Action at a Distance: Did Physicist Thomas Young’s 1807 Lectures Inspire Some of the Earliest Examples of Abstract Art? Open Access

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a formally trained Swedish artist with deep interests in both science and the occult. Working largely in isolation from the main developments in modern painting in Paris and elsewhere, she created some of the first abstract paintings in the early twentieth century, paralleling—and some argue, preceding—the better-known creations of Wassily Kandinsky and others [1]. However, until relatively recently af Klint’s name remained absent from the annals of art history because she rarely exhibited her groundbreaking work. In accordance with her wishes, her paintings remained hidden for decades after her death. Seeming to have accepted that the art world of her time would not appreciate such an unusual style, af Klint sought advice from philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924, writing: “Should the paintings which I created between 1902 and 1920, some of which you saw for yourself, be destroyed. Or can one do something with them?” [2]

Af Klint’s work survived, tucked away for decades in waiting for a more receptive future audience. Starting in 2013, multiple exhibitions in Stockholm and elsewhere began to introduce the public to her work, and in 2018, a large collection of her abstract art filled the interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York for its American debut. The exhibit seemed to realize af Klint’s documented dream of introducing her paintings to the world from inside a towering spiral temple [3], and it was met roundly with acclaim, breaking all attendance records for the museum [4].

About one year after visiting the Guggenheim exhibit myself, I was updating my lectures for an astrophysics course when I landed on the lectures of British polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829), who is credited with establishing the wave theory of light through his experiments on refraction and diffraction. I included in my slides a digital copy of a color plate from Young’s 1807 A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (Fig. 1), a colossal volume of work spanning virtually all the major topics of natural philosophy and engineering, including Young’s primary research focus at the time: the nature of light and color [5]. Examining the plate, I realized that many of Young’s diagrams resembled key elements of af Klint’s iconic geometric paintings from the Altarpieces, Parsifal, The Swan, and The Dove series, which she completed between 1914 and 1916 (Figs 2–6).

The existing literature describing af Klint’s known sources contain no references to Young, but in several instances, the captions accompanying Young’s color figures even seem to decode elements of af Klint’s paintings or bring attention to details that might otherwise be overlooked. An excerpt from Plate XXIX of Young’s Lectures (Fig. 2a) is accompanied by the description:

This caption almost interchangeably describes features in af Klint’s Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece (Fig. 2b). Could Youngs research have inspired some of the earliest known examples of abstract art?

Young had been formally employed as a professional scientist for only two years when he became the chair of Natural Philosophy at the recently established Royal Institution in London in 1802. As a new professor, and only 28 years old, he was charged with teaching a vast course on all topics relevant to natural philosophy and engineering. Citing his unpopular teaching style, overwork, and low pay, he resigned his post after teaching the course just twice. In a moment of humility to which any new professor might relate, Young concluded his final lecture at the Royal Institution with a profuse apology to his students [6]:

Young’s labors would bear fruit beyond the classroom when his Lectures were published a few years later in 1807 as two volumes covering sixty lectures on hydrodynamics, mechanics, physics, and astronomy. While many of the topics in Young’s Lectures extended far beyond his formal training, the sections on light and color provided an opportunity to describe the novel research he was pursuing at the time. The diagrams illustrating his experimental observations, which he likely sketched himself, are the only full color plates in the two-volume set. Young’s lecture notes from 1802 describe his discovery of new physical methods of producing colors in light. He writes that he had recently “observed two other cases of the production of colours which have been hitherto wholly unnoticed”: the appearance of colors around a hair or fiber held close to the eye, and the colored rings produced “when moisture is interposed between two pieces of glass” [7]. The dispersion of white light into different component colors due to its passage through or near to material objects was a primary focus of Young’s research during this time. The principle of interference, which Young’s most famous experiment had demonstrated, is now credited with overturning Newton’s corpuscular model and establishing the wave theory of light, a pillar of modern physics.

Af Klint’s interest in science is well documented, and her paintings evoke—at times even by name—concepts from evolution, botany, and physics. The fact that she was working during a revolutionary time for theoretical and experimental physics has led art historians to look first to scientists who were her contemporaries as her primary sources of inspiration. However, as discussed further below, an 1823 book in her personal library by the astronomer Simon Anders Cronstrand and a copy of Young’s Lectures in the library of Uppsala University, where af Klint would be commissioned to paint a portrait of Swedish physicist Knut Ångstrom in 1910, would have put astronomy and physics discoveries of the previous century within her reach.

Hints of an invisible universe lying beneath the visible physical realm had been accumulating throughout the century leading up to Hilma af Klint’s prime artistic years. The work of James Maxwell and others, including Volta, Gauss, Ampere, and Helmholtz, in the 1800s led to the development of electromagnetic theory, which implicated invisible charges and currents with producing forces that could affect objects at a distance. The theory predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves, which by 1888 Heinrich Hertz would detect experimentally in the form of radio waves, leading in short order to the explosive development of wireless technology.

Other forms of invisible light were being revealed around this same time. The German-British astronomer William Herschel discovered infrared radiation in 1800, and the existence of additional invisible light was confirmed with German physicist William Conrad Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays in 1895. The latter revelation led quickly to the development of X-ray imaging technologies, which awed the world by making it possible to see through visibly opaque solid matter. Just one year later, in 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel described another unseen phenomenon—radioactivity—leading rapidly to new related discoveries by Marie and Pierre Curie. Simultaneously gravitational and electromagnetic forces were also being actively reexamined with the aim of better understanding whether a medium was required to mediate such forces that could act on objects from a distance. A major paradigm shift on this front would come with the publication of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1916.

This accelerating unveiling of the invisible universe due to advances in theoretical and experimental physics has been credited by certain art historians with a major influence on the concurrent birth of abstract art. Linda Dalrymple Henderson has written of af Klint’s interest in the theory of ether [8], which many leading physicists and subscribers to the occult in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed permeated space and enabled the transmission of vibrations, including light waves. For af Klint, the invisible medium of the ether also connected the physical plane of existence with the astral and mental planes.

The concept of ether as a physical medium that facilitated the propagation of light waves and other forces like gravity that could be felt at a distance had been in both the academic and public consciousness for some time, and Young had been specifically investigating the nature of this theoretical ether in his optical experiments more than 100 years prior to af Klint’s artistic explorations of the concept. An extensive passage from Young’s Lectures speculating about the existence of a universal ether was included in P.G. Tait and Balfour Stewart’s Unseen Universe (1875), a popular text among af Klint’s contemporary spiritualists. Historian Tamara Ketabgian has noted that Tait and Stewart’s book “inspired enthusiastic citation by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), founder of the Theosophical Society” [9]. Af Klint’s work reflects a particularly heavy influence by Blavatsky during the period of her transition to abstract painting, concurrent with her creation of the Swan, Dove, and Altarpieces series [10].

Art historian Briony Fer has speculated about af Klint’s interest in color theory [11], noting that the annotated squares in her Parsifal series (1916) are reminiscent of diagrams in Annie Besant’s and C.W. Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1905)—a likely source for af Klint due to her involvement in the Theosophical Society, of which Besant was President. Fer also suggests Johann Wolfgang van Goethe’s Theory of Colour (1810) as a text af Klint may have known, since her mentor, the philosopher and theosophist/anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, was a scholar of Goethe. I would suggest that the watercolor squares in the Parsifal series also resemble Fig. 439 in the color plates of Young’s Lectures (Figs 1 and 5), which he uses to demonstrate the inversion of color in the lasting imprint of an image on a person’s vision. The diagrams Young used to illustrate his experiments with color vision appear almost like crude sketches of af Klint’s The Dove, Nos. 12 and 13. Paired side by side, these paintings can produce the same visual effects described by Young (Fig. 5).

Af Klint’s iconic series The Swan features geometric imagery with similarities to many of Young’s illustrations of the production and perception of colors achieved through his experiments with refraction, reflection, and diffraction. The black-and-white diagrams depicting the propagation of light through combinations of lenses and reflective surfaces included in Young’s Lectures On The Theory of Optics bear a particularly strong geometric resemblance to The Swan, Nos. 12 and 13 (Fig. 6).

The realistic paintings of swans, which precede the more abstract and geometric pieces in the same series, may also have been inspired by the engravings in Young’s Lectures. The black-and-white diagrams of Plate XXXI, which immediately follow the two color plates in Lectures, contain astronomical illustrations that bear striking resemblance to elements in af Klint’s The Swan, No. 5 (Fig. 7). In Figs 453 and 454 of Lectures, Joseph Skelton (1783–1871) engraved reproductions of the British astronomer William Herschel’s (1738–1822) observations of the constellation Lyra and French astronomer Charles Messier’s (1730–1817) observations of the Orion Nebula. The constellation Lyra includes the star Vega, also referred to as α-Lyrae, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. There is a similarity between the speckled pattern in the background of af Klint’s swans and Herschel’s illustrated observations of Vega as seen through a telescope. The shape of the swan in af Klint’s series also appears to mirror the shape of the Orion Nebula as sketched by Messier and reproduced in Fig. 455 of Young’s Lectures.

It is conceivable that af Klint could have also linked these astronomical sketches to a swan for another reason: The small constellation of Lyra is bordered to the East by the large constellation of Cygnus, also known as the Swan. The head-to-head placement of Cygnus with the lifeless form of the dead goose Anser on the Western conception of the celestial sphere echoes the reflected swans in af Klint’s The Swan, No. 1 (Fig. 8). A complete map of the sky featuring these constellations is included amongst the black-and-white plates in Young’s Lectures, and other popular representations of the Western constellations would have been available to af Klint as well [12].

Consistent with the possible astronomical sources for this series derived from both astrophysics and astrology, af Klint biographer Julia Voss writes, “The higher meaning of the swan is not difficult to understand. For af Klint, it is the bringer of light, the messenger that turns matter back into spirit, that travels between cultures and connects old beliefs with the newest research” [13]. Other elements from the eight full plates of astronomical diagrams in Young’s Lectures can also be found echoed in af Klint’s The Dove series. Ringed planetary subjects that feature prominently in The Dove Nos. 12 and 13 are followed in the series by familiar planetary orbital diagrams, which af Klint intertwines with religious symbolism in The Dove Nos. 9-11.

The Hilma af Klint Foundation maintains a catalog of books af Klint possessed in her personal library at the time of her death. Young’s work is not included in that list, leaving open the question of whether af Klint definitively had access to his Lectures. However, one of the oldest books listed to have been in her collection is the 1823 publication “Om Astronomiens nyare Framsteg” (On the Recent Progress in Astronomy) by Simon Anders Cronstrand (1784–1850) [14], a Swedish scientist and contemporary of Young’s. At the time Young’s Lectures were published, Cronstrand was working as a professor of experimental physics at Uppsala University. Cronstrand would go on to become a professor at the Military Academy Karlberg in 1809 and at the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm later that same year. Given Cronstrand and Young’s common professional interests, it seems almost certain that Cronstrand would have been aware of Young’s work and could have also possessed a copy of his Lectures at the Military Academy Karlberg, where af Klint would be born into a family of naval officers in 1862. In addition to working beside the af Klint residence in the Karlberg Palace, Cronstrand may have had close professional ties to the family. By 1815, astronomical measurements were being applied to precision cartography, and Cronstrand pivoted to working as a geodesist. Af Klint’s uncle Gustav af Klint (1771–1840), an admiral in the Swedish Navy and prolific cartographer of the day, may have had at least a working relationship with Cronstrand. Thus, it is not surprising that some of Cronstrand’s work is found in af Klint’s library. The contents of his book may have encouraged af Klint’s interests, and potentially led her to Young’s wave theory of light, which was well known among scientists by this period and appeared in contemporary books on light and color [15]. Although such a book is not in af Klint’s personal library, she could easily have consulted such sources in the libraries in Stockholm or at Uppsala University.

In 1910, af Klint was commissioned by Uppsala University to paint a posthumous portrait of Swedish physicist Knut Ångstrom. This work would be one of only two paintings, both portraits, known to have been completed by af Klint during a four-year artistic pause that she took while caring for her elderly mother from 1908 to 1912. Knut Ångstrom (1857–1910) would have been an attractive subject for af Klint, as he had been a supporter of the women’s movement and had personally advocated for Marie Curie to receive the Nobel Prize [16]. His research had focused on the atmospheric absorption of solar radiation and the terrestrial reemission of infrared radiation, processes that are now known to underpin the greenhouse effect. His father was the famous Swedish physicist Anders Ångstrom (1814–1874), who had also worked at Uppsala University and made pioneering advances in the field of absorption spectroscopy—the measurement of interactions between light and matter. In honor of the senior Ångstrom’s work, the “angstrom” is now a commonly used unit of measure for visible wavelengths of light.

Two copies of Young’s Lectures are currently held in the special collections of the Uppsala University library. One of the copies was acquired in 1922, but the other copy could have been available to af Klint while she was working on Knut Ångstrom’s portrait. Given the alignment between her theosophical interests at the time and the Ångstroms’ research on the interactions between light and matter, it seems plausible that she could have been inspired to seek out more physics texts at the library during her commission. Such a search would have led her to Young’s Lectures just a few years before she began work on The Swan.

In addition to the question of whether af Klint definitively accessed Young’s Lectures prior to 1914, it is also unclear who drafted the volume’s original diagrams that may have inspired some of af Klint’s abstract masterpieces. The two color plates in Young’s Lectures are a clear departure from the other schematics included in the 1807 publication. Joseph Skelton is listed as the engraver on all plates included in the publication, but the original color sketches were likely drawn by Young himself during his experiments. Notably, there is little evidence to suggest that Young considered them to be artistic. In the first few lines of his lecture On the Nature of Light and Colours, Young speculated that his explorations into the nature of light would have negligible practical applications: “The nature of light is a subject of no material importance to the concerns of life or to the practice of the arts, but it is in many other respects extremely interesting, especially as it tends to assist our views both of the nature of our sensations, and of the constitution of the universe at large” [17].

In retrospect, Young’s outsized influence on our modern understanding of light, the technological applications of which permeate our modern lives—and now, perhaps also art history—shows that both he and other scientists of his generation underestimated the importance of his work. In 1881, more than half a century after Young’s death, the German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz noted:

The belated appreciation of Young’s contributions to modern physics remarkably parallels the posthumous recognition of af Klint’s paintings. Both were decades ahead of their time in their respective fields. Young’s diagrams pushed forward humanity’s understanding of the nature of light, but it would take an artist to recognize and amplify the inherent beauty of his experiments. Coincidentally, Rudolf Steiner promoted precisely this type of interplay between the realms of art and science in a 1915 lecture that was transcribed by Thomasine Andersson and listed among the items in af Klint’s personal library:

I extend deep gratitude to Linda Dalrymple Henderson for her generous feedback and insightful suggestions, which substantially improved early versions of this manuscript. I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to the staff of the Uppsala University Library; the McCormick Library Special Collections and University Archives at Northwestern University; the Nils Bohr Library and Archive at the American Institute of Physics, whose support enabled my research; and to my mother, Mel Lundgren, who cultivated my appreciation of art and provided encouragement for this work.