Spiritualist art

Spiritualist art is art made by mediums and visionaries who said spirits guided their hands. It emerged in the wake of nineteenth-century Spiritualism and takes several forms: automatic drawings produced in trance, portraits of spirits seen in seance, ornate symbolic compositions, and 'precipitated' paintings claimed to appear on canvas without human touch. Georgiana Houghton's swirling watercolours of the 1860s were followed by the automatic paintings of the French miner Augustin Lesage and the vast diagrammatic canvases of Hilma af Klint. Because its imagery arose from inner vision rather than observed nature, spiritualist art fed directly into the birth of abstraction, and later into surrealism's automatism. Mediumistic painting remains active today, notably in Brazil.

Defining characteristics

• Trance-driven, automatic mark-making: the hand moved by a 'spirit control' rather than conscious design
• Intricate radiating webs, spirals and floral lattices of fine lines
• Non-representational, symbol-laden fields that prefigure pure abstraction
• Spirit portraits: faces and figures recorded from seance visions
• Layered watercolor and ink with inscribed names, dates and spiritual messages
• 'Precipitated' canvases said to be painted by spirits without human hands

Key figures

• Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884) — English medium whose intricately patterned spirit drawings of the 1860s anticipated abstraction
• Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) — Swedish mystic whose large symbolic paintings, such as The Ten Largest (1907), were made 'for the temple'
• Augustin Lesage (1876-1954) — French miner turned automatic painter of vast symmetrical compositions guided by spirit voices
• Harold Sharp (1890-1980) — British medium who coined the auragraph and developed it as a psychic portrait format

Example works

• The Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ — Georgiana Houghton (1860s-1870s)
• The Ten Largest — Hilma af Klint (1907)

Sources

• Spiritualist art - Wikipedia encyclopedia
• Georgiana Houghton - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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