Youth, The Ten Largest, No 3-4, Group IV, 1907

Hilma af Klint

Narrator: Youth has a lively orange background and is marked by movement. The first of the two paintings includes spirals and shells representing spiritual development. In Hilma af Klint’s cosmology this development is a kind of evolution. Theosophers believed that it wasn’t only the plant and animal kingdoms that evolved, as Darwin had described it in the mid-nineteenth century, but rather that the same applied to human consciousness and spiritual development.

Both of these paintings feature egg shapes that can symbolise the beginning of something. The yellow and the blue again represent the male and the female principle. According to Hilma af Klint’s notes, pink is linked with Eros, the god of love. In early accounts, Eros was a primordial god associated with the very creation of the cosmos.