Botanist Lena Struwe in the Hilma af Klint’ exhibit, “What Stands Behind the Flowers,” at the Museum of Modern Art, showing 20th century herbarium sheets and Hilma af Klint’s notebooks and floras describing plants featured in the exhibit. Photo credit: Åke Struwe.
A year ago, Rutgers botanist Lena Struwe received a call from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York asking her to participate in a research collaboration investigating a set of recently discovered botanical drawings by Hilma af Klint, the esteemed early 20th century artist from Sweden, whose oversized abstract paintings were hidden for many decades after her death.
The work by Struwe and MoMA on the botanical drawings would soon reveal unexpected aspects of af Klint’s scientific knowledge and the ways her early botanical experiences shaped some of her art.
Cover of Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2025.
The collection, titled Nature Studies and acquired by MoMA in 2022, is on display, for the first time, from May 11 through September 27 in the exhibition, Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers. The 46 botanical works featuring wildflowers, weeds and edible plants were painted by af Klint during the spring and summer of 1919 and 1920 at her studio outside Stockholm, Sweden.
“When I went to MoMA in the spring of last year and saw these drawings for the first time. I was astonished. These are traditional botanical drawings of common plants but with an unknown and unique dimension,” says Struwe, director of the Chrysler Herbarium and professor who teaches botany, evolution and nature journaling at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
Struwe earned her doctoral degree in Systematic Botany from Stockholm University and grew up only 30 miles away from where Hilma af Klint made the drawings. “When I was a child, our family used to sail in the summers around the islands where af Klint had lived, but despite that it was more than 100 years after her birth in 1862, she was then still unknown as an ingenious artist.”
“I know all these plant species Hilma painted by heart; they are part of our Swedish culture and folklore. I’m so familiar with the landscapes Hilma lived in and the lives and features of these plants, from the first signs-of-spring bright yellow coltsfoot flowers to the unassuming sedges in the meadows.”
Many of the plants af Klint painted are present in northeastern United States as weeds, like dandelions, which happens to be one of Struwe’s current research subjects.
“People have mostly focused on Hilma af Klint’s fantastic abstract art, but from our research we now know that she was a holistic person, and her paintings had deep spiritual meaning. We’ve discovered that, from an early age, she was educated in natural history, especially plants, and was taught by some of the foremost field botanists of the 1870s,” says Struwe.”
Field collecting tools of the type that Hilma af Klint might have used in the 1800s – a wooden herbarium plant press, a brass magnifier, and a vasculum, a metal transport box for transporting collected live plants. Photo credit: Susanne Ruemmele, 2024.
“I also discovered that Hilma has likely pressed plants as part of her classwork as a teenager and that she kept her school flora with handwritten notes until her death in 1944,” she adds.
When Johannes Lundberg, curator at Swedish Museum of Natural History’s herbarium, searched for fungi and plants collected by af Klint after an inquiry by Struwe, he discovered seven unknown scientific drawings of mushrooms made by af Klint in their archives of millions of natural history specimens. It is now clear that af Klint was not only an abstract painter, but also a skilled scientific illustrator, hired to make botanical drawings of fungi for a book that never was published. Specimens from a student herbarium made by a young Swedish woman from the same time and area as af Klint’s school years were also discovered by Struwe in the herbarium at University of Oslo, Norway. They are also now on display in the exhibit, through a special loan, likely being the first time ever scientifically collected plant specimens are showcased at MoMA.
Through these botanical watercolor paintings, af Klint sought to reveal, in her words, “what stands behind the flowers,” reflecting her belief that studying nature uncovers truths about the world. Each botanical illustration of a species is paired with a diagram, all different and depicting the properties she perceived they had. Some examples are concentric circles, a pinwheel of primary colors, checkerboards of dots and bright arrows, or crosses sunken in the ground.
Hilma af Klint. Convallaria majalis (Lily of the Valley), Geum rivale (Water Avens), Polygala vulgaris (Common Milkwort). Sheet 11 from the portfolio Nature Studies. June 10–11, 1919. Watercolor, pencil, ink, and metallic paint on paper, 19 5/8 × 10 5/8 in. (49.9 × 27 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Drawings and Prints Fund and gift of Jack Shear, 2022.
“This exhibition and the research leading up to it have expanded our understanding of Hilma af Klint’s practice. This is an artist with a deep interest in the natural world. We have learned that her plant knowledge and formal and informal botanical experience has shaped her artistic vision,” says Jodi Hauptman, The Richard Roth Senior Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA, and the curator of the exhibition.
Struwe’s discoveries are detailed in a chapter titled, The Botanical World of Hilma af Klint in the printed, well-illustrated exhibit catalogue, Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers that accompanies the exhibition, alongside af Klint’s drawings and unpublished writings at MoMA. The book also includes essays by the exhibition curator Jodi Hauptman; Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University; and MoMA Paper Conservator Laura Neufeld, which analyze the imagery, materiality, and artistic knowledge of these never-before-displayed botanical works by af Klint.
“I always tell my students, when you get an opportunity, don’t say no too quickly. Always explore unexpected opportunities because you don’t know where they might lead you,” says Struwe. “This started as a small consultation for MoMA and has blossomed into a fantastic collaboration and a new research field focused on Hilma af Klint’s botanical world.”
Struwe continues, “Sometimes serendipity and unexpected connections make you amazed, and in this project, we have had many of those gasps of astonishment. Not only did I grow up and knew Hilma’s flowers as part of a joint Swedish heritage, but we also discovered that my grandmother’s aunt, a teacher and amateur botanist, attended the same girl’s public school in Stockholm as af Klint in 1872.”
Coincidentally, Struwe picked up watercolor painting a few years ago and her work with MoMA has her thinking differently about the connection of art and science in her own life.
“Working with Hilma’s botanical art have made me think differently about colors, patterns and forms in both nature and art. Colors were really important to Hilma, and she used them so boldly in her diagrams. There is meaning to her colors and symbolic shapes that we haven’t discovered yet,” says Struwe. “There is still so much left to discover in her work, this is just a first scratch on the surface of her understanding and interpretation of the world around her, seen and unseen, scientific and spiritual.”
Struwe is both thrilled and a bit bemused that she has become the go-to expert on Hilma af Klint’s botanical world.
“I never expected my memories of wildflower meadows, well-used field guide floras, and long summer vacations help me in future scientific and art history endeavors in the United States. I want to continue to create bridges of shared knowledge and excitement between art and science.”
