The Seven Pointed Star, No. 14 (1908 CE)

Hilma af Klint’s No. 14 from The Seven Pointed Star (Group VI), created in 1908, is a small yet intensely concentrated abstract drawing. On a relatively modest surface, she gathers cosmic energy into a vibrating web of overlapping circles, golden spirals, and flowing blue lines. With only three primary colors, blue, red, and yellow, against a pale beige ground, the work feels like a secret diagram of the universe: intimate in scale, yet vast in implication. It is one of the clearest examples of how af Klint joined sacred geometry, especially the golden ratio, with the spirit-guided spontaneity she described as automatic drawing.

A Drawing from the Beginning of Paintings for the Temple

Created in the winter of 1907–1908 in Stockholm, this drawing belongs to the intense burst of work that followed a decisive spiritual event in Hilma af Klint’s life. On New Year’s Eve in 1906, during a séance with the women’s spiritual group De Fem (The Five), she accepted a commission from one of the “High Masters,” the being Amaliel, to create the cycle Paintings for the Temple. The small works on paper made in 1907–1908, including this one, functioned as exploratory meditations and technical studies for the monumental canvases that would follow in series such as Primordial Chaos, The Ten Largest, and Evolution.

At the age of forty-six, af Klint was already deeply engaged with Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Christianity, and contemporary natural science. The year 1908 also marks the moment when she consciously began to use the golden ratio as a structural principle, understanding it as visible proof of a divine harmony joining spirit and matter.

Trance, Geometry, and Studio Practice

Although Hilma af Klint kept most of her abstract work hidden during her lifetime, a revealing detail survives about the drawings of 1907–1908. She is said to have made many of them in a meditative trance, often with her eyes partly closed, allowing the hand to move under guidance while still adhering to exact geometric principles. Friends who occasionally visited her studio later recalled seeing hundreds of such sheets spread across the floor like maps of invisible worlds.

Another telling moment belongs to 1908, when Rudolf Steiner visited her studio and saw related works. He is said to have reacted with visible unease and advised her not to continue too quickly along this path. Af Klint quietly ignored that advice. This drawing therefore belongs to the very body of work that unsettled Steiner and that later generations would recognize as one of the most groundbreaking achievements in early abstraction.

Sacred Geometry and Invisible Forces

This drawing is a concentrated expression of Hilma af Klint’s larger aim: to make the invisible visible. Long before non-objective art was accepted as a category, she developed a symbolic language grounded in esoteric traditions such as Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Christianity, while also engaging ideas from contemporary science, including atomic models, electromagnetism, and botany. The overlapping circles create vesica piscis forms that suggest the union of opposites, male and female, spirit and matter, while the golden spiral embodies evolution and spiritual ascent, ideas central to Theosophical conceptions of cosmic development.

Blue lines stand for the masculine or spiritual principle, yellow circles for the feminine or material, and red for transformative life force. Together they form a visual account of humanity’s movement toward a higher state of consciousness in a coming new age. By building the composition around the golden ratio, a proportion she regarded as a divine law, af Klint turned abstraction into a form of sacred geometry. The drawing thus operates both as a spiritual exercise and as a proto-scientific diagram, anticipating by decades later artistic interests in mathematics, mysticism, and abstraction.

Tempera, Gouache, and Measured Structure

The work is executed in tempera, gouache, and graphite on paper, later mounted on canvas. It measures 73 × 65.5 cm, or 28.7 × 25.8 inches. Its palette is built from intense ultramarine blue in the lines and spirals, together with cadmium red and yellow in the circles and accents, laid down in thin translucent layers over a delicate pencil underdrawing.

Part of the composition was constructed with compass and ruler, including the golden-ratio grid and logarithmic spiral, while other elements were drawn freehand in a rapid, almost automatic gesture. The geometric structure beneath the surface is not immediately visible, yet it governs the work with mathematical precision.

From Studio Archive to Foundation Collection

Created in Stockholm in 1908, the drawing remained in Hilma af Klint’s personal studio archive throughout her life. After her death in 1944, it passed to her nephew Erik af Klint. In 1970, it was transferred to the newly founded Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk, the Hilma af Klint Foundation, where it has remained ever since as part of the foundation’s collection in Sweden.