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Artists have long delighted in flowers. It puts to the test their powers of observation and commitment to nature. It brings out the possibilities in media such as watercolor, with its fluid line and still more fluid color.

All well and good, but Hilma af Klint wanted more. She asked “what stands behind the flowers.” A show of that name asks with her, at MoMA through September 27, and it reinforces the case for af Klint as a progenitor of abstraction. Ah, but then what lies behind that? If your answer is nature, she would not mind a seemingly vicious circle. She felt pure form as essential to both.

Hilma af Klint was on hardly anyone’s radar when the Guggenheim served up a 2019 retrospective, but then neither was abstract art when she began to make it. She had a reputation, to the extent that she had a reputation, as a Symbolist, and that could upend the history of abstraction. Her first nature studies at MoMA date to 1908, when itself was barely in flower, and the Swedish artist may not yet have heard of it. Born in 1862, she came late to the job, but she had an interest in flowers even as a student, in essays and notebooks. It took a direction not even she could have expected.

She kept her studies of nature and design separate at first, but barely. Her first dated studies could be symbols in an unknown code. Curves break away from larger circles, condensing into bulbs, buds, or seemingly nothing at all. Undated studies keep their eye on the ground and the forest canopy, with ferns and soil running densely the width of the paper. You are likely to remember them for their texture without quite known whether that derives from botany or art. Subsequent studies, starting in 1918, focus on the radiance of circles and squares without a flower in sight.

Still, af Klint’s drawings have a single impetus, and within a year or two they came together at last. A flower study follows the vertical course of a branch or stem. So, to its side, do small colored circles, like stills from a cinematic color wheel. More often, she pairs flowers with an actual color wheel or rectangle, with diagonals that need never meet. Are they the components of art for art’s sake—like color wheels or nested squares in the days or Josef and Anni Albers—or even today? Do not be too sure.

In those same years, she was pursuing comparable shapes in painting, as suns, pyramids, and altarpieces. They make a point of their radiance, but are they bringing a heavenly vision down to earth? Without the obligation to compose a major painting, the madness is all the greater in drawing. She has a parallel, too, in the painstaking course from nature to abstract art in Wassily Kandinsky. Yet she is less inclined to leave flowers behind, not even when, with her Atom drawings, the lure of science shifts from botany to quantum mechanics. She worked in series and soon had her largest, Nature Studies, and she spoke of all her work as a botanical atlas.

Notice, though, how nature keeps its distance, behind the curtain behind the curtain. Some studies allow words back in, as in her student essays, but perched on spirals. In the show’s last series, radiance becomes the aftereffect of an explosion. Here she unleashes the fluid nature of watercolor, with shades of blue, yellow, and especially red changing its shade as it covers a sheet. Notice, too, though, the humility, even banality, of her approach to nature, much as in her early ferns and fallen leaves. If a fly or an ant enters the scene, it counts as both nature and art, too.

She may seem to have outstayed nature’s welcome, as modern art was coming to be. The popularity of nature studies reflects the ideals of Romanticism, from John Constable to Beatrix Potter, in observation and expression. It comes with a moral, too, ever since flowers in Flemish still life became a parable of decay and death. Still, af Klint refused all that quite as much as Modernism. Swedish winters hang on way too long for her to abandon the first signs of blossoming. What lay behind the curtain was the impress of the curtain itself.

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Exactly one hundred years ago, a show opened in Mannheim with one eye on the future and a middle finger squarely in the public’s face. It was 1925, and Germany’s loss in World War I was not just a bitter memory. Soldiers came home to a shortage of affordable housing, the ruins of a wartime economy, and a new art.

It was time to make demands—on art and on society. It was time for a Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Now if only its dreams could survive the Great Depression and the Nazis—and if only the artists could agree on their objective. For now, they will just have to find what common ground they can at the Neue Galerie through May 26.

Modern art in Germany had always had a confrontational spirit and a shortage of optimism, and the very idea of a New Objectivity may sound like a cruel joke. But then the movement made no excuses for starting over. This was no time for German Expressionism, with its implication of escaping reality. A smaller show, from the Kellen collection, has all that you might expect in wild colors and subjective impressions, through May 5, from Gustav Klimt and decorative portraits to /Wassily Kandinsky and Blue Rider. If a new movement, in contrast, came with contradictions, it also came with the promise of things as they are. Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub of Mannheim’s school of art had given it a name two years before, and even he thought it encompassed two directions that he could hardly reconcile.

Sachlichkeit in German can refer to the facticity of things or the facts, and Hartlaub distinguished “verists,” who faced a gritty industrial present, from “classicists,” who gave the future a more perfect union. If that were not enough, the Neue Galerie finds room for proletarian realism and Cologne progressives as well. It sees a meeting of art and technology, too, including the work of the Bauhaus, founded in 1919. The curator, Olaf Peters, includes Oskar Schlemmer’s painting of the Bauhaus that long graced the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art. It has Marcel Breuer chairs as well. If they are off limits to visitors, the future takes time to arrive.

It may arrive with a felt ambivalence as well. Marianne Brandt at the Bauhaus designed a clock, a telephone, a desk tray, an ashtray, and more. Nothing was beneath her. Models posed for ads for fancy jewelry, and nothing was above them. Still, a proper critique had to extend to consumerism. When an unemployed worker bares her shoulders to Otto Dix, the promise of sexual favors extends to neither one.

Reality here is treacherous, proletarian or not, but seeing it is half the battle. When photos by August Sander capture ordinary workers, they become individuals. Who needs Max Beckmann and his assault on Berlin nightlife when they can emerge into daylight? Other works focus on children, caring for dolls and one another. Others have the dignity of doctors, sowers, or educated readers. Still, it is a dangerous moment in a harsh world.

Exploiters may share the dangers with the working class. When capitalists meet for Georg Scholz or Franz M. Jansen, they cannot drop their pipes, their scowls, or their masks. When high society gathers around a felt table to make plans, most outright headless and mindless, the businessman looks like Donald J. Trump with a mustache, and a general sets down his bloody sword. A blind man’s dog looks bloodthirsty himself. Factories devoid of life for Carl Grossberg, though, look gorgeous. The future may be nearing after all.

Art here all but denies the contradictions, and such as the price of a movement. It also leaves names that few will care to remember. Yet they make real demands, including the demand to face the alternatives. A row of portrait busts runs from youth and determination to near abstract sculpture to a robotic mask. A doctor shares a room of portraits with a madman, because who is not a madman or a patient? The convex mirror above the doctor’s head wants to know.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.