The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Hilma af Klint · De tio största, Group IV of the Paintings for the Temple · a cycle of ten paintings scored as one work, numbered 1 to 10 by the four ages of a life: Childhood (Nos. 1 and 2), Youth (Nos. 3 and 4), Adulthood (Nos. 5 to 8), Old Age (Nos. 9 and 10) · tempera on paper mounted on canvas, each about 3.2 by 2.4 metres · painted in Stockholm, 1907 · Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm · all ten surviving and kept together; the temple they were made for was never built
Mode
A painted cycle as a diagram of growth; non-objective painting at the scale of history painting, made to serve a doctrine
Mythos
The ages of man, built into the titles, the numbering and the division; the seed, the flower, the spiral and the egg, on a frame with no person in it
Phase
A whole life, from germ to old age; painted in Stockholm in 1907, the fourth group of the Paintings for the Temple (1906 to 1915)
Presentation
Ten sheets of tempera on paper mounted on canvas, each about 3.2 by 2.4 metres, numbered 1 to 10 and divided by age two, two, four and two, each age on its own ground colour
Register
Warm delight at monumental size; forms that float, swell and crowd, then stand quiet and ordered at the end
Scale
Ten panels taller than the viewer, one life, read in passage from the first to the last
Governing Proposition
Ten sheets, each nearly twice the height of a person, carry a human life from childhood to old age, and there is no body in any of them. Spirals, buds, rosettes, loops of script and small geometric figures float on a coloured ground, swell and crowd through youth and adulthood, and stand quiet and ordered at the end. The wager of the cycle is that the growth of a life can be shown as the growth of a form, from an undivided beginning through flowering to an order simpler than where it began, and that a diagram enlarged past the body stops being a diagram and becomes a place to stand inside.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Swedish title, De tio största, names the size. There are ten paintings, tempera on paper mounted on canvas, each about 3.2 metres high and 2.4 wide, the sheets varying slightly, and they were painted in Stockholm in 1907 by Hilma af Klint, at forty-five. They are numbered 1 to 10 as a sequence and titled by the four ages of a human life, and they were conceived and painted as one group. The Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm keeps them. The cycle is the work, not any single panel, and it is whole.
The ages are not given equal room. Childhood has two panels, Nos. 1 and 2; Youth two, Nos. 3 and 4; Adulthood four, Nos. 5 to 8; Old Age two, Nos. 9 and 10. Adulthood takes as many panels as childhood and youth together, and the weight is meant: it is the life’s fullness. Each age is set on its own ground colour, so that the change from one age to the next is a change of the whole field, and is felt as time as the eye passes along the row.
There is no figure in any of them, and no face. On the grounds float spirals, buds, rosettes, loops of script and small geometric figures. In childhood the forms are loose and few, floating like buds or cells. Through youth and adulthood they swell, double and crowd to the edges. In old age they stand quiet: circles and ordered, symmetrical figures, centred on the field. Biology, botany and geometry stand in for the person, and a life is carried from germ to order without a body anywhere in it.
Movement II
Af Klint was trained at the Royal Academy in Stockholm from 1882 to 1887 and worked as a painter of portraits and landscapes. From 1896 she met with four other women, Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson, in a circle called the Five, which kept records of its séances and made automatic drawings. The doctrine the circle served was theosophical, and later anthroposophical: a soul in four parts, a passage from matter to spirit.
The Ten Largest is Group IV of The Paintings for the Temple, a commission she carried out from 1906 to 1915. Her notes give its authorship to the High Masters. Her own account of how the Temple paintings were made, given here in paraphrase because its wording cannot be fixed, is that they came through her without preliminary drawings and that she did not know what they were to depict. How far the work is hers and how far the circle’s, and what that claimed authorship does to the attribution, are questions still open.
Every element had a precedent: botanical illustration, Jugendstil ornament, the diagrams of theosophy, Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms among them, and the Five’s own drawings of the 1890s. None had been made the art itself at the scale of history painting. Here the ornament and the diagram are the whole picture, non-objective, in 1907, before the abstraction of Kandinsky, Kupka and Mondrian. Whether a doctrinal diagram counts as painting’s departure is disputed; the departure is on the panels whatever the intention. She did not show the cycle as a group in her lifetime. A trained painter of forty-five gave her art to a commission she could not show.
Movement III
The four panels of adulthood are the densest of the cycle. Forms that floated apart in childhood and swelled in youth now double, press against one another and crowd to the edges of the sheet. One of the four could be taken away and the age would still read; no pair allows that. Within each panel the composition accretes, and many of its forms could be moved without the panel losing its sense. The architecture of the cycle is necessary; the population of its surfaces is permitted.
Size changes what the forms are. At the scale of a book plate they would be diagrams in a manual; at over three metres they outsize the body, and a life becomes something one stands inside. The first sight of the ten together is of sheets taller than any visitor in colours no painting of 1907 carried at that size. The elevation is warm and of one kind, delight and transport rather than terror. There is no darkness in the cycle and no dread, and at a distance some panels read as decoration.
The making holds at that size. Tempera on paper, matte and even, gives flat, luminous grounds across nearly eight square metres a panel, without streak or visible seam. The forms are drawn in a confident, unbroken line, curves held over a metre without wavering. Each age is keyed to a ground and a palette, and all ten were painted within the one year. The handling is flat and illustrative, nearer a decorative designer’s than a painter’s; the script is diagrammatic; the range of mark is narrow.
Movement IV
From the crowded panels of adulthood the cycle drops into old age. Circles and ordered figures stand quiet, centred and symmetrical, and the eye feels the cooling as a change of air. Old age is not shown as decay. It is shown as clarification: the life ends in an order simpler, more symmetrical and more abstract than the flowering that came before. That is the cycle’s proposition, and it holds: a human life can be shown as growth with a form, from an undivided beginning through multiplication to order.
The loose buds of childhood and the ordered circles of old age obey one law. Growth, the development of a form from germ to order, is laid flat on a coloured field at one scale, and the turn from organic to geometric is not a second physics but the law unfolding. The most distant parts of the cycle are stages of one process. One element sits uneasily in it. The letters and words are a second order of sign, legible only by the doctrine, laid onto a field otherwise governed by visual growth, and they assume a key the viewer does not have.
The ages of man are as old as the riddle of the Sphinx and the Greek ages, and painting carried them in Titian’s Three Ages, in Cole’s The Voyage of Life and, in af Klint’s own decade, in Munch’s frieze of life. Here the archetype is the structure: titles, numbering, division and ground. But it stands on an empty frame. There is no particular life, no event, no family made visible, no labour, no city and no history; the person is held only as a process. Much of what the panels carry is a doctrine illustrated, and much of what they give is a state, buoyancy and joy.
Movement V
Rudolf Steiner saw the work in 1908. For about eighty years after that the cycle was in storage with the family and the foundation, before no public. It was first widely shown in 1986, in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890 to 1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; in full retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2013; and to a very large public at the Guggenheim in 2018 and 2019. All ten panels have survived, kept together, uncut and undispersed, for 119 years, and nothing in them is lost or replaced. Their material, tempera on paper, large and often travelled, is fragile, and cannot be cleaned or handled as oil can.
In the field the cycle entered, Swedish and European painting of the 1900s and 1910s, it moved nothing: it was unseen. Since 1986, and above all since 2013, it has reorganised the history of abstraction rather than its practice, forcing a revision of that history’s account of its origins, of the place of women in it and of its spiritual sources, and contemporary painters cite it widely. The field of 1907 was not moved; the story of it was. A reputation that has risen this fast, partly on a story of rediscovery, has yet to show that it can outlast its moment.
The ten were made for a temple, a spiral building af Klint imagined for the Temple paintings, and it was never built. The form is complete in its panels and incomplete in its place: the hang, the room and the order of approach she meant are unrealised, and every showing is a provisional room. The questions stay open: whether this is abstraction or a doctrine in a non-figurative code; whether its priority changes the history of modern art or only its chronology; what the script means. Ten sheets still carry a life from its first loose forms to its last ordered ones, with no one in it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the configuration, then within the panel. Take away Childhood and the life has no origin; take away Old Age and it has no close, and the turn from bloom to geometry, which is the cycle’s argument, goes with it. The four ages are compelled. The count within them is less so: adulthood’s four panels are the life’s fullness, and the weight is meant, but one of the four could go and the age would still read, which no pair allows. Within the panel the composition accretes, and many of its spirals, buds, rosettes, loops of script and small figures could be moved or removed without loss. The scale is compelled; the population of motifs is permitted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Two things can be stated, through image, and they hold. A human life can be shown as growth with a form: from an undivided beginning, through flowering and multiplication, to an order simpler, more symmetrical and more abstract at the end, so that old age is shown as clarification and not as decay. And the invisible processes of a life can be given a visible order without a single body, with biology, botany and geometry standing in for the person. Against them, much of what the panels carry is a doctrine illustrated rather than uncovered, and the script assumes a key the viewer does not have. Much of what the cycle gives is a state, buoyancy and joy at monumental size, and a state ranks below a meaning.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation is warm and of one kind: delight at a scale that dwarfs the viewer, transport rather than terror. It comes at the first sight of the ten together, sheets over three metres high in colours no painting of 1907 carried at that size; in the loose forms floating like buds or cells in childhood; in youth and adulthood, where the forms swell, double and crowd to the edges, the densest passages of the cycle; and in the drop into old age, where circles and ordered figures stand quiet and the eye feels the cooling as a change of air. Height is high and recurs across the ten. What holds it is the single register: no darkness, no dread, and some panels read at a distance as decoration.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked: the ages of man, an archetype as old as the riddle of the Sphinx and the Greek ages, carried in painting by Titian’s Three Ages, Cole’s The Voyage of Life and, in af Klint’s own decade, Munch’s frieze of life. Here it is load-bearing: the titles, the numbering, the division by two, two, four and two and the change of ground with each age are the structure of the work, and the cycle cannot be read without them. The seed and the flower, the spiral of growth, the egg and the union of paired opposites are built into the motifs. What holds the axis below the gate is the absent particular: no person, no face, no event. The archetype stands on an empty frame.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance: the academic Swedish painting af Klint learned at the Royal Academy (1882 to 1887) and practised in portrait and landscape; botanical illustration; Jugendstil ornament; and the diagrams of theosophy, Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms among them, with the automatic drawings of the Five in the 1890s. The departure: non-objective painting at monumental scale in 1907; a life cycle without a figure; the ornament and the diagram enlarged to the scale of history painting and made the whole picture. Each element had a precedent; none had been made the art itself at three metres. The stake was real and private: a trained painter of forty-five gave her art to a commission she could not show. Held a little below the top because the swerve was not risked in public, and because whether a doctrinal diagram is a swerve in painting is disputed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The size is the knowledge: at the scale of a book plate these forms are diagrams in a manual; at over three metres they are presences that outsize the body, and a life becomes something one stands inside. The sequence is the knowledge: the ages exist only in the passage from panel to panel, and the change of ground is felt as time. The medium bears it: matte, even tempera gives the flat, luminous grounds on which the forms float, without the depth or weight of oil. Substitute one canvas or an easel series and the life as duration goes. Held below the top because the form was meant for a temple never built, and its place, hang and order of approach are unrealised.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the record is short: about forty years of public return, intense for about thirteen. The questions are open and real: whether this is abstraction at all, or a doctrine illustrated in a non-figurative code; whether its priority over Kandinsky changes the history of modern art or only its chronology; how far the work is af Klint’s and how far the circle’s, and what the authorship her notes give to the High Masters does to the attribution; what the letters and script mean; how the cycle stands to Steiner, who saw the work in 1908. Her notebooks promise long study. The panels yield at two distances, the ensemble and the cluster of forms. Many of the disputes turn on history and doctrine more than on what the surfaces give on return.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The intrinsic force is very high: a reorganisation of what painting could be, monumental non-objective painting before the founders of abstraction, with an organic vocabulary and a programme no one else had. The field it entered, Swedish and European painting of the 1900s and 1910s, was not moved; the story of it was. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: nil in that field, for the panels were unseen for eighty years, a delay credited and discounted at its length; and since 1986, above all since 2013, a reorganisation of the history of abstraction rather than its practice, forcing revision of its account of origins, of the place of women in it and of its spiritual sources, with contemporary painters citing it widely. That reach is historiographic more than generative.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. All ten panels survive, kept together, uncut and undispersed, for 119 years, and nothing that made the work is lost or replaced. Presence is charged heavily: for about eighty of those years the cycle was in storage with the family and the foundation, before no public; it has been present to attention from 1986, and widely only from 2013. Fabric: tempera on paper mounted on canvas, large and often travelled, is fragile material, and cannot be cleaned or handled as oil can. A reputation that has risen this fast, partly on a story of rediscovery, has yet to show it can outlast its moment. The long survival of the form lifts the figure a little above what presence alone would earn, and no further.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of tempera on paper at a scale beyond the reach of the arm, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing in three ways. Ground: flat, even fields of colour across nearly eight square metres a panel, without streak or visible seam, which is hard in a water-based medium on paper. Contour: the forms are drawn in a confident, unbroken line at large size, curves held without wavering over a metre. Colour: each age is keyed to a ground and a palette, and the shifts are calibrated, so that the cooling of old age reads as a change of state rather than of mood. The costs: the handling is flat and illustrative, nearer a decorative designer’s than a painter’s; the script is diagrammatic; the range of mark is narrow.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the loose, floating buds and spirals of Childhood, and the ordered circles and symmetrical figures of Old Age. They obey one law: growth, read as the development of a form from germ to order, laid flat on a coloured field at one scale. The change from organic to geometric is not a second physics but the law itself unfolding, and the cycle’s most distant parts are stages of one process. The range is wide: four colour keys, two vocabularies, organic and geometric, and a written element. What holds the axis is that the written element sits uneasily: letters and words are a second order of sign, legible only by doctrine, laid onto a field otherwise governed by visual growth. Held for that seam, not for narrowness.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: a human life in its four ages, the whole span of a person; time, as duration across the sequence; the natural order, in cells, seeds, flowers and shells; the sacred, as a spiritual order the life passes through; sex and generation, in the paired forms; and consciousness, as the development the notes describe. One structure, the growth of a form, carries all of them, and they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family made visible, no labour, no city, no state, no history; and the person is held only as a process, never as a body or a face. More than an abstract field holds, since a whole life is here; less than a figure painting of like ambition. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.1, then The Sublime, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.7. Non-objective painting at the scale of history painting in 1907, the ornament and the diagram made the whole picture; a delight that rises across ten sheets taller than the viewer; a form in which the size, the sequence and the matte ground are the knowledge, so that a life is something one stands inside; and one law of growth that carries the cycle from the loose forms of childhood to the ordered figures of old age.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: a life in its four ages, time, the natural order, the sacred, generation and consciousness are held in one structure of growth; the family, labour, the city, the state and history are absent, and the person is a process without a body or a face. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 7.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0: much of what the panels carry is a doctrine illustrated and a state of joy, and the cycle, unseen for eighty years, moved the history of its field more than the field. The three are one fact: a life given a form with no one in it, made for a temple and kept for eighty years from any public.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.1 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 by five tenths and The Unconcealment at 7.9 by six. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. The twelve sum to 100.2, an average of 8.35 that displays 8.4.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the ten paintings as reproduced and as documented in the exhibition literature (Moderna Museet, 2013; the Guggenheim, 2018 to 2019), not from standing before them. The structure, medium, scale, ages and history of the cycle are known securely; its panel-by-panel motifs only moderately, and they are described here in general terms. The work scored is the cycle of ten as one work, as it stands now, whole: no panel is lost, replaced or rebuilt, and no later hand has added to it. The temple it was made for was never built, and nothing stands in its place; every room the cycle has hung in is a provisional one. The other groups of The Paintings for the Temple, the temple imagined for them, af Klint’s notebooks, the records of the Five and the doctrine the paintings were made to serve are context, and are not scored. Her account of how the paintings were made is paraphrased, since its wording cannot be fixed, and no words of hers are quoted. The years in storage are weighed only as facts of survival and are not charged to the painter. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the months of painting and how long the ten took, the measurements of each panel, the colour of each age’s ground, how the sheets were worked, the number of works in the Temple series, the extent of the notebooks, any colour code for female and male, the present condition of the panels, and Steiner’s response in 1908.