Artists And The Spirit World

In 2018, an exhibition of deliriously strange and beautiful paintings by a little-known theosophist and spiritualist, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It became the most popular show in the institution's 60-year history. Included in the exhibition was af Klint's The Ten Largest, which she claimed was painted directly through her by a spirit guide. `I remember standing in front of The Ten Largest and realising I had never encountered a suite of paintings that was so baffling and so exhilarating,` Higgie says. `Wandering from picture to picture was like travelling through the exalted corridors of someone's mind.`

Why did these works remain obscure for so long, and then go on to capture the imagination of so many?

Across this series of essays, Higgie re-evaluates the influence of spiritualism on the art of the past 150 years: how it helped shape movements such as modernism and surrealism, but was largely ignored by art critics and historians until recently. Why were women written out of the story? And why are so many artists turning to mysticism now?

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie is the writer and presenter of a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

Jennifer Higgie traces the impact of the spirit world on modernist art.

As a teenage art student, Higgie was in thrall to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, commonly hailed as the pioneer of abstraction in Western art. Yet she would only learn years later that `Kandinsky's brilliance evolved in response to meandering, often heated, conversations that spanned genders, communities, belief systems and centuries`. Challenging the ‘lone genius' and ‘great male artist' narratives, Higgie describes how Kandinsky developed his approach in conjunction with notable female artists such as Gabriele Münter, was in thrall to theosophy and published an essay, Towards the Spiritual in Art, in 1911, the same year as he painted Composition V. Yet according to one pre-eminent critic, until recently, the art world found it `indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.`

Across this series of essays, Higgie re-evaluates the influence of spiritualism on the art of the past 150 years. Why were women written out of the story? And why are so many artists turning to mysticism now?

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie presents a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

The roles of spiritualism and women artists at the beginning of western abstraction.

An elf-like child, leaning against a tree in a springtime forest glade, plays a pipe. It's an image created by Italian/British artist and illustrator Estella Canziani in 1914. Two years later it sold 250,000 copies. `As all hell rained down upon the fields of Flanders and the Somme, it would seem that every muddy trench had a copy of the painting pinned to its walls - a talisman of a better world.`

In this series, Higgie traces the stories of artists who have connected with spiritualism and produced radical innovations. In the late 19th century, the likes of Richard Dadd created wild, hallucinogenic paintings inspired by fairies. But Higgie is also interested in the flip side - `the world of spirits and fairies as a space that privileges solace over innovation`, which Canziani communicated to so many through The Piper of Dreams. What does this gentle imagery add to the stories of ghosts and seances, the abstract and the surreal, that Higgie is navigating through?

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie presents a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

Fairy fever and art's response to World War I.

Ithell Colquhoun was one of the female surrealists whose work belatedly forced Andr退 Breton to acknowledge their contribution to the movement. In her 1938 work, Scylla, `Colquhoun refutes herself as a one-dimensional being,'` Higgie says. `She is complex, intellectual, her legs are fleshy and phallic; she's a landscape, a monster, a sea nymph, a woman. She will not be reduced to a type; her gender is not a one-liner.`

But until the last decade or so, Colquhoun's legacy was little-known. Now her name is often cited as an influence by contemporary artists, inspired by her `rallying call to automatism` and radical ideas about gender and the environment. `As a female artist unabashed by her sexuality,` Higgie writes, `she was vocal that women must be artistically, emotionally, mythically and sexually empowered. Her work also reiterates that despite our protestations, human beings are more open to different energies than perhaps we realise.`

Across this series of essays, Higgie re-evaluates the influence of spirituality on the art of the past 150 years. Why were women written out of the story? And why are so many artists turning to mysticism now?

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie presents a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

Celebrating the artist who championed automatism, feminism and the value of other realms.

`More and more contemporary artists and curators are exploring the spiritual realm and questioning its exclusion from the art-historical canon,` writes Higgie. `The hashtag ‘witch' has 15 million posts on Instagram, millennials are into feminist witch parties, and astrology and tarot are booming.`

This final essay takes Donna Huddleston's 2013 Witch Dance as its focus, tracing a line back to the pioneer choreographer and dancer Mary Wigman's 1926 work of the same name. Huddleston's is a performance piece in which scenes unfold as if in a trance. Glamour - with its original allusions to sorcery and the occult - pervades the work, as eight female dancers move in and out of light and smoke, hands splayed `in an evocation of terror, tension or power, fingers pointing to the sky, arms raised in supplication`.

As Higgie rounds off her re-evaluation of the influence of spiritualism on the art of the past 150 years, she celebrates the revival of interest in other realms, within the art world and beyond it too.

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie presents a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

How alternative ways of understanding the world are inspiring contemporary artists.