The Swan, No.18 (1915 CE)

When you stand in front of The Swan, No. 18 you are met by a dramatic, almost violent yet harmonious explosion of colour and form. A large black circle fills most of the almost square canvas, pierced by powerful diagonal rays in glowing yellow, deep blue and fiery red. At the very centre lies a multicoloured target of concentric rings against a red ground, and only when you come very close do you discover the painting’s secret heart: a tiny, almost invisible pyramid, just a few millimetres high, glowing in a pale whitish-yellow tone as if a spark of divine light has just broken through from another dimension. Painted in 1915 by the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, this work is the triumphant finale of an eighteen-part series.

Hilma af Klint executed The Swan series between the autumn of 1914 and the spring of 1915, immediately after completing her vast cycle Paintings for the Temple, which she regarded as commissioned by higher spiritual beings. Since the late 1890s she had belonged to the women’s spiritualist group De Fem, who held weekly séances and practised automatic drawing in order to make contact with what they called the High Masters. It was during this intensely productive and visionary period that the entire Swan series emerged. Af Klint herself described the process as completely guided: the pictures were painted directly through her, without preliminary sketches, with great force and certainty, and she often had no idea what they meant only revealed afterwards. 

After Hilma af Klint’s death, relatives who unpacked the stored canvases are said to have shaken their heads at the huge coloured surfaces and dismissed them as childish scribbles, after which many of the paintings spent decades in an unheated shed. When conservators at Moderna Museet examined the painting under raking light in preparation for the 2013 exhibition, they discovered that the tiny central pyramid is painted with an almost phosphorescent layer of paint that seems to glow softly depending on the angle of the light, as though the canvas really does contain a small portal to another world. Thousands of visitors to the Guggenheim have recounted the same magical moment: after staring at the painting for several minutes they suddenly notice the minute pyramid, and in that instant the entire composition shifts meaning, as if a lamp has been switched on inside their minds. 

Hilma af Klint is now universally regarded as the true pioneer of abstract painting. The Swan, No. 18 concludes a symbolic drama about the reconciliation of opposites: male and female, spirit and matter, light and darkness, life and death. The imagery is deeply rooted in Theosophy, alchemy, Christianity and Rosicrucianism. The swan, which in Helena Blavatsky’s writings symbolised the greatness of the spirit and in alchemical tradition the final red stage when base metal is transformed into spiritual gold, undergoes a complete metamorphosis through the series. It begins in stark black and white with two confronting birds, gradually becomes more colourful and fragmented, reaches an intimate erotic-spiritual union in number 17, and finally explodes in number 18 into pure cosmic energy. The barely visible upward-pointing pyramid in the centre, placed inside the black circle of dissolution, signals that the divine spark has been born out of primordial darkness and is now rising. The painting is therefore both a mystical diagram and a radically modern abstract composition that bridges late 19th-century spiritualism with the non-objective art of the 20th century.

The painting is executed in oil on canvas and measures 150.5 × 151 cm, or 59.25 × 59.45 inches, making it almost perfectly square. The paint layer is generally thin and smooth, but the tiny central pyramid is applied in an extremely delicate, semi-transparent whitish-yellow that creates a faint luminescent effect in certain light. The entire composition is governed by rigorous geometry: every ray and every circle is calculated with mathematical precision around the exact centre point where the miniature pyramid rises, partly concealed by the small yellow circle so that only its glowing tip is visible, giving the impression that it floats or shines forth from the very core of the painting.

The work remained in Hilma af Klint’s studio and later in family storage until her death in 1944. In 1970 her nephew Erik af Klint donated the greater part of the artistic estate to the newly founded Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk in Stockholm, where The Swan, No. 18 has since been kept.