Finding Lost Voices: The Important Art of Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944) and Didi Jackson's new poetry collection, My Infinity
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered
A few weeks ago, I found myself on a stopover in New York City. I was on my way back from England and headed to Salem, Massachusetts, to present at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. My friend Caitlin suggested we meet up at the MoMA for the Hilma af Klint show, “What Stands Behind the Flowers”. I told her I’d never heard of af Klint before, but I’m always game to see a show at the MoMA. Caitlyn assured me I’d be amazed—and boy, she wasn’t wrong.
The exhibit showcased the paintings af Klint made during the spring and summer of 1919 and 1920. Her goal was to document the flora of her home. “I will try,” she wrote, “to grasp the flowers of the earth.” Seeing the exhibit, of course, spun me into an obsession to find out more about af Klint. Who was this extraordinary artist I had never heard of before?
Af Klint was born in Stockholm in 1862, the fourth child of Mathilda af Klint and the Swedish naval commander Captain Victor af Klint. She had an idyllic childhood, spending summers on the island of Adelsö, close to nature—an influence that would later inform her work. After graduation, she soon established herself as a respected figurative painter in Stockholm. At the same time, af Klint became deeply involved in spiritualism and Theosophy. It was her connection to spiritualism that led to her breakthrough experience as an artist: The Paintings for the Temple (1906–1908).
During this period, she met a group of four other women. “The Five,” as they called themselves, met regularly between 1896 and 1907. As the Guggenheim site explains:
“Each of their gatherings started with a prayer, meditation, and a sermon in front of an altar with a triangle and a cross with a central rose, a Rosicrucian symbol. They continued with an analysis of a New Testament text, followed by a séance during which they made contact with spirits and spiritual leaders. The spirits were individually identified by names, while the spiritual leaders were simply referred to as ‘The High Ones.’ The spiritual contacts were verbally expressed by the group’s medium, as well as by automatic scriptures and drawings. The Five recorded these sessions in a series of notebooks.”
After several years, the spirits began informing The Five about a critical mission in the future. One spirit spoke of future paintings, while another predicted the building of a temple. This spirit also revealed that it would be af Klint who would need to create the temple’s architectural drawings. On January 1, 1906, a spirit named Amaliel gave af Klint a specific assignment. As she recalled in her notebook:
“Amaliel offered me a work and I answered immediately Yes… This was the large work that I was to perform in my life.”
The 111 paintings in The Paintings for the Temple were created following this experience.
Af Klint pioneered abstract painting long before her contemporaries Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. She was confident in what she was creating, and she understood that the world might not yet be ready for her work. In 1932, she declared that her paintings, drawings, and notebooks “should be opened twenty years after my death.” She died in 1944, and per her wishes, her work wasn’t released until two decades later. It’s only recently that her art has come into the public eye.
This week, I got a chance to sit down with the poet, Didi Jackson in order to talk about her latest poetry collection, My Infinity, (Red Hen, 2024) in which many of her poems take on the voice of Hilma af Klint.
Didi Jackson is a poet who currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, poet Major Jackson, and her rascally rescue dog, Finn. She is a Dean's Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches as an assistant professor of creative writing. She is the author of two poetry collections, My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020).
Iris Jamahl Dunkle:
I was thrilled to read your collection, My Infinity, especially the middle section on Hilma af Klint. Can you tell me how you came across her and what drew you to writing in her voice?
Didi Jackson:
Major and I were going to New York—it must have been 2018. It was my birthday, and I’d heard about this amazing show at the Guggenheim (This show ran from October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019) by an artist I’d never heard of: Hilma af Klint. I saw a couple of the featured pieces and thought, “Oh, that’d be fun to go to for my birthday.” They’d extended the exhibit, so we were able to go. And it was amazing. I’ve spent a lot of time in museums, but nothing had ever moved me like her work. I felt such a strong connection.
I was teaching a class at UVM at the time, a course on word and image, and I brought her work into the class. She uses letters and words in a made-up alphabet in her paintings, which I thought would resonate with my students—and they fell in love with her too. This was around the time after Trump’s first election, so students were feeling anxious about the future, and Hilma’s story and art spoke to them. Her work isn’t figurative—it’s abstract but grounded in something that’s deeply felt, and it just resonated in that moment.
At first, I didn’t even think about writing poems about her. I was just so in awe. But around 2020, I wrote the first one, and then realized, “Why am I not writing more about her work?” It was hard, though. When you really love an artist, you want to do their work justice.
Iris:
It was the largest show ever at the Guggenheim, right?
Didi:
Yes, over 600,000 people visited. That’s incredible for someone whom hardly anyone had heard of. You’d expect numbers like that for Van Gogh, but not Hilma.
Iris:
I saw her botanical drawings at MoMA last summer. They were extraordinary, with her own strange symbolic language. I was thinking about Sylvia Plath at the time, and it made sense that they felt connected. I’ve been reading her biography too. She was doing abstraction and automatic writing before anyone else, yet never got credit for it. Why do you think she wasn’t recognized in her time? And why did she control her archive so tightly, requesting it be hidden for 20 years after her death?
Didi:
Julia Voss’s biography explores this, and I think she’s probably right. Hilma’s actual journals haven’t all been translated yet. But Voss argues Hilma really did try to get her work seen. She predates Kandinsky and Mondrian, yet Kandinsky is credited with inventing abstraction.
There’s a piece in the biography that mentions Mary Wollstonecraft visiting Sweden about a hundred years earlier and being shocked at how far behind they were on women’s rights. So, Hilma came up in a deeply patriarchal system—even though she got into the Academy of Fine Arts, women had to use different entrances than men. This was the late 1800s.
She began her abstract work around 1906, and in addition to being a woman, she was doing seances and communicating with spirits, which was considered fringe at best. I believe she truly thought her work was before its time—and that’s why she wanted it sealed until the world was ready.
Iris:
It’s like she had this Gertrude Stein-level confidence—believing in herself without any institutional support.
Didi:
Exactly. And I think a lot about pioneering women like that—how they had to believe in themselves despite everything. They weren’t pandering to trends; they were pushing through to something new. Like Plath or Sexton—writing things no one else had written about at the time.
Iris:
Absolutely. So what was it like being in the spaces Hilma lived in?
Didi:
We went to Stockholm and visited the main cathedral, where there’s this massive wooden carving of St. Michael fighting the dragon that shows up in her paintings. The lighting in the cathedral, the architecture, all of it, you could feel how it influenced her.
We stayed in the old town, near the river, across from the Art Museum. I was really sick, but I still had to go out and see things. We eventually rented a car and went to Munsö, where she spent her summers. I wanted to see the landscape, the churches she sketched, because even in her abstract works, you can see elements of nature, spirals, flowers, things that feel rooted in landscape.
Iris:
And those little figures you included in your book between sections—are those her drawings?
Didi:
Yes, they’re excerpts from her paintings, mostly from The Ten Largest. I chose them intuitively—whatever felt right with the tone of the section.
Iris:
It sounds like that’s how she would’ve wanted you to do it.
Didi:
Exactly. I rarely write persona poems, but when I tried to write about Hilma in my own voice, I kept slipping into teaching mode. So I thought, what if she told her own story? All the facts in the poems are real, though of course I imagined some metaphors. Like the line, “My wrist spiraling like a small snake sliding”—that’s me interpreting what her automatic writing might’ve felt like.
Iris:
And the form in your poem about “The Five”—the letters U and W?
Didi:
Yes! That’s one of the only times I tried to let my form echo her abstraction. The U’s and W’s are everywhere in her paintings, and she believed they symbolized specific things: U was the spirit, W was about fighting vanity and cunning. I took that from her own notes. I also used W to gesture toward “woman,” just quietly. I like letting readers discover those connections without spelling it all out.
Iris:
I loved how you layered your own trauma throughout the collection—like how the poem after Monster transitions into “After My Husband’s Suicide, I Visit a Psychic in Cassadaga.” It felt so intentional. Did writing in Hilma’s voice help you explore your own grief?
Didi:
Yes, definitely. I felt a strong kinship with Hilma, especially in her desire to communicate with the dead. After my husband died, tragically and unexpectedly, I went to Cassadaga, which is a spiritualist town in Florida. It had always seemed spooky to me growing up nearby, but after he died, I just needed to try something.
I saw a medium there, someone off the grid, no sign on her house. I told only one person I was going, my cousin, because I thought maybe I was losing it. But the session ended with something so specific, so uncanny, it left me stunned. I’m trying to write about it in an essay because I can’t quite get it into a poem.
Iris:
Did you feel like you really connected with your husband?
Didi:
Yes. I asked a specific question and got a specific answer—something the medium couldn’t have known. I don’t even know how to explain it. But that experience—and Hilma’s unwavering belief in the unseen—helped me process my grief in a different way.
Iris:
That's amazing. It makes sense you’d connect with an artist who also had that deep desire to communicate with the dead—she lost her sister at a young age. And you had this trauma, losing someone in such a sudden, unresolved way. You wanted to keep talking to him.
Didi:
Yes. I also wanted a sense of closure, to know he’s okay. There’s so much stigma around suicide, and while I think things are improving, it’s still so difficult. The comments and questions people make are so inappropriate. There’s still this old-school belief about eternal damnation, and even if you don’t believe in it, it lingers in the back of your mind. That moment just gave me some peace.
Iris:
Yeah, society hasn't come that far. Just look at how people talk about Sylvia Plath.
Didi:
It's true. And I try to give people grace because they don't know what to say, but still... I was the one mourning.
Iris:
Let’s talk a little about the poem “Choices.” I feel like it really addresses the erasure of women artists. I love the line: “As if, like evening, they were all just temporary 3-hour visitors, or merely because of their presence, made all else eventually blind.” It’s such a powerful meditation. For Hilma, there was so much erasure—not just during her life but even after. She knew she had to wait for the audience to be ready to receive her.
Didi:
Yes, she died in 1944.
Iris:
Right. That number feels significant in your book.
Didi:
It’s weird. I’m not into numerology at all, but 44 kept showing up. My husband was 44 when he died. Hilma died in 1944. I think she started her major work when she was 44. One of the comets that appears in the book returns every 44 years. Mondrian and Kandinsky also died in 1944. Even my friend’s mom died at 44. It was all just very strange.
In “Choices,” I was thinking about the reality for most women artists. Even today, I know people who prioritize family over their art, and that’s valid, but they often don’t have the support of a partner to help balance it. Their art is seen as a hobby or something “cute.” That’s the reality for so many.
I was also reading Three Martini Afternoons—it’s down here by my desk—and just got to the part where Anne Sexton got the Radcliffe fellowship. That was life-changing for her. Same for Tillie Olsen. But how many other women didn’t get that opportunity? They just disappeared—unknown voices, unknown artists, lost potential.
So I started imagining—where could those women be hidden? I thought of snakes under leaf litter, which is something that shows up in Hilma’s art. There’s danger in that image, but also power. Our thin bodies billowing like ballooned cursive words—there’s movement, beauty, and force in that image. It’s not just about erasure—it’s about what could still emerge.
Iris:
Yes! That’s so powerful. What do you think is most important for people to know about Hilma af Klint?
Didi:
I’m in awe of someone who stood behind her work even when it wasn’t loved or understood. She kept going, despite rejection. That’s a powerful example—especially for women. She might not have wanted to be made into an “example,” but she is one. She believed in her work and trusted that someday the world would catch up.
Iris:
Absolutely.
Didi:
I also want people to experience her art. When I do readings, I can’t always show the images, but I always tell people: Go Google her work. People have emotional and physical reactions to it. There’s something in her art that just hits you—it works on your brain and body. That, in itself, is worth experiencing.
For More Information
Details about the past Guggenheim Exhibit: Paintings for the Future
Details about the current MoMA exhibit: What Stands Behind the Flowers
Upcoming Readings and Events
September 20, 10:00 AM - “Out of the Shadows” Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Holly Baggett, author of Making No Compromise at the Kansas Book Festival. Topeka, KS
September 21 - 23 - Western Literature Association Keynote: "Sanora Babb, and the Importance of Telling the Stories About Women Who Have Been Forgotten to Understand the Past, the Present and the Future"
**An audiobook of Riding Like the Wind: the Life of Sanora Babb will be released in September!
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Thank you for featuring Didi Jackson's poetry and the art of af Klint. The story of how they intersect is fascinating!
Absolutely loved this one! I hadn't known about af Klint before I saw her show at the Guggenheim circa 2018. I remember how her vision was that her art would be displayed in a spiral-shaped temple, and there we were in that spiral-shaped museum! You're probably aware, but there's a good documentary about her, "Beyond the Visible," which I think is available on the free library channel, Kanopy.