One work amid the hundreds in a flabbergasting retrospective, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” at the Guggenheim Museum, is so good that it knocked my sense of the show momentarily askew. Af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic—a mystic primarily, though a dab hand at painting—who died in 1944, at the age of eighty-two. She left instructions that none of her work be shown until twenty years after her death, including her magnum opus—a hundred and ninety-three paintings, most of them made between 1906 and 1908, and intended for display in a temple only sketchily conceived, much less built. Seventy-six of those are at the Guggenheim. (Not until the late nineteen-eighties did European and American museums begin showing any works by af Klint; her first solo show, ever, occurred in 1988, in Helsinki.) It seems that af Klint, fed up with her uncomprehending contemporaries, wagered on a more spiritually attuned future audience. Might that be us? It’s a tall order. The art is fearfully esoteric. But something about it resonates with a restlessly searching mood in present culture, hostile to old ideas. Af Klint has a lot of people’s rapt attention. From what I hear, young artists of many stripes are mad for her.

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Photograph by Albin Dahlström; courtesy the Moderna Museet, Stockholm

The least of the excitements is a case being made by some art historians, and advanced by the show’s fine curator, Tracey Bashkoff, that af Klint, working secretly in Stockholm in 1906, was the inventor of abstract painting, beating Wassily Kandinsky, in Munich, to the title by five years. I have no problem with such an elevation being retroactive, given that hardly anyone saw the relevant works during af Klint’s lifetime, even as worldwide attention to Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich—for starters—established abstraction as an attribute of modernity. But the claim really compels only if you’re still in thrall to the weary modernist mythos of progress in art. (The critic Thomas B. Hess remarked, in 1951, “Abstract art has always existed, but until this century it never knew of its existence.”) Today, when “art” has come to mean anything that you can’t think of another word for, the game of historical priorities is turning into a sport for specialists. In af Klint’s case, there’s the further hitch that, on her own terms, she operated outside time.

Photograph by Albin Dahlström; courtesy the Moderna Museet, Stockholm

She was born in 1862, near Stockholm, into a family with a long male line of naval officers and navigators. At school, she was exposed to mathematics and botany while beginning to paint. She graduated with honors from the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in 1887, and was granted a studio, shared with two other artists, in an officially sponsored building at the heart of the Stockholm art world. By this time, she had already embraced spiritualism, and had been attending séances since she was seventeen. (When she was eighteen, the death of one of her sisters intensified her zeal.) She painted landscapes and portraits in a naturalistic vein, earning money from their sale, and she travelled in Europe. But her life in Stockholm came to center on the Five, a group that she founded with four other women, in 1896. At regular séances, they received messages from supernatural “High Masters,” which they documented in notebooks and in skittery drawings that call to mind some that I’ve seen (and—full disclosure—long ago made) by trippers on hallucinogens.

The spirits had identities: Amaliel, Ananda, Clemens, Esther, Georg, and Gregor. In 1903, Georg and Ananda announced the need for a temple filled with paintings. Two years later, Amaliel gave af Klint the commission. (I’m reporting from the show’s catalogue. I have no idea how this transaction was managed.) Her works to that end began with efforts including “The WU/Rose Series”: a set of confident and gorgeous small oil paintings that suggest the development of a complex language of symbols. Then came “The Ten Largest” (1907), a sensational suite of immense works in tempera on paper glued to canvas. Each measures more or less ten and a half feet high by nearly eight feet wide. Two are themed “Childhood,” two “Youth,” four “Adulthood,” and two “Old Age.” The painting that initially seized—and, as I came to realize, misled—my attention is titled “No. 3, Youth,” which struck me as, indeed, a knockout feat of abstract art, whatever its motivation.

Photograph by Albin Dahlström; courtesy the Moderna Museet, Stockholm

About a dozen spiral forms—differing in design, size, and color—jostle beside and below a mandala of concentric circles, all energetically brushed against an orange ground. Some suggest natural forms. (A tiny image of a snail provides a reference.) Others spin into what look like tunnels. The mandala’s central circle, pink, is quartered by a vertical blue line and a horizontal yellow one. (Blue meant female for af Klint, and yellow indicated male.) Each quadrant contains a petal shape, blue or yellow, that encloses two abutted white ovals and is flanked with inscriptions reading “ave maria.” Balancing the dominant impact of the mandala is a nested group of seven ovals, crisply outlined in white—ineffably lively—in the three primary colors, the three secondaries, and near-black. The over-all stylistic effect is so fresh that the picture might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now. Having been transfixed by it, I turned a judgmental eye on its nine neighbors, all of them sharply distinctive and often beautiful, but lacking the same pitch of equilibrium and cumulative force.

Photograph by Albin Dahlström; courtesy the Moderna Museet, Stockholm

That was on my first visit to the show. On my second, something shifted. The rest of the suite gradually asserted a principled intention that seemed indifferent to aesthetic comparisons—and even to art, at all—because it is subservient to something more important. Each picture, and even each detail of each picture, signifies. (For one example, af Klint’s assignment of “ave maria” to youth may allude to Catholicism as an immature phase of spiritual growth.) No constituent work functions apart from the whole. Af Klint wasn’t exercising a style, despite the exceptional éclat of “No. 3, Youth” and of several other works in the show. She was channelling visions received from a spirit world. Whether or not any such sphere exists depends, I guess, on what you mean by “existence.” Were it not real for af Klint, we wouldn’t be talking about her now.

Courtesy the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm

The spell broke in 1908, with a visit to her Stockholm studio from Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian polymath whose “spiritual science,” as he termed it, evolved from Theosophy and other mystic tendencies of the time into programs for reform in various fields, education among them. (Steiner schools persist today.) He told af Klint to give up otherworldliness and to proceed on her own intuition. It was ruinous advice. She all but stopped work for the next four years and, once she resumed, she never recovered the selfless focus and intensity of her temple pictures, despite occasional coups of inventive design and expressive panache. What happened, I think, was the loss of an extraordinary degree of freedom that had been vouchsafed to af Klint by her beliefs and guarded, in secrecy, from vulgar eyes. She had been alone on a peak, until she was cast down by a sense of being seen—and sized up—by what she took to be unimpeachable authority.

Photograph by Albin Dahlström; courtesy the Moderna Museet, Stockholm

As far as I know, there is no escape for mortal beings from time. But experimental ideas of practical access to eternity exerted tremendous sway on educated, intelligent, and forward-looking people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a cutoff that was roughly coincident with the First World War. William James died in 1910 without having ceased to urge an open-minded respect for occult convictions. The time’s cascading scientific discoveries gave an impetus to searches for an empirical truth that might lie at the common core of all religions, a goal that couldn’t seem much more far-fetched, at first thought, than, say, the search for subatomic particles. Nor could it have the malign effects of the political ideologies that formed the next big wave of incautiously invested human hopes.

You can probably forget about texting Gregor and Amaliel. But the concentrated spirituality—egoless consciousness—that is delivered from that era by the best of Hilma af Klint’s work feels like news that is new again. I don’t know what to do with or about it. Maybe some of our artists will. Meanwhile, looking seems a good start. ♦