The First Abstract Expressionists: Carl Jung and Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint: The Artist Turned Spiritual Medium

Before the posthumous discovery of the esoteric artwork which would eventually turn her into one of the giants of abstract art, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) hid behind the façade of her formal training at the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, appearing to her contemporaries as a mere painter of landscapes and botanica. Away from the gaze of the public eye, af Klint explored her spiritual interests with a Spiritualist group called “The Five.”

These women began their meetings like any other bible study—they opened their texts, read scripture, then prayed together. Then began a séance to contact the “High Masters”—spirits that held knowledge about the universe’s mysteries. The teachings of Madame Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical movement, as well as Spiritualist occult groups, informed their practices and readings. Equipped with occultist knowledge, af Klint practiced psychic mediumship, letting the spirits’ messages flow from her paintbrush toward her canvas.

Af Klint hid away her works from the world for intentional discovery no sooner than 20 years after her death, claiming that the public would not understand what she was trying to do. Indeed, even since 1986 when her first works were uncovered, we are still untangling her work.

Carl Jung: Psychologist of the Collective Unconscious

While af Klint has now become a new icon for spiritual abstraction, there remains another occult-adjacent artist still in the shadows of the abstract art world: Carl Jung (1875–1961). Despite being born to the family of a Protestant pastor, Jung’s family, like “The Five,” was deeply involved in the practice of Spiritualism, a late 19th-century phenomenon wherein people attempted to communicate with the dead through seances.

Jung would eventually explore his family roots even further through his doctoral thesis On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena. He concluded that hypnotic trances, ghost-sightings, automatic writing, and thought transmission arose from maladies of the unconscious, which projected appearances of seemingly different personalities. Eventually, Jung would have his own period of psychological malady and would bring his fascination with the occult into his self-treatment—the manifestation of which would become known as The Red Book.

After an intimate, professional break with Freud in 1913, Jung had a series of uncomfortable “confrontations with the unconscious,” in which he interacted with aspects of his own mind—initially through speech, and later through active imagination. From an outsider’s point of view, the activities of Hilma af Klint and Carl Jung would have seemed strikingly similar—and it is quite possible their internal worlds were, too.

The Red Book is a valuable glimpse into Jung’s personal myth, the basis of what would become the foundational theories of Jungian psychology. While writing The Red Book, Jung engaged with automatic drawing practices, allowing whatever arose from his unconscious to make itself known on paper. Many of the drawings in The Red Book are impressionistic and abstract illustrations of Jung’s active imaginative visions.

Other drawings took the form of mandalas, a shape in which Jung would later investigate and theorize about through the automatic drawings of his patients. Jung writes in his essay Concerning Mandala Symbolism, “Most mandalas have an intuitive, irrational character and, through their symbolical content, exert a retroactive influence on the unconscious. They therefore possess a ‘magical’ significance.” The mandala, Jung believed, was a representation of the Self and its path towards individuation—at the center lying the state of wholeness. The creation of these mandalas through automatic drawing could be a source for healing for a patient.

Parallel Motifs and Techniques

With just a quick glance at Hilma af Klint’s oeuvre, the recurring motif of mandalas is apparent in her work. While Carl Jung’s take on a more elaborate, ornate design, Hilma af Klint’s follow a simpler design, placing greater emphasis on the choice of pigment and free flowing harmony with other shapes. At times, she allows the mandalas to stand alone on the canvas, and at other times, such as in The Ten Largest series, they are incorporated onto the canvas with various symbols and swirls.

For Hilma af Klint to have done this while undergoing intense spiritual practices like trances and seances would be of no surprise to Carl Jung. He continues in the essay, “We are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconscious disposition in every individual which is able to produce the same or very similar symbols at all times and in all places.” To be shared in their motifs is only a natural function of the collective unconscious, and the mandala is a prime example of collective symbols across time and space. If Hilma af Klint was intuitively channeling and drawing mandalas, then, could we interpret her commission from the High Masters as an individuation process in its own right?

What Jung put into words, af Klint presented in her art. Gazing closely at af Klint’s work, you may start to notice patterns of solid colored, deeply saturated backgrounds with overlayed symmetrical symbols, often using repeated motifs like concentric circles, spirals, and contrasting colors. Thankfully, we are not completely in the dark about the meanings of af Klint’s paintings. Af Klint wrote her own code to her paintings in her journal, which was informed both by occult intellectual theory and the High Masters themselves.

A recurring motif we gather from this code and her paintings is gender harmony, a balancing of feminine and masculine energies. In sympathy with Goethe’s theory of color, yellow represented male and blue represented female. The two often overlapped on campus, creating a soft green, feminine and masculine energies melting into unity. Elsewhere on the canvas floats shapes resembling testicles, ovaries, sperm, and eggs, unattached to any distinguishable body.

While we cannot know exactly what af Klint set forth to communicate with hermaphroditic and androgynous imagery, her work alludes to the same Eastern philosophy that attracted theosophists—yin and yang, non-duality. Such concepts of gender were explored by Jung in his theory of the anima and animus.

While he had strict essentialist views of gender, Jung believed that within one individual lived a soul that took on the opposite gender of the individual’s identity—for a male, the anima, and for a female, the animus. To achieve individuation, Jung argues that an individual must build a relationship towards this animus, interacting with it through therapeutic processes that tapped into the unconscious. When the ego’s gender identity and the animus work together in harmony, individuation can be initiated, often the first step towards meeting other archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Looking through a Jungian lens, af Klint’s inner spiritual work no doubt occurred through peeling back the layers of her conscious mind, allowing the High Masters to speak to her through the collective unconscious, the source for the universal truths that af Klint sought. Her exploration of gender in her paintings could point to an exploration and integration of her anima. Indeed, she eventually completed this “Great Commission” from the High Masters, moving onto create abstract works that were not channeled, but fully her own.

At the core of Jungian psychology is the concept of the individuation process, the journey towards self-realization and integration of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche. In The Ten Largest, af Klint paints a series of channeled abstract paintings capturing the essences of different periods of life. Jung also paid attention to the different stages of a person’s life, attributing much importance to mature adulthood for the individuation process.

Each of af Klint’s paintings may depict various stages of individuation, from the initial fragmentation and chaos of the psyche to the eventual harmony and integration of its disparate elements. Much like Jung, af Klint underwent her own journey of individuation through these channeling processes, entering her own underworld in solitude, engaged in deep spiritual and self-analytical work unbeknownst to those around her.

Is Abstraction the Language of the Unconscious?

Through their own personal individuation myths—Carl Jung, with his active imaginative acts of The Red Book, and Hilma af Klint, her channeling of the High Masters, the two explored similar concepts in their artwork. Both did it through the medium of abstraction. Such comparisons raise important implications for the field of abstract art. What is the significance of the fact that the first two stark examples of Western abstraction artists involved themselves in occultist studies? Is “abstract art” the art of the unconscious, and can we lend this label to contemporary abstractionists?

The similar backgrounds of these artists cannot be ignored. Both were surrounded by Spiritualist and Theosophical influences which certainly influenced their ecstatic experiences and automatic drawings. But it is remarkable, too, that one of the first artists we hail as Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, underwent Jungian therapy in 1939 with Joseph Henderson. Just as Jung encouraged his patients to express their unconscious through art, so did Henderson with Pollock. Can we lend the title of “abstractionist-before-it-was-cool” to Jung, just as we have given it to af Klint? Both figures also chose to have their works hidden from the public, only to be discovered and published posthumously. Maybe, Jung, like af Klint, was just waiting for divine timing.

Author’s bio:

Tara Yazdan Panah is writer finishing up her last year at Harvard Divinity School. She has written for publications such as LIBER Feminist Review, Teen Vogue, and Boston Arts Fuse.