The Dove, No.2 (1915 CE)

Hilma af Klint’s The Dove, No. 2 is one of the most striking and mysterious paintings in her monumental Paintings for the Temple cycle. Against a vast, velvety black field that swallows three-quarters of the canvas, a radiant geometric form descends from above and dramatically “lands” in the lower third, where soft cubes in pale yellow and blue seem to kiss a subtle horizon line. A burst of red and white energy surrounds the point of contact—symbolising the final defeat of chaos by light. Painted in just five intense days, this is the darkest and most dramatic picture in the entire 14-work “Dove” series and a powerful meditation on the moment when spirit touches matter.

The Dove, No. 2 was painted between 20 and 25 March 1915 in Stockholm. It belongs to the late phase of Paintings for the Temple, a spiritual commission Hilma af Klint claimed to have received in 1906 from higher beings (“High Masters”) during séances with the female spiritualist group De Fem (The Five). The entire cycle, comprising 193 paintings created between 1906 and 1915, was intended to decorate an imagined spiral temple of spiritual ascent. The “Dove” series (14 large oil paintings) immediately follows “The Swan” series and explores the bird as a mediator between heaven and earth, with a particular focus on the triumph of harmony over duality. According to af Klint’s meticulous notebooks, The Dove, No. 1 was completed on 19 March 1915 and No. 2 began the very next day—an unusually rapid pace for her large-scale oils.

On 25 March 1915, the day she finished the painting, af Klint wrote in her Notebook (p. 87):   

“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 instances where she gave an explicit personal interpretation of a single work. In the same notebook she noted that the painting was guided in real time during séances, and that the spirit Amaliel dictated the exact moment when the descending form should “explode” into colour at the bottom of the canvas.

Hilma af Klint produced fully non-objective paintings years before Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondrian are traditionally credited with inventing abstraction, yet her work remained almost unknown until the 1980s because she believed the world was not ready for it. The Dove, No. 2 fuses Christian iconography (the dove as the Holy Spirit), Theosophical ideas of cosmic evolution, Anthroposophy, and Goethe’s colour theory into a uniquely personal symbolic language. The painting dramatises the exact instant of incarnation—the descent of spirit into matter—and the overcoming of dualism (light/dark, male/female, good/evil). Within the imagined temple, it was meant to be placed on the descending spiral, marking the visitor’s re-entry from pure spirit into the physical world. Today it is celebrated as a pioneering masterpiece of spiritual abstraction and a key feminist contribution to early 20th-century modernism.

• Medium: Oil on canvas  
• Dimensions: 151 × 114.5 cm (59 ½ × 45 inches)  
• Technique: The immense black field is built up in multiple thin, transparent glazes of indigo, Prussian blue, and lampblack, creating a deep, almost three-dimensional velvet texture that shifts with the light. The coloured lower section is painted wet-on-wet with generous amounts of oil, giving the yellow and blue cubic forms a luminous, slightly glossy quality that makes them appear to float in front of the matte blackness. Fine metallic gold and silver lines—barely visible in reproduction—trace sacred geometries and recall medieval icons. A discreet dark-red serpentine form (the defeated dragon) is painted so thinly that it almost disappears into the black ground and is only fully visible under raking light or in high-resolution photographs.

Hilma af Klint kept the entire Paintings for the Temple cycle in her studio and stipulated in her will that the works should not be shown publicly until 20 years after her death (she died in 1944). The paintings passed to her nephew Erik af Klint, Vice-Admiral of the Swedish Navy, and were stored in the care of the newly founded Hilma af Klint Foundation (established 1972). The foundation still owns the painting today.