Hilma af Klint
In 1915, Hilma af Klint began The Dove, one of the final groups within the Paintings for the Temple—her major body of work, made mostly between 1906 and 1915, comprising over 190 paintings in total. She believed she had been commissioned to create them by spiritual entities she called the "High Masters," who communicated with her through séances and automatic writing and drawing, a practice common in the Spiritualist and Theosophical circles she moved in at the time. The paintings were meant to be housed in a spiral-shaped temple that was never built in her lifetime, and af Klint herself stipulated that the work not be shown publicly until decades after her death. This is one reason the series is only now widely recognized as among the earliest examples of abstract art in Western painting, predating Kandinsky's celebrated abstract works by several years.
The Dove consists of 14 paintings that originally belonged to two sets, one of which was an 8-painting Saint George series. In it, the dragon-slaying saint becomes personal allegory: af Klint states plainly that Saint George represents her, and the dragon symbolizes the vices she must overcome, echoing Theosophical ideas. This is what this painting depicts: on a red background, a heart sits at the center of the composition, with two crosses emerging from it. Within the heart, Saint George stands on a circle set inside an oval, while at the bottom left, two malevolent heads gaze toward him, feeding the dragon with energy rendered as oblique spiraling lines.
Another one of her extraordinary paintings is featured on the cover of our 2027 Weekly Planner! It's now available for presale with 25% off, while limited quantities last! :)
P.S. Did you know af Klint's artistic explorations had a lot in common with the ideas of a world-famous psychologist? See how the art of Hilma af Klint and Carl Jung intertwined!