The Swan, No. 1 (1915 CE)

The Swan No. 1, painted by Hilma af Klint between 1914 and 1915, is one of the most powerful and spiritually charged works in early abstract art. Across an almost square canvas, two monumental swans confront and complete each other: a white swan glides through a deep black field, while a black swan moves across a radiant white expanse. Their beaks meet exactly at the center in a delicate, charged point of contact, their wingtips lightly touching, while flashes of yellow, orange, pink, and blue glow at beaks and feet. The painting feels perfectly symmetrical and yet alive with tension, like the instant before reconciliation or transcendence.

A Beginning within the Temple Cycle

Hilma af Klint painted The Swan No. 1 as the opening work in a series of seventeen paintings that forms the final chapter of her vast cycle Paintings for the Temple, begun in 1906. By 1914, the classically trained artist, who had graduated with honors from Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and established herself as a successful portrait and landscape painter, had long since turned away from visible reality. From 1906 onward, she believed that she was receiving direct commissions from higher spiritual beings, above all a guide named Amaliel, during séances held with the all-female spiritualist group De Fem (The Five). The Swan series was created during the years of the First World War, in the seclusion of her Stockholm studio or on the island of Munsö, far from public view.

Painted under Spiritual Guidance

Af Klint often painted the large Temple canvases, including the Swan series, directly on the floor of her improvised studio, at times entering a trance-like state while working under spiritual guidance. In her notebooks, she recorded that the entire Swan sequence had been commissioned by Amaliel as a meditation on the union of opposites and on humanity’s future spiritual evolution. When the sealed crates containing these works were finally opened in the 1970s, conservators at Moderna Museet were struck by their pristine condition and luminous colors. The experimental binders she appears to have mixed herself, possibly shaped by her interest in chemistry and alchemy, had preserved the pigments with unusual brilliance. Since the painting’s rediscovery, many viewers encountering The Swan No. 1 in exhibitions, from the Guggenheim to Moderna Museet, have described a nearly physical response: sudden tears, goosebumps, or a sensation of palpable energy.

The Union of Opposites

Today Hilma af Klint is recognized as one of the very first artists anywhere to create fully non-objective paintings, beginning as early as 1906, several years before the figures more often credited with the invention of abstraction. The Swan No. 1 brings together the central concerns of her spiritual project: the reconciliation of light and dark, male and female, spirit and matter. These ideas draw on Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, and alchemical symbolism. The swan itself carries an ancient sacred meaning, serving in Theosophy as a sign of the divine spirit and in alchemy as an image of the union of opposites. More recent scholarship has also connected the painting to early twentieth-century science, Jungian mandalas, and even botanical studies, revealing the extraordinary breadth of af Klint’s synthesis of art, mysticism, and knowledge.

Black and White, Color and Contact

The painting is executed in oil on canvas and measures 150.5 × 153 cm, or 59 × 60 inches, its nearly square format reinforcing the mirror-like symmetry of the composition. The palette is dominated by intense fields of black and white, interrupted by controlled accents of cadmium yellow, orange, pink, cerulean blue, and subtle touches of gold. Broad, assured brushstrokes shape the large areas of color, while finer, almost calligraphic lines define the swans’ elegant contours.

Provenance

From its completion in 1915 until Hilma af Klint’s death in 1944, the painting remained in her private possession. After her death, it passed to her nephew Erik af Klint and stayed in storage in accordance with her wishes. In the early 1970s, the work was transferred to the newly established Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm. Since the 1980s, it has been on long-term loan to Moderna Museet in Stockholm, while remaining in the ownership of the Foundation.