What are we to make of the Hilma af Klint phenomenon? After decades of obscurity during which her works were stashed away in her nephew’s storeroom, the visionary Swedish artist and mystic’s 2018 Guggenheim retrospective broke all attendance records. In the show’s aftermath, we have seen the emergence of a veritable af Klint industry issuing forth an unending stream of books, posters, T-shirts, mugs, exhibitions, even an opera. In just the last year, this once forgotten artist has been the subject of solo shows at Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Tate Modern, and now, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Jennifer Higgie offers a clue to af Klint’s contemporary resonance in her 2023 book on women artists and the spirit world, The Other Side: “Quite apart from the sheer beauty of her paintings,” Higgie writes, “it’s hard not to see the near-feverish interest in [af Klint’s] work as a reflection of the widespread hunger for new ways of inhabiting the planet.”
Indeed, at the advent of the second quarter of the 21st century, a pileup of crises—social, political, environmental, and technological—seems to have all but extinguished the sense of optimism about the future that flared periodically throughout the 20th century. Af Klint’s mysterious, luminous abstractions offer a salve to our jangled nerves. They also, as Higgie suggests, provide a stand-in for the values of feminism, environmentalism, collectivity, and spirituality that run counter to the current fixation on money, testosterone, and power.
Hilma af Klint: Prunus padus (European Bird Cherry), Prunus avium (Sweet Cherry), Prunus cerasus (Sour Cherry), Prunus domestica (European Plum), from the portfolio “Nature Studies,” 1919.
Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York
Af Klint is just one manifestation of the art world’s embrace of what we might describe as a spiritual turn, with the MoMA exhibition emphasizing her work’s mystical side. The turn we are witnessing is wide-ranging, encompassing everything from an interest in esoteric rituals and the occult to the amplification of Indigenous, non-Western, and precolonial spiritual practices. It includes an embrace of the divine feminine and the framing of ecological concerns in terms of reverence for nature. What unites these disparate ideas is a resistance to materialism and a rejection of our heedless instrumentalization of all things earthly, from nature to culture.
The days when a whiff of religious belief or spiritual concerns would discredit an artist are long gone. Consider, for instance, the foregrounding of spirituality in the last two Venice Biennales. In 2022 Cecilia Alemani grounded “The Milk of Dreams” in the surrealism of Leonora Carrington, who became a fulcrum from which to explore myth, magic, spirituality, and “post-humanism,” often from a very female point of view. Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 edition, “Foreigners Everywhere,” focused on Indigenous and non-Western traditions that provide alternate visions of humanity’s relationship with nature, the spirit world, and the cosmos. The current environment has also engendered a reconsideration of the influence of once marginalized religious traditions, among them the millenarian Christian Shaker movement whose aesthetic impact is the subject of two current shows, one at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston and the other at the Vitra Design Museum in Switzerland.
Gordon Hall: Leaning Back (1), 2021.
Courtesy the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Another sign of the spiritual turn are the in-depth treatments at various major museums of spiritually inclined artists, most of them women. Among recent examples are María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who referenced Santería rituals and divinities in her 2023 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, and Amalia Mesa-Bains, who took over El Museo del Barrio with a series of altarlike installations that celebrated female saints and deities from Catholic, Aztec, and ancient Greek traditions. Currently at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Carrie Mae Weems’s retrospective features a new installation titled Preach (2025), which explores the role of religion and spirituality among Afro-descendant Americans across the generations. Central to all three of these explorations is a dive back into spiritual traditions at odds with the secularized version of modernity that has shaped so much thinking about contemporary art—until now.
IT IS IMPORTANT TO emphasize here that this spiritual turn is not really a turn among artists, who have long been champions of alternate realities and transcendent experiences. Prior to the 19th century, Western art and religion were deeply entwined. But this did not end with the arrival of Modernism: Charlene Spretnak’s 2014 book, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, unspools a persistent thread of spirituality running through Modern art from William Blake to the present. What we are seeing today is a turn by the institutional art world toward exhibitions that embody the search for a different set of values.
Why now? Times of upheaval have historically engendered a spiritual turn, and ours is no different. At present we are in the throes of mighty conflicts over gender roles and gender identity. Social media and AI are forcing us to reconsider the meaning of selfhood. We seem able to muster only feeble responses to the potentially world-ending ravages of climate change. Meanwhile, the populist rage that is upending long-established social and political norms has culminated in the return of a deeply polarizing leader. The political resistance that met Trump’s first election is much more muted this time, the outcome perhaps of a sense of powerlessness. In these troubled times, frustration and exhaustion are leading many to search for ways to transcend the chaos. Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump’s ascendence coincides with a reversal of the decades-long decline of religious groups in the United States.
Ava Muntell: The Woman with a Million Eyes, ca. early 20th century.
Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass; Collection Tony Oursler
We find precedents for our current turmoil in the 19th century. Then as now, the country was bitterly divided in a conflict that led in 1861 to civil war. Not unlike our own algorithmic revolution, startling new technologies like electricity, the steam engine, the telephone, and the telegraph were remaking daily life. Faith and science were at loggerheads as Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined traditional religious beliefs. On the social front, labor struggles, racial strife, and the battle for women’s rights ignited ugly political reactions.
Not coincidentally, the 19th century was also a golden age of spiritualism. This is a phenomenon explored in the exhibition “Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums,” currently on view at the Ringling museum in Sarasota, Florida. Curated by George H. Schwartz of the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the traveling show presents a highly entertaining tour of the objects and practices employed by magicians and mediums to convince a credulous public of the possibility of communication with the dead.
A lithograph promoting stage magician Howard Thurston’s magic show, 1929.
Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass; Muntell and Beattie
From the mid-19th century through the early decades of the 20th, spiritualism—the belief in and practice of communication with the dead—captured the imagination of a large public. By 1880 there were an estimated eight million spiritualists in America and Europe. The show and its accompanying catalog focus on the mechanics and commodification of spiritualism as both a form of entertainment and a species of religious belief. The curatorial framework emphasizes the alternately symbiotic and antagonistic relationships between magicians and mediums as they adapted each other’s techniques while undermining each other’s credibility.
The catalog details some of the reasons for the spiritualism craze, among them the comfort it offered a populace traumatized by war, its apparent alignment with science, and its convergence with the birth of modern advertising techniques. Only one essay touches on the artistic manifestations of spiritualism. Written by artist Tony Oursler, whose own work is indebted to spiritualism and who is an avid collector of the movement’s ephemera, it discusses the spirit-guided painter Ethel Le Rossignol. Her kaleidoscopic figurative paintings were created in collaboration with a deceased friend known only as J.P.F.
The massive catalog for “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art,” an exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2022, contains a deeper dive into the philosophical underpinnings, historical significance, and artistic repercussions of spiritualism. Curator Robert Cozzolino follows the spiritualist thread from its birth in the traumas of the 19th century to its present-day influence on artists as diverse as Oursler, Howardena Pindell, Carolee Schneemann, and Bill Viola. Cozzolino remarks that “to remember is to confront ghosts, to ask what they want, to make amends, and to learn to live with them,” adding, “artists assert these ideas and often willingly court otherworldly contact as a way to move forward.”
IF THE 19TH CENTURY is one touchstone for our current unrest, the period between the two World Wars offers another. A series of shocks, among them the carnage of World War I, the cataclysm of the Great Depression, and the rise of Fascism, galvanized the artists associated with the Surrealist movement. They reacted to the failures of individualism, capitalism, and nationalism with an embrace of fantasy and dreams. Although many of the artists were involved in revolutionary politics, their real mission was a revolution of the spirit. They believed change would emerge from within, as a product of the expanded consciousness that comes from relinquishing the hold of reason.
Leonora Carrington: Nunscape at Manzanillo, 1956.
©Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Once considered an aesthetic backwater, Surrealism has, in our equally troubled times, become intensely popular, with particular focus directed toward women Surrealists—several of whom embraced personas as magical being, goddess, and witch. “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity,” on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2022, stressed the occult interests of Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Maya Deren, Kay Sage, and Remedios Varo. The Pompidou Center’s traveling “Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism” is the latest in a string of Surrealist blockbusters; it opens in June at the Hamburger Kunsthalle before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Individual artists are also getting deeper looks, with Maruja Mallo’s retrospective on view now at Centro Botín in Spain, and Leonora Carrington becoming almost as much a cottage industry as af Klint. “Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver,” currently at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, draws from her productive midcentury period, and features some of her less familiar paintings—works illuminating the truly spooky nature of her inner world. They are filled with strange creatures and spectral human figures whose inner light seems on the verge of dissolving into the surrounding shadows, borrowing from the Kabbalah, alchemy, Celtic myth, ancient Egyptian pictograms, and Druid magic, as well as a very personal vocabulary of symbols referencing metamorphosis and hybridity.
This spring also brought a lesser known but equally fascinating Surrealist-influenced artist into view. Ithell Colquhoun was included in the historical section of Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale, but she has until now received less attention than some of the other heroines of that show. This may be because she separated herself from her fellow Surrealists to settle in a remote area of Cornwall, England, home of ancient Celtic stone circles, Druidic rituals, and Arthurian legend.
“Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds,” a major retrospective of this visionary artist’s work organized by Tate St. Ives and traveling to Tate Britain in June, should help rectify her obscurity. Not just a painter, she was also a scholar and writer whose work traverses Jewish Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Egyptian mythology, and Hindu Tantra. Born in India and raised in southwest England, Colquhoun displayed an interest in alchemy and the occult early on. During her time at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the late 1920s, she became involved with various occultist organizations, and with members of the British and French Surrealist movements. By the time she moved to Cornwall, she was infusing Surrealist automatism with her knowledge of various esoteric traditions. Colquhoun’s resulting work ranges from early Daliesque tableaux full of vaguely neoclassical figures and alchemically inspired spatial diagrams to nature-based abstractions and, finally, to a set of fully nonobjective Tarot cards.
Much current work in a spiritual vein moves beyond the 19th century’s concern with communion with the dead and the Surrealists’ preoccupation with unconscious knowledge to explore questions about our relationship to nature. We see this in the growing interest in Indigeneity, which often offers more holistic connections to the land, and in the feminist tinge in so much of today’s spiritually inclined work. Women’s metaphorical and historical identification with nature, once derided as essentialist, now offers a counter to the extractive and exploitative paradigm that pervades the industrial world.
Saya Woolfalk: Plucked from a Jangling Infinity (for Daphna Mitchell, My Mother-in-Law), 2023.
Courtesy Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Saya Woolfalk is one artist approaching nature’s spiritual side. Her midcareer retrospective currently fills two floors of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, and centers around a long-term project: the creation of an alternate reality that she titles the Empathic Universe. This world is at once trippy and mystical, a version of a futuristic utopia that envelops viewers in a sensory overload of light, color, and sound. The part-human, part-plant beings that populate it have been transformed by an ambiguous technology to assume an empathic consciousness attuned to the rhythms and processes of nature. Like af Klint, Carrington, and Colquhoun, Woolfalk deploys her art to create portals into another world that is rife with animism, hybridity, and the promise of connection with spirits and energies beyond ordinary human perception. She says, “I want audience members to experience the exhibition space as a cosmological space. Someplace where they can reimagine their bodies’ relationships to nature.”
Which brings us back to af Klint. The Guggenheim’s 2018 exhibition helped fan the institutional art world’s enthusiasm for spiritually inclined work with an emphasis on the artist’s role as a conduit for the voices of her spiritual guides. “Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind Flowers,” currently at the Museum of Modern Art, brings a different aspect of the artist’s work into view. It centers on af Klint’s “Nature Studies,” a portfolio of 46 botanical drawings that she created in 1919 and 1920 after she had distanced herself from her spiritual guides. In some ways, these were a return to the botanical and zoological illustrations she had created for various scientific encyclopedias as an income source while she pursued her esoteric work. But for “Nature Studies,” she merged her scientific and spiritual concerns, incorporating geometric diagrams that situated these precisely drawn plants into otherwise invisible energy and spiritual fields.
The foregrounding of nature in these works provides another perspective on the af Klint story. Dubbing her work “mystical empiricism,” art historian Daniel Birnbaum remarks, “her version of abstraction is compatible with the processes of teeming nature rather than the precision of heavenly geometries.” As such, it underscores the powerful connections between the spiritual forces that lure artists toward other dimensions and the vision of nature as a realm of vibrant energies and entwined relationships. Artists who explore this version of spirituality find it, not out there in an all-powerful creator or on some distant and disembodied astral plane, but closer to home in our own surroundings. For them, the spiritual turn is a turn toward this world, toward an earth that is alive, potentially sustaining, and deeply vulnerable. It is a sense of spirit that seems particularly attuned to our precarious times.
