Georgiana Houghton’s only major showing of her drawings in her lifetime was not a success. It was an elaborate affair at the New British Gallery in London organized at her own expense, but of the 155 pieces produced over a ten-year period, she sold only one. Nor was the critical reception particularly warm. According to a recent account, “most of the critics were surprised and alienated, dismissive, malicious, or amused” (Althaus 2021b, 34).

Despite this disappointment, today there is a growing recognition that Houghton’s art is quite beautiful and worthy of our attention and that she and not the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) may have been the first to introduce works that were not tied to recognizable objects—abstract art. For decades, art historians have placed the beginning of abstract art at 1910 when Kandinsky produced his first nonrepresentational works, but Houghton’s exhibition of abstract drawings was held forty years earlier in 1871. Furthermore, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint began painting beautiful abstract works beginning in 1906, four years before Kandinsky. Given the many challenges faced by women artists well into the twentieth century, it seems likely that sexism played a role in the telling of this story.

Apart from any claims of being the first, these three artists¹ and several others in the surrealist and abstract art movements had something in common: spiritualism. To varying degrees, they believed that what was being expressed on their canvases was not of their invention. They were mere transcriptionists, creating a physical manifestation of the imaginations of other beings or spirits. As a result, the birth of abstract art owes as much to the spiritualist movement as it does to any individual artist.

 

Georgiana Houghton

Georgiana Houghton² was born in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, on April 20, 1814, the seventh of ten children (Althaus 2021b). Although her father was a wine and brandy dealer in the Canary Islands, she grew up primarily in London and was educated in France, where she and her sister Zilla studied art. Georgiana never married and lived with her parents until their death in the 1860s.

Bereavement often provokes a desire to communicate with the dead, and as a result, the spiritualist movement experienced peaks of interest after the U.S. Civil War and World War I because so many soldiers did not come home. In Houghton’s case, she was particularly moved by the death of her sister Zilla in 1851, soon after the birth of her fifth child. Writing in the program to her exhibition, Houghton described her spiritualist beginnings: “In the summer of 1859 I first heard of the possibility of communion with the Spirits of those who had passed away from the mortal form” (Althaus 2021b, 40). Houghton and her mother attended a séance given by a neighbor, and she had also heard about the psychic experiences of the medium Elizabeth Wilkinson. Soon Georgiana and her mother began making their own attempts at communication with the dead.

Elizabeth Wilkinson’s husband, William, was the editor of Spiritualism Magazine and author of the book Spirit Drawings (1858), which described Elizabeth’s production of spirit drawings (Hawkins n.d.). William’s brother Garth Wilkinson was a homeopath and translator of the Swedish mystic philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose philosophy was an important influence on nineteenth-century spiritualism. William and Elizabeth Wilkinson’s eleven-year-old son died in 1856, and in their séances, the Wilkinsons believed that he was speaking through Elizabeth. As described by Wilkinson in Spirit Drawings, Elizabeth began to produce drawings and writings, which she maintained had been authored not by her but by her dead son’s spirit.

Following the Wilkinsons’ example, Houghton began using a planchette (see above) to make her own drawings. The planchette was similar to those used today with Ouija boards except that, rather than being used as a pointer, the V-shaped end held a pencil that could be used to draw or write on paper. Houghton petitioned the spirit world to see whether Zilla, who was a trained artist in life, might guide her hand, but the response that came back assigned a spirit named Henry Lenny, who was described as a deaf and mute artist. Henry very vigorously guided Houghton’s hand and even controlled the substitution of pencils of various colors.

As was the case for many spiritualists of the Victorian era, Houghton’s mediumship was embedded in a deep religious faith. The clergy did not officially sanction spiritualism and communication with the dead, but the many spiritualist newspapers of the period were often explicitly Christian. As described in her 1882 book Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, Houghton’s séances typically began with a recitation of The Lord’s Prayer, and many of her spirit drawings reflected religious themes. The banner photo for this article is titled The Eye of the Lord and in producing it, Houghton’s hand was purportedly guided by seven different archangels.

Georgiana Houghton’s 1871 art show may not have been a success, but she achieved some prominence in the London spiritualist movement from the 1860s until her death in 1884. In addition to her book about her séances at home, she wrote a second volume about spirit photography titled Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (1882), which focused primarily on the work of London spirit photographer Frederick Hudson.

Houghton’s description of Hudson’s photography was entirely praising and credulous, which may be surprising to modern viewers because the photos seem so obviously faked. But in the mid and late nineteenth century, photography was still a new and somewhat mysterious technology. Few people were able to detect double exposures and other forms of manipulation, many of which were easy to accomplish once the photographer retreated to the darkroom to develop the prints. Even naturalist and independent codiscover of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace, himself a spiritualist, found many of Hudson’s images convincing; however, he conceded that Hudson had cheated on occasion “to satisfy everyone” (cited in Fischer 2004).

Hudson did have his critics, both within the spiritualist community and among skeptics. Competing spirit photographer John Beattie and other critics pointed out several problems. For example, many of the cloaked ghostly figures had their faces obscured, making it difficult to identify them as the loved one they were supposed to be. In addition, when the cloaked figures or their clothing appeared in front of the sitting subject, as can be seen in pictures 3 and 4 above, critics argued that the photographs must have been staged with the complete awareness of everyone involved. The controversy surrounding Hudson was such a point of debate in the London spiritualist community that it split factions into “Hudsonist” and “anti-Hudsonist” camps (Fischer 2004).

After Alfred Russel Wallace wrote two articles supporting the validity of spirit photography, Eleanor Sidgwick of the Society for Psychical Research responded by making her own investigation. She concluded: “After eliminating what might certainly or probably be attributed to trickery, the remaining evidence was hardly sufficient in amount to establish even a prima facie case for investigation” (cited in Fischer 2004, 34). Thus, the scientific door closed because Hudson and the other spirit photographers had been rejected by a group that was open to the validity of communication with the dead.

Hilma af Klint

The other likely unsung progenitor of abstract art is the Swedish painter Hilda af Klint. Klint was born on October 26, 1862, in Karlsberg Castle (Karlsbergs Slott) near Stockholm. Her father taught astronomy, navigation, and general nautical science to naval cadets at the Karlberg Military Academy (Althaus and Voss 2021). Hilma showed talent in art at an early age and began her art education at the Technical School in Stockholm. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm began admitting women in 1865, much earlier than many European schools, and at the age of twenty she was enrolled.

Hilma af Klint’s most important works were created beginning in 1906 under the influence of her study of spiritualism and Theosophy, the mystical religious movement associated with Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky. Beginning when she was seventeen years old, af Klint participated in séances and was thought to have skills as a medium. When her sister Hermina died in 1880, af Klint’s interest in religion and communication with “the other side” increased.

 

At a séance in 1904, a spirit named Ananda prophesied that af Klint would paint images on the astral level that would represent the immortality of humanity. During two other séances that year, a spirit named Georg gave Hilma af Klint the assignment to make the necessary architectural drawings for a temple, and in 1906 a spirit named Amaliel gave her the task of making the paintings that would become the plans for the temple. This was the origin of a series Hilma af Klint undertook between 1906 and 1915 called “Paintings for the Temple.” Most of these works are abstract paintings, and some predate Kandinsky’s first abstracts.

Hilma af Klint faced considerable rejection during her life. Her earlier figurative works were better received, but her abstract spiritualist paintings did not easily find an audience. She applied to exhibit her work at the World Conference of Spiritualist Science in London, and initially the leadership turned her down. Only after friends advocated on her behalf did this group agree to display her work at the 1928 congress—the only public display of Hilma af Klint’s work during her lifetime. Based in part on this experience and her belief that her art would be better understood in the future, af Klint requested that her works not be publicly shown again until twenty years after her death. But she is no longer hidden away in obscurity. In 2018, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City mounted a major exhibition of her work that broke records for attendance (600,000) and for sales of the show catalogue (Ferren 2019).

Spiritualism, Psychology, and Modern Art

The connection between spiritualism and modern art is much bigger than just these two mediums. The Swiss painter Emma Kunz (1892–1963) was also a healer who was believed to have a number of psychic powers. She claimed her complex geometrical works were records of natural energy flows (Althaus 2021a). In 1942, she visited a quarry and claimed to have discovered strong energy fields and a healing rock that she called AION A. A powder form of AION A is being marketed for the treatment of a variety of ailments on the Emma Kunz website (https://www.emma-kunz.com/en/aion-a/) and on Amazon’s UK website; however, AION A was out of stock on the Amazon site when I checked. The Emma Kunz website says AION A can be purchased at Swiss pharmacies and chemist shops.

 

Wassily Kandinsky himself believed in a kind of spiritualism that played a role in his art. In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky asserted that colors produce a psychic vibration that can be felt in the human soul (Kandinsky 1977, 24). In addition, some artists of the Surrealist movement, which began in Europe after World War I, employed automatism as a means of breaking away from previous traditions. Unlike the religious forms of spiritualism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the automatism of the surrealists was grounded in Freudian notions of the unconscious. Art critic Fabrice Flahutez suggested artists used automatism to “disorient the mind, disrupt the senses, celebrate the absurd and the accidental” (Flahutez 2021, 240). The Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta (1911–2002) said “the only way to reproduce these psychic landscapes photographically is to automatically translate on the canvas the messages that come from the depths of our minds” (cited in Flahutez 2021, 240). The automatisms of the surrealists were not transcriptions of messages from the spirits of the dead. Instead, automatism was a means of breaking away from the chains of consciousness and the conditioning of civilization.

Abstract and less representational forms of art began to appear just as photography was becoming a popular way of making images—spirit photography aside—that were remarkably close to reality. This technological development undoubtedly set the occasion for visual artists to break away from traditional forms. For the artists discussed in this article, a common thread is a loss of personal control. Spiritual artists such as Georgia Houghton and Hilma af Klint believed that their physical movements were being controlled by the spirits of the dead. Furthermore, planchettes such as the one used by Houghton move very easily—almost as if you had not touched it—which further breaks down the sense of physical control over its movements. Kandinsky believed he was sensitive to psychic vibrations that came from various colors and communicated with the human soul, and the surrealists were tapping into the Freudian unconscious.

Being truly creative and making something entirely new may require breaking away from conventional modes of thought. It is almost a cliché for novelists to claim they don’t know what their characters will do next, and E. L. Doctorow is credited with saying, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” These are all statements that highlight a sense of lack of control during a creative activity, which may be a very effective mindset for these kinds of tasks.

Hilma af Klint, and Wassily Kandisky emerged as artists during periods of great upheaval and change. There were threats to traditional religious views; active reform movements, including temperance, abolitionism, and suffrage; and the tragedies of war. This was the crucible that fostered spiritualism and mysticism, which in turn changed the course of the visual arts.

Today, science-minded people understand that the dead do not speak to us—through a planchette or by any other means. Nonetheless, we can still appreciate the beauty produced by artists who held these beliefs. From the beginning of human history, art has been inspired by religious beliefs, many of which have been long ago discarded. We do not have to believe in Greek mythology to appreciate the beauty of Antonio Canova’s sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1793). Nor do we have to endorse spiritualism to recognize the artistic accomplishments of Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, and Wassily Kandinsky. Indeed, we can go a step further and credit their achievements to them in a way that they did not.

 

Notes

1. For anyone who is interested in these artists and can get to New York City, there is a major show of Kandinsky’s work at the Guggenheim Museum through September 5, 2022. Eight paintings by Hilma af Klint can be viewed at the David Zwirner Gallery through February 5, 2022, and there is a large exhibition of surrealist works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 30, 2022.
2. The observant reader will recall that I first wrote about Georgiana Houghton in my August 4, 2021 column “French Science & Pseudoscience: A Skeptic’s Tour of Paris” /exclusive/french-science-pseudoscience-a-skeptics-tour-of-paris/

References

Althaus, Karin. 2021a. Emma Kunz. In World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, eds. Karin Althaus, Mathias Mühling, Sebastian Schneider. Munich: Hirmer, 162–173.

———. 2021b. Georgiana Houghton. In World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, eds. Karin Althaus, Mathias Mühling, Sebastian Schneider. Munich: Hirmer, 30–41.

Althaus, Karin, and Julia Voss. 2021.Hilma af Klint. In World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, eds. Karin Althaus, Mathias Mühling, Sebastian Schneider. Munich: Hirmer, 80–93.

Ferren, Andrew. 2019. In search of Hilma Af Klint, who upended art history, but left few traces. The New York Times (October 21). Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/travel/stockholm-hilma-af-klint.html.

Flahutez, Fabrice. 2021. Automatism. In Surrealism Beyond the Borders, eds. Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale. New Haven: Yale University Press, 240–243.

Fischer, Andreas. 2004. ‘A photographer of marvels’ Frederich Hudson and the beginnings of spirit photography in Europe. In Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, et al. (eds.), The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 29–43.

Hawkins, John. n.d. William Martin Wilkinson—Kingston University Working Paper.

Kandinsky, Wassily. 1977. Concering the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover.

Wilkinson, M. M. 1858. Spirit Drawings: A Personal Narrative. London: Chapman & Hall.