Angels from the spirit realm told Hilma af Klint that becoming a vegetarian would fuel her creativity. This great Swedish artist, whose pioneering works predate the first purely abstract compositions by the likes of Kandinsky and Mondrian, was used to taking advice from higher forces. She was a member of the marvellously named De Fem (the Five), a group of female artists who organised seances and made art under the guidance of spirits called Ananada, Amaliel, Clemens, Esther, Georg and Gregor. “There are foods that cause lethargy in the body,” Af Klint once wrote. “There are foods that sustain the body, and finally there are foods that come from the opposite direction, that sustain the body in a non-material way.”
I think about those words as I stroll with Briony Fer through one of the most beautiful rooms in Europe, a gallery at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet containing a series of paintings called The Ten Largest. Perhaps without a vegetarian diet, these grand grids and intersecting circles – suggesting shells, wings, swans, flowers and sunbursts – might never have existed. Nor, perhaps, would her proto-pop art palette of sunny oranges, feminine blues and masculine yellows (expressing physical and spiritual love) have been so thrilling.
