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 the entire history of early abstract art. Across an almost square canvas, two monumental swans confront and complete each other: a white swan glides against a deep black field, while a black swan moves through a radiant white expanse. Their beaks meet precisely at the centre in a delicate, electric point of contact, wingtips lightly touching, with vivid flashes of yellow, orange, pink, and blue glowing at beaks and feet. The painting feels perfectly symmetrical yet vibrating with tension, like the moment before reconciliation or transcendence. 

Hilma af Klint painted The Swan No. 1 as the opening piece of a seventeen-part series 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 honours from Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in and enjoyed a successful career as a portrait and landscape painter, had long since turned away from visible reality. From 1906 onward she believed she was receiving direct commissions from higher spiritual beings, chiefly a guide named Amaliel, during séances conducted 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 quiet seclusion of her Stockholm studio or on the island of Munsö, far from the public eye. 

Af Klint often painted the enormous Temple canvases, including the Swan series, directly on the floor of her improvised studio, sometimes entering a trance-like state as she worked under spiritual guidance. She recorded in her notebooks that the entire Swan sequence had been specifically commissioned by Amaliel as a meditation on the union of opposites and humanity’s coming spiritual evolution. When the sealed crates were finally opened in the 1970s, conservators at Moderna Museet were astonished by the paintings’ pristine condition and luminous colours; the experimental binders she mixed herself, possibly influenced by her interest in chemistry and alchemy, had preserved the pigments almost perfectly. Since its rediscovery, countless visitors standing before The Swan No. 1 in exhibitions from the Guggenheim to Moderna Museet have described an almost physical sensation of energy, sudden tears, or goosebumps, an experience that continues to be shared widely in personal accounts.

Today Hilma af Klint is recognised as one of the very first artists anywhere to create fully non-objective paintings, beginning as early as 1906, several years before the male pioneers usually celebrated for the “invention” of abstraction. The Swan No. 1 crystallises the core concerns of her spiritual project: the reconciliation of dualities (light and dark, male and female, spirit and matter) drawn from Theosophy, anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, and alchemical symbolism. The swan itself carries ancient sacred meaning, representing the divine spirit in Theosophy and the union of opposites in alchemy. Recent scholarship further reveals the painting’s links to early twentieth-century science, Jungian mandalas, and even botanical studies, underlining af Klint’s extraordinary synthesis of art, mysticism, and knowledge. 

The painting is executed in oil on canvas and measures 150.5 × 153 cm (59 × 60 in). Its nearly square format reinforcing the mirror-like symmetry. The palette is dominated by intense black and white fields, interrupted by deliberate, glowing accents of cadmium yellow, orange, pink, cerulean blue, and subtle touches of gold. Broad, confident brushstrokes define the large colour masses, while finer, almost calligraphic lines trace the swans’ elegant contours.

From its completion in 1915 until her death in 1944, the painting remained in Hilma af Klint’s private possession. Upon her death it passed to her nephew Erik af Klint and was kept in storage in accordance with her will. 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, Stockholm, while remaining owned by the Foundation.