The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is undergoing a major reevaluation that has seen her portrayed as a pioneer of abstraction on a par with Mondrian and Kandinsky. My paper will focus on af Klint’s The 10 Largest (1907), a series of paintings that are amongst her largest not merely in scale but also in philosophical ambition. The titles she gave to the works denote a succession of stages in a cycle of human life from childhood, to youth, adulthood, and old age. This is represented using an allegorical format in which plant and animal motifs substitute for direct portrayal of the human. My paper aims to investigate ‘life’ as a theme in nineteenth century biological science and consider its relevance to af Klint’s abstraction.

A comparison of The 10 Largest with Philip Otto Runge's Times of the Day series of engravings that allegorise the stages of human life as times of a day (as well as seasons) and are replete with botanical imagery, serves to underline af Klint’s affinity with Naturphilosophie. In biology and physiology, such concerns were registered in the study of generative processes and notions of developmental stages - epitomized by the new field of embryology. The first three volumes of Karl Friedrich Burdach’s Die Physiologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft (1836-38) were devoted to ‘the history of life’ and dealt in turn with generation, procreation, the development of the embryo, and the ages of man, including death. Recapitulation theory, moreover, proposed that the individual in the course of its development repeats the stages of evolution of the species. With its central subject of a ‘cycle of life’, The 10 Largest can be seen to draw together fundamental themes of generation, growth and evolution that preoccupied af Klint in her other major series Ur Chaos (1906-07) and Evolution (1908). These works attest to af Klint’s awareness of images newly revealed by microscopy that demonstrated the role of the male and female gametes in fertilization and the details of cellular mitotic division. With such recent advances, it must have seemed that life was on the verge of yielding up its last secrets to science.

Among the biological ideas circulating at the turn of the twentieth century, a resurgent vitalism was very congenial to af Klint’s pantheistic and spiritual leanings. My paper will argue that vitalism not only informed the content of af Klint’s work but also determined its form by fostering a tendency to abstract. (Study of af Klint thus sheds light on the turn to abstraction more generally.) Vitalistic biology fuelled the study of form and pattern in nature, subjects with aesthetic crossovers recognised by a succession of authors, among them Goethe, Heckel, Blossfeld, and Wentworth Thompson. A self-propagating tendril line, especially prominent in the series The 10 Largest, is one of several ‘abstract’ motifs in af Klint’s painting that give expression to an autonomous life force. Another is the spiral. Theodore Cook, in The Curves of Life (1914), a study of spirals in nature and art, concluded that: ‘with very few exceptions the spiral formation is intimately connected with the phenomena of life and growth.’ Occurring with such frequency in af Klint’s work as to be almost a surrogate signature, even determining the architecture of the temple that was to have housed The 10 Largest, the spiral is an abstract distillation of her abiding preoccupation with ‘life’.