 1944. The paintings passed to her nephew Erik af Klint, Vice-Admiral of the Swedish Navy, and were later placed in the care of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, established in 1972. The foundation still owns the painting today.