Georgiana Houghton spirit drawings Georgiana Houghton spirit drawings

Simon Grant, Lars Bang Larsen and Marco Pasi

edited by Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen and Barnaby Wright First published to accompany Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings

The Courtauld Gallery, London, 16 June – 11 September 2016 Organised in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art contents

The Courtauld Gallery is supported by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (hefce)

6 Director’s Foreword

8 “Works of art without parallel in the world” Georgiana Houghton’s Spirit Drawings Copyright © 2016 simon grant and marco pasi Texts copyright © the authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any storage or retrieval system, without the 24 Spectres of Art prior permission in writing from the copyright holder and publisher. lars bang larsen and marco pasi isbn 9781 911300 02 1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 34 CATALOGUE

Produced by Paul Holberton publishing 89 Borough High Street, London se1 1nl 36 Catalogue Introduction www.paul-holberton.net

Designed by Laura Parker ernst vegelin van claerbergen and barnaby wright

Printing by Gomer Press, Llandysul

front cover: Detail of cat. 7, The Eye of God; frontispiece: Detail of cat. 19, The Eye of the Lord; page 7: Detail of cat. 4, 82 List of Works Flower of William Harman Butler; page 8: Detail of cat. 12, The Risen Lord; page 17: Detail of verso of cat. 15, The Eye of the Lord; page 24: Detail of cat. 6, Flower of Samuel Warrand; pages 34–35: Detail of cat. 10, The Glory of the Lord

photographic credits Fig. 2 reproduced by kind permission of the Fyndics of Cambridge University Library; fig. 3 © Bethlam Museum of the Mind; fig. 4 © Archives, Charmet/Bridgeman Images; fig. 6 © ABCD Collection, Paris; cat. 3–15, 17–21 Courtesy of Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia; cat. 16–16.6 Courtesy of College of Psychic Studies, London

director’s foreword

In 1871 a gallery in London’s Old Bond Street hosted what are deeply grateful to Gill Matini, Leslie Price and Vivienne must surely have been one of the most extraordinary art Roberts for their generous enthusiasm, encouragement and exhibitions of the entire Victorian era. It consisted of 155 expertise. Thanks are also due to John Rust and Lucie Forder, works, chiefly watercolours, which the accompanying as well as to Sarah Turner. catalogue described as having been produced by the medium The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Monash Georgiana Houghton under the direct influence of spirits. University Museum of Art, where it was shown in a different These ‘spirit drawings’ are remarkable not only for the form in 2015. We are greatly indebted to Charlotte Day and purported manner in which they were created but also for her staff at MUMA for facilitating the project so professionally. their outstanding visual qualities. Characterised by a striking For The Courtauld Gallery, this exhibition forms part of a combination of rich colours and densely layered forms and strand of programming which concerns itself with alternative patterns they are technically highly accomplished. These histories of drawing. Such projects, by their nature outside the complex non-figurative arrangements of fluid open designs mainstream, are especially reliant upon philanthropic support and minutely controlled surfaces are as original as they are and in the present case, as so often before, that support has creatively persuasive. been provided by the International Music and Art Foundation. The majority of Houghton’s surviving oeuvre is preserved in An additional grant was gratefully received from the Richard the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union in Melbourne, Australia – one McDougall Fund. We thank them both for their generosity. of the oldest institutions of its kind. We extend our sincere Finally, I extend my warm personal thanks to the curators thanks to the Union’s members, and especially to Alan Bennett of the exhibition and authors of this publication: Simon Grant, and Lorraine Lee Tet, for entrusting their works to our care. Lars Bang Larsen and Marco Pasi, all of whom have had a long- The Victorian Spiritualists’ Union shared our ambition to standing interest in Georgiana Houghton’s work. It has been present Houghton’s watercolours once more in London for a pleasure for The Courtauld Gallery to join in their efforts to the consideration of new audiences with fresh perspectives on bring Houghton’s remarkable narrative to wider scholarly and their qualities and the many questions they raise. An important public attention. additional group of works has been lent from the archives of the College of Psychic Studies, London, where they are ernst vegelin van claerbergen beautifully preserved in an early album of spiritualist art. We Head of The Courtauld Gallery

exhibition supporters

Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings is sponsored by The International Music and Art Foundation

Further generous support has been provided by The Richard McDougall Fund “Works of art without parallel in the world” Georgiana Houghton’s Spirit Drawings

simon grant and marco pasi

Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) spent most of her life her loss. Houghton was still grieving for Zilla in 1859 when in Victorian London as a single woman (fig. 1). She came her cousin put her in touch with a neighbour, Mrs Marshall, from an ordinary, respectable middle-class English family, who, it transpired, was a well-known spirit medium. and apart from her active involvement in spiritualism Through her, she took part in her first séance. – then at the height of its popularity – led a relatively The experience astonished her. unremarkable, quiet life. After her death, she was soon After just one session with Marshall, Houghton felt forgotten and, until recent times, her name was rarely that what she had seen and heard was “all sufficient” to mentioned by historians, even in well-documented studies convince her that she was capable of doing it herself, and of spiritualism.1 Yet, during her life she produced some spent the following three months in rigorous training, with of the most astonishing works of art that have reached us help, involvement and encouragement from her mother. from that period – in her own words, “Works of art without Houghton was spurred on by her deeply held Christian parallel in the world”.2 These seemingly abstract and richly faith, and validated her purpose in those terms. Her great symbolic works were hardly appreciated or understood aim was, as she wrote in Evenings at Home, “to show ‘What during her life and were as soon forgotten as their author. the Lord hath done for my soul’ by granting me the Light After more than a century of oblivion, this exhibition and now poured upon mankind by the restored power of catalogue seek to bring Houghton’s remarkable works to communion with the unseen”.4 the attention of a new audience. She soon began with the practice of ‘table tipping’ Houghton was born on 20th April 1814 in Las Palmas, (a process in which, like a ouija board, a table was used to on the island of Grand Canary, the seventh child of George receive ‘messages’ from spirits) and after hearing in July and Mary Houghton. In London she lived in genteel 1861 about the spirit drawings of Mrs Elizabeth Wilkinson poverty, her merchant father having lost money in a series (on whom more below) she turned to drawing. Having of unlucky trading ventures.3 We know surprisingly little of initially made a small number of images with the aid of her biography before her work as spirit artist and medium, a tool known as a planchette, she began the first of her though from her two-volume memoirs, Evenings at Home in free-hand images of spiritual flowers and fruit, led by a Spiritual Séance, we know that she had trained as an artist, growing number of ‘spirit guides’.5 The first of these was but renounced art on the death of her beloved younger a man called Henry Lenny, described as a “deaf and dumb sister Zilla Rosalia, herself a “charming artist”, who had artist”. Later guides included great artists from the past, died in 1851 aged 31. She was deeply affected by her sister’s such as Titian and Correggio. By October 1861 she had death, which had come some years after the loss of her her first communication with her “appointed guardians”, younger brother Cecil Angelo, aged nine in 1826. Like many Zacharias, John and Joseph. At the end of 1862 she began of her generation who witnessed death in the family, she in earnest her “Sunday evening pen and ink drawings”,6 looked to any means to find explanations and comfort for under the direction of a larger group of these “high spirits”.

9 HOUGHTON AND BRITISH SPIRITUALISM More ambitious (and unexplained) apports from other sought to contact her husband Albert after his premature In order better to appreciate Houghton’s artistic activity reports included the appearance of, variously: a six foot death in 1861.15 and the context in which it took place, it is important to sunflower, “sea water and live star fishes”, “three ducks Spiritualism’s ascendancy also came at a time when say something about the development of spiritualism in prepared for cooking”, a pile of snow, and, perhaps most Victorian society was undergoing immense social and Victorian Britain, and also about its social and cultural famously, the transportation of Houghton’s friend and cultural upheaval. Women were beginning to enjoy greater relevance. With its origins in the United States in 1848, fellow medium, the heavily built Mrs Agnes Guppy (1838– personal freedoms, both at home and in the emerging with the famous rappings of the Fox sisters in upstate 1917), from her house in Highbury to central London – world of work, and the ‘darkened room’ of the séance New York, spiritualism arrived in Britain in 1852, when a distance of three miles.11 offered an immensely liberating environment.16 More the first of a long series of American mediums, Mrs Houghton would soon become part of what could be widely, geological findings and evolutionary theories as Maria Hayden (1826–1883), travelled to London. It then called an inner circle of influential spiritualist practitioners well as other scientific advances, coupled with the crisis spread quickly across the country.7 In 1853 the first British that included Agnes Guppy, Daniel Dunglas Home, of orthodox faiths that emerged, led to a fundamental spiritualist journal, The Spirit World, began publication. The Emma Hardinge Britten (1823–1899) and Mary Marshall questioning about the very nature of existence and origin spiritualists’ belief that the living could communicate with (1842–1884), and they would often attend each other’s of man. It was no surprise then, that it would lead many to the dead dwelling in the spirit world was largely played séances. Another important acquaintance was that with explore the possibility of the idea of a tangible afterlife, and, out in the shape of the séance, in which participants would John Murray Spear (1804–1887), one of the most prominent as Lynda Nead writes, a “longing to animate the dead”.17 attempt to contact the spirits of dead family members, American spiritualists, radical agitator, social reformer, and As a result it attracted such intellectual luminaries and friends and others through the conduit of a spirit medium. inventor of spirit machines.12 Spear and his family spent distinguished men as the chemist and physicist Sir William The appearance of mediums able to produce seemingly some time in England in 1863 and became close friends Crookes (1832–1919),18 Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913),19 extraordinary phenomena during the séances, such as with Houghton. He clearly had a significant influence on naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886), created an enormous her, and it was he who gave her the name ‘Holy Symbolist’ biologist, who had published a paper on the theory of interest and made spiritualism almost instantly fashionable (later modified to ‘Sacred Symbolist’), which she cherished natural selection in the same year as Darwin, and engineer with all social classes. By the time Houghton was active, afterwards and sometimes used in the descriptions of Cromwell Varley (1828–1883), best known for his work on spiritualism was well developed, with numerous local her drawings. the transatlantic telegraph cable.20 It is interesting to note groups and societies engaging in private and public Houghton increasingly acquired a position of visibility that Houghton created two spirit portraits of Varley and his séances. Historian of spiritualism Alex Owen remarks within the spiritualist movement. When a body was formed wife. Mrs Varley was one of the most regular attendees at 1. Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884), photograph used that Houghton was a “private medium”, as opposed to a in 1869 to investigate the phenomena of spiritualism, called Houghton’s séances. as the frontispiece to her Evenings at Home in Spiritual “public” one.8 This means that she mostly operated within a the London Dialectical Society, she was invited to give Unsurprisingly, spiritualism also had many detractors.21 Séance, Prefaced and Welded Together by a Species of small circle of relatives and friends, and did not hold public her opinion and describe her experiences as a medium. Several mediums were caught using tricks in order to Autobiography, 2nd series, London, E.W. Allen, 1882 séances open to strangers and for which usually a fee would The final report of the Society, including her testimony, produce spirit phenomena artificially, and frauds were be paid. was then published in 1871, and offers today a very vivid exposed. But for sceptics the problem of spiritualism was During the following years, and probably up to her death, Spirit phenomena would typically include table image of the movement at the time.13 Another sign of not just the fraud but also the sanity of the mediums and she continued to produce drawings, using watercolours rapping, table tipping, levitations, ‘automatic’ writing her prominent role in the spiritualist community was the other persons involved. An article published in the and ink, under their direct guidance. As well as her hand and drawing, as well as, most controversially, ‘apports’ – her election in 1874 to the council of the recently formed British Medical Journal in the summer of 1871 pointed out being directed by her ‘spirit guides’ to create her drawings, or manifestations of material objects.9 Houghton’s own British National Association of Spiritualists.14 that “so-called spiritualistic manifestations are simply Houghton very regularly communicated with other spirits, descriptions in Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance are filled Those who took part in the activities of spiritualists due to a particular nervous temperament, and to certain including family members, whom collectively she called her with examples of séances she held as a medium and hosted ranged from amused dabblers to those who immersed forms of disease which have long been recognised and “invisible friends”. at her house, and those of others that she attended. She themselves in systematic investigation of its method and are thoroughly understood by the medical profession”.22 reports witnessing various fruit and vegetables (bananas, purpose. As such, spiritualism appealed to all social classes, As Alex Owen has shown, female mediumship posed dates, an onion …) as well as flowers and other objects.10 and there were rumours that even Queen Victoria had significant challenges to the dominant values and norms

10 11 of behaviour of mid-Victorian society. The attempt at Pencils and sheets of note-paper were on the table … pet name for Lizzie). However, rather than depicting what medicalisation and pathologisation of mediumship can and soon after the gas had been turned out, one sheet was many viewed as Beatrice/Lizzie’s demise, the painting had be seen, therefore, as a response to these challenges.23 brought and laid lightly on my hand … we then heard the stronger spiritualist meaning for Rossetti. In a letter of 1871 Female mediums could be perceived as mentally disturbed scratching sound of the pencil upon it …. The spirits then to Mrs Cowper-Temple, who would later own a version persons who were in need of medical attention and, in by raps requested a light, when they found that they had of the painting, Rossetti explained that it was “not at all some cases, of forced confinement in psychiatric asylums. been drawing a rather ferocious looking animal … [with] intended to represent Death ... but to render it under the Owen emphasises the relation that existed between these huge claw-like feet.27 resemblance of a trance .... She sees through her shut lids, attempts and the particular social fragility of women at is conscious of a new world.”31 These symbols would also the time, due to their inferior legal status. There is an Rossetti’s friend and neighbour J.M.W. Whistler was also appear in William Holman Hunt’s portrait of his dead wife’s indication that even Houghton’s sanity was questioned. enraptured by spiritualism, and, as fellow artist Mortimer mother Mrs George Waugh (1868), which he painted around In her autobiographical book she writes that at one point Menpes recalled, for years he “pottered with table-turning the same time as a haunting posthumous portrait of his a doctor was called by members of her family to inquire and spirit-rapping”.28 He had also attended a number of wife, Fanny Waugh Hunt (1866–1868). Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’ about her involvement in spiritualism. Georgiana came séances at the Rossetti house. A more sceptical John Ruskin and portraits of women such as Symphony in White, No. 1 to no harm, however, perhaps partly because the doctor had been aware of spiritualism since the poet Elizabeth (or The White Girl, 1861–62) were described by several in question was a homeopathic physician sympathetic to Barrett Browning had tried to interest him during D.D. critics as being seemingly symbolic of transitory worlds. spiritualism.24 Home’s first visit to England in 1855, and had told Ruskin The French critic Fernand Desnoyers thought The White of her experiences with mesmerism.29 His first experience Girl to be a portrait of a medium, and Whistler to be of a séance, however, was not until 1864, through his “le plus spirite des peintres”.32 BRITISH SPIRITUALISM AND VICTORIAN ART friendship with William and Georgiana Mount-Temple, While it is clear that at the time some British artists had Many artists were inexorably drawn to the ethereal and hosted by a friend of Houghton’s, Mrs MacDougall Gregory, an interest in spiritualism – and Houghton was acquainted tantalising world of spirits. Most notable among them and led by Mrs Marshall. However, by 1868 Ruskin had with them – the relationship between art and spiritualism were members of the Pre-Raphaelite group, some of whom “done with mediums”.30 also went in the opposite direction, with mediums who, Houghton had met or who were in close connection with The male Pre-Raphaelite artists reflected their interest in around the mid-1850s, began to produce drawings during 2. Anna Mary Howitt (1824–1884) her network. The most prominent was Dante Gabriel spiritualism by the inclusion in their paintings of knowing their séances. Typically, the mediums who produced these Design with central figure, c. 1857 Rossetti (1828–1882), who had first attended séances at the symbolic references and images of women in trance-like works would ascribe their authorship not to themselves, Ink and watercolour on paper, 190 x 270 mm house of Houghton’s friends the writers William (1792– or dream-like states. While they witnessed spirit drawings but rather to the spirits who they claimed were guiding Cambridge University Library, Society for Psychical Research Archives (SPR/MS/65/9/45) 1879) and Mary Howitt (1799–1888) in 1856–58, possibly being produced, they did not make such works themselves. their hands while in a state of trance or sometimes even in along with his wife Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862).25 After Instead, their considered response was figurative, full consciousness. 33 Siddal’s death, Rossetti had constantly felt her presence allegorical, personal and highly emotionally charged. The One of the first, if not the very first, medium artist to known as ‘Sisters in Art’. She became disillusioned with her and in 1865 organised séance evenings at his Chelsea studio most potent example is Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, of which emerge in Britain was Anna Mary Howitt (1824–1884), artistic practice after Ruskin made some caustic comments in order to communicate with her spirit. the artist made several versions from about 1863. Rossetti daughter of William and Mary Howitt, whom we have about it. She then discontinued her work as an artist and ​Rossetti’s brother William Michael also came under the combined the story of the death of the poet Dante already encountered in connection with the group of the became interested in spiritualism. After a while, she began spiritualist spell, and went to over twenty séances between Alighieri’s beloved Beatrice Portinari with that of his wife Pre-Raphaelites.34 The Howitts were among the most to produce a new kind of art, in the form of finely detailed 1865 and 1868. He kept a séance diary to record the events. Elizabeth Siddal, who had died just a year before the first prominent personalities in the world of British spiritualism and elaborate spirit drawings (see fig. 2). Many of them At one session in early 1868, led by Mrs Guppy, Houghton picture was started, and places her portrait at the centre and their daughter Anna Mary was a writer of fiction, featured complex floral whorls and sinuous, elaborate was present along with artists including William Holman of the story. In it the symbols are clear – the poppy for memoirs, biography and poetry, as well as an accomplished patterns done with a fine hand, some filled with feverishly Hunt.26 Appropriately for the people gathered, “direct death, sleep and consolation (and a nod to her laudanum artist, having trained at Henry Sass’s Art School (at the written pencilled words across the pages. One of her most drawings” were produced by the spirits. As Houghton overdose), and the dove (which Rossetti variously depicts as same time as Rossetti and W.H. Hunt). She had exhibited regular subjects, however, was a female Christ-like figure wrote: red or white) as the Holy Spirit (‘Dove’ was also Rossetti’s her paintings at the Royal Academy, and set up a group that suggests her earlier pursuit of feminist causes had not

12 13 to reach a wider public than that of a normal séance. THE WORKS AND THE MESSAGE Some of them were in fact used as illustrations in Camilla As we have noted earlier, Houghton began practising Crosland’s 1857 book on spiritualism Light in the Valley.38 spirit drawing in 1861, and continued at least until the Another group of early spirit artists based in London late 1870s and possibly even later.45 We can notice a clear was the Wilkinson family, which included the homeopathic development in her style. At the beginning it is easy to physician and editor of Swedenborg’s writings Dr J.J. Garth recognise shapes of plants, flowers and fruits, which is Wilkinson, his brother William M. Wilkinson, owner and confirmed by the titles of the works (see fig. 5). The images editor of the important spiritualist journal The Spiritual are not supposed to reproduce natural vegetation, however, Magazine, and his wife Elizabeth. The Wilkinsons had lost a but have instead a spiritual meaning. Houghton explains, child and thought that the drawings they produced during for instance, that “with the birth of a child into the earth their séances were sent by him. Based on these experiences, life, a flower springs up in spirit realms, which grows day in 1858 William Wilkinson published the first book entirely by day in conformity with the infant’s awakening powers”.46 devoted to spirit drawings.39 Houghton recalled in her What we see in these drawings are the flowers that in the autobiography that it was Wilkinson’s example that gave spirit world correspond to particular persons living, or 40 her the idea to start experimenting with spirit drawing. 4. Victor Hugo (1802–1885) having lived, in the material world. Houghton explains As Houghton’s artistic experiments began to be known Taches-planètes, 1857 that the colours and the shapes have a symbolic meaning, within the spiritualist community, her reputation grew. Pen and brown wash on paper, 450 x 585 mm which can be easily understood by spiritual beings, but not Musée du Louvre, Paris Houghton would show the growing portfolio of her by normal persons: “to dwellers upon earth the pictured drawings to many curious admirers across London, who became numerous enough for Houghton to set up weekly sessions at her home. Among these visitors were a number and clearly showed the influence of her teacher. Several of of spirit artists, including George Childs (1798–1875), these have survived (see fig. 3).43 better known for his romanticised views of the industrial If we look at other countries, such as France, we can revolution, and Thomas Heaphy (1813–1873), a friend of easily find other examples of the relationship between both Charles Dodgson and John Ruskin and known for spiritualism and art. Between 1853 and 1855, while engaging 3. Barbara Honywood (1827–1895) No title (Album Page XIV), c. 1864 his pictures of ghosts. Spirit artists would also come to in spiritualist séances during their exile on the isle of Jersey, Watercolour on paper, 360 x 245 mm her for guidance. Henry Collen (1797–1879) – “a dear Victor Hugo (1802–1885) and his son Charles (1826–1871) Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Beckenham old gentleman”, as Houghton remembered him – had produced a series of remarkable drawings and watercolours been Queen Victoria’s miniature painter but wanted to (see fig. 4). Another famous example is that of Victorien “resuscitate the dormant talent”41 of his spirit drawing Sardou (1831–1908), who, during a period of crisis in his abated. As Rachel Oberter has commented, such a pictorial and, after a few sessions with her, found that he was able career as a playwright, devoted himself to spiritualism and rendering of “the feminine side of Christ” was part of a to make “rather elaborate spiral lines”.42 Perhaps the most began creating drawings and engravings directly inspired strand of “feminist millenarian theology” in Victorian notable and talented beneficiary was a well-connected lady by his mediumistic experiences. Some of them were culture.35 Opinions about Howitt’s drawings differed: the called Barbara Honywood (1827–1895), who had arrived published as early as 1858 in the leading French spiritist writer Margaret Oliphant described them as “wonderful at Houghton’s door in 1863 with a letter of introduction journal La Revue Spirite.44 Sardou’s images show strange 5. Georgiana Houghton 36 Plant of Zilla Rosalia Warren, 8th April 1862 scribble-scrabbles”, while one of the ‘Sisters’, Bessie from Heaphy. At first Honywood produced figurative floral landscapes from other planets and fantastic, otherworldly Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board, Parkes, thought her works were “some of the most delicate, images, much as Houghton had done in her early works, palaces. Renewed success with his dramas made Sardou’s 326 x 237 mm beautiful drawings ever done by a woman’s hand”.37 In but within a year her style had changed and her drawings enthusiasm for spiritualism cool down, which remained Private collection any case, Howitt’s drawings were very probably the first became as colourful and as abstract as Houghton’s own, therefore, like for Hugo, an episode in his biography.

14 15 representations require interpreting”,47 otherwise their true Another remarkable aspect of the drawings is that most meaning will be missed. But one should also keep in mind of them have an appended explanation, which Houghton that what one sees in the drawings is just a pale copy of the usually received from the spirits via automatic writing. original. Their earthly support can hardly render faithfully These texts give us important details about the drawings, the “glorious hues” of the spiritual world. such as the date on which they were composed. But they With these early images the visual language remains also offer us the key to their complex symbolism, which is figurative, even if it is not meant to represent the natural complemented by the explanations in the 1871 catalogue. world. But soon the style becomes increasingly more The texts, therefore, are fully part of the artwork, and the complex, with a point where no clear objects can be strict relationship between visionary images and texts recognised. Interestingly, this gradual shift in style is makes one think immediately of William Blake, who was concomitant with a change in the subject. Beginning an inspirational figure for many English spiritualists. with The Holy Trinity, dated 29th November 1861, we move Although Houghton’s style can be called ‘abstract’ from the various forms of spirit vegetation to abstract avant la lettre, it is also important to keep in mind that her theological notions. According to Houghton “this drawing drawings were never objectless. They are in fact always was the first of the Sacred Symbolism, which I have highly symbolic and they represent ‘something’, even if found the chief characteristic of my work”.48 This ‘sacred this something happens to belong to another world and be symbolism’ seems to be based on a complex system of invisible. The symbolic aspect of her work reduces perhaps correspondences based on colour and shape, of which to some extent the gap between it and that of the other she offers the key in the catalogue of her 1871 exhibition.49 artists active in the period, such as the Pre-Raphaelites. Yellow, for instance, represents God the Father, but One should not push the analogy too far, however, but also faith and wisdom. Orange is power, violet heavenly acknowledge the difference existing between her drawings happiness, and so on. and the high forms of art of her time. A third kind of subject encompasses what Houghton In her ‘abstraction’ Houghton was different not only refers to as “crowns” and “monograms”. They are the from the mainstream artists, but also from the other subtle, colourful emanations of every “thought, word, and medium artists of her time, most of whom remained faithful deed” of a particular person.50 These are like fine threads of to more traditional forms of figurative representation. Of all spiritual matter, which are woven together and can only be these artists, Houghton is clearly the most radical, at least seen by those who have access to spiritual reality. in terms of her artistic language, in the sense that she shows After her early shift to a non-figurative style, Houghton a decisive, uncompromising departure from current artistic remains consistent: all her extant drawings from that canons. While she did this, she still tried very explicitly to moment on show complex patterns of colours without be part of that same art world. No other spirit or medium any apparent, recognisable object (see fig. 6). The only artist during the second half of the nineteenth century, and exception is a drawing dated 8th December 1862, The at least until the emergence of modernism and the avant- Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ (cat. 9). Here the face of a gardes in the early twentieth century, was more consistent bearded man, obviously Jesus Christ, emerges from within than her in this respect. Houghton’s drawings were certainly the usual web of colour lines and patterns. Interestingly supposed to be an illustration of the spiritual world and a enough, a work of this title is not mentioned in the visual support for the teaching of spiritual principles, but catalogue of the 1871 exhibition and may therefore not have she did not see them as purely didactic. Houghton also been included. strongly believed in their artistic quality, which for her made

16 17 their spiritual message even more powerful and cogent. And a long path of evolution, which continues indefinitely after spiritualist cause. Visitors who showed special interest were while she would take no credit for this message, which she death. Advanced spirits turn into angels and archangels and invited to observe her working on drawings at home. Many saw as originating from other sources, she would certainly may offer help from the other world to those who still live of her friends from spiritualist circles visited the exhibition, take some credit for the artistic value of the drawings. In in this one. The drawings allow us to catch a glimpse of the but Houghton found the most sympathetic visitors were the catalogue of her 1871 exhibition she notes that, while spirit world, and they become, therefore, evidence of its members of the clergy (including one who commissioned the spirits could in principle choose anybody to convey existence. a ‘portrait’) as well as artists, such as the satirist Florence their messages, it was logical that they would choose a Claxton and the American sculptor and spiritualist William well-trained artist when those messages needed to take a Wetmore Story. One of the most significant visitors was visual form: “The spirits … can of course better guide the THE 1871 EXHIBITION AND ITS RECEPTION Leah Fox Underhill (1813–1890), who, together with her two trained hand, and make a more speedy progress if they are In 1871 Houghton realised her dream of having a large younger sisters, had played a key role in the origins of the thus relieved from all the elementary part … for no person exhibition of her spirit drawings. She wrote later that the spiritualist movement in upstate New York in 1848.58 can spring, at one bound, to a pinnacle of art perfection, 155 works exhibited accounted for all the drawings in her Houghton’s exhibition was received with a mix of any more than an acorn can in one season become a widely possession, as well as a number borrowed back from their bafflement, hilarity and scorn by the press, with reviewers spreading oak”.51 owners. It offered, in other words – with a possible few unable to come to terms with either the images or their A few more words should be added about Houghton’s exceptions – a full account of her output over a ten-year intent. In one article the reviewer suggested that if own spiritual vision.52 If we place her ideas within the period.55 What is most remarkable about this undertaking “the readers were to imagine such a thing as an accurate broader context of nineteenth-century British spiritualism, is the scale and ambition of her project and the short time copy of coloured and white Berlin wools, all tangled there is nothing in them that is particularly original or it took to come to fruition. After the encouragement of an together in a flattened mass, framed and hung round a odd. Like most British spiritualists at the time, she is artist friend called “Mr L” in her book, she was put in touch gallery, some idea could be formed of the appearance of this eager to show that spiritualism is perfectly compatible with a Mr McNair, a manager for several exhibiting venues, most strange exhibition”.59 In another article the reviewer with Christianity, even if it is a Christianity that is heavily who offered the New British Gallery, at 39 Old Bond Street, writes how “a visitor to the exhibition is alternatively influenced by the large legacy of the Swedish visionary for a period of almost four months over the summer. occupied by sad and ludicrous images during the whole Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and rejects some of In the second volume of her Evenings at Home, Houghton of his stay in this gallery of painful absurdities”,60 while a the dogmas of more orthodox Christian Churches. Just as offers what must be one of the most extensive insights into third exclaims: “We should not have called attention to 6. Cover of the Catalogue of the Spirit Drawings in Swedenborg claimed to be able directly to see the spiritual Victorian exhibition-making. She describes all practical this exhibition at all, did we not believe that it will disgust Water Colours, Exhibited at the New British Gallery, world, Houghton claims to depict it with the help of her matters, including the nature of the catalogue, printed in all sober people with the follies which it is intended to Old Bond Street. By Miss Houghton, through Whose spirit guides and to make it visible for those who do not two versions, one with pink tinted paper and brown cloth advance and promote”.61 This last reviewer goes further and Mediumship They Have Been Executed, London, 1871 possess the gift of Swedenborg’s spiritual sight. But in cover (fig. 6) and a special edition for Queen Victoria, describes how he viewed her work “with horror and alarm, Houghton’s vision we notice a millenarian element which is printed in pink satin and bound in white calf and gold.56 She for we had never been so impressed before with the strange public onslaught – the press had enjoyed lampooning the also typical of her age and especially of the milieus in which arranged an extensive advertising campaign that included hallucinations of which the human mind may be capable .... vagaries of the spiritualist movement since its early years in she moved. She sees her work as announcing a “Third the distribution of leaflets, placards and posters, as well as If we were to sum up the characteristics of the exhibition in Britain. Houghton wrote how the “scoffs of the ignorant”63 Dispensation”, which is supposed to be imminent.53 It is advertisements in the newspapers. She enlisted the services a single phrase, we should pronounce it symbolism were unimportant to her and placed as much regard on the the dawn of the age of the Holy Ghost, an age of increased of a Mr Spencer, picture framer, though she insisted that gone mad.”62 message of the works, as on the artistic skill which they spirituality and proximity to God’s revelation, coming she herself put together each work, “hammering in every Such vitriol was unsurprising at a time when the undoubtedly contained – believing that her art “could not after the two earlier ages of the Father and of the Son. This nail with my own hands”.57 gallery-goer was more likely to see paintings by the be criticised according to any of the known and accepted tripartite vision of history, and the feeling of imminence in Houghton hung the work herself, and decided on prices, Pre-Raphaelites, and the most radical art being painted in canons of art”.64 its denouement, shows the unmistakable influence of the with help from her “unseen friends”. Once the exhibition London was works such as Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Some reviewers, however, were more sympathetic to spiritual tradition of Joachim of Fiore, of which there was a opened, she spent almost every day talking to visitors, Silver – Chelsea and Monet’s Thames below Westminster. what she was doing. The writer for The News of the World strong revival in Britain at that time.54 Human beings are on answering queries and trying to convert them to the However, Houghton, it seems, was prepared for this kind of started off by extolling Houghton’s technique, and the

18 19 way “the brilliancy and harmony of the tints ... engage of the relative support of the spiritualist community, she LATER LIFE AND AFTERMATH attention”.65 To help the reader imagine pictures so unusual sold only one of the exhibited works. But in another sense Soon after the 1871 exhibition Houghton met Frederick for an art exhibition at the time, the reviewer could not the exhibition was not a failure at all, and she reached an Hudson (1818–1900), a photographer who was at that help making a slightly far-fetched comparison with a well- important goal with it. Houghton did not want to show time experimenting with spirit photography.75 She began known contemporary painter: “The idea presents itself to her works only privately to her spiritualist friends and to collaborate with him, appearing in a large number the imagination of a canvas of Turner’s, over which troops acquaintances, as most other spirit artists were doing, of Hudson’s photographs. After a while, however, of fairies have been meandering, dropping jewels as they but rather wanted to exhibit them in a space that would suspicions were raised about the authenticity of Hudson’s went”. Houghton was described as “a clever and tasteful define her as an artist. This is an indication of her desire photographs, which indirectly also affected Houghton. In artist ... a sincere believer in what she says”.66 The author to have her drawings recognised not only as objects with 1882, when her collaboration with Hudson had already then observed that “the lady and her drawings constitute a deep spiritual value but also as artistic works. And that come to an end, she published a book where she described a little poem, fanciful and beautiful, its aims and ends she was consistent in her artistic ambition is confirmed the work she had done with him and confirmed her belief being to establish the holiness and beauty of pure religious by the fact that she submitted her works on a number of in the presence of spirits in his photographs.76 For a principle, and the happiness which it creates in this life occasions to art institutions such as the Royal Academy period, spirit photography became her primary concern, leading to the greater happiness hereafter”.67 Similarly or to the Dudley Gallery, so that they could be included in but after an interregnum she returned to drawing. positive was a review that appeared in Queen, a society their exhibitions.71 It is not surprising that her attempts Alongside her “sacred work”, she accepted commissions periodical set up by Samuel Beeton. At the outset, the were regularly frustrated; what is surprising is that, while for spiritual monograms, which became an important if author made it clear that trying to make sense of what he she was surely well aware of the difference between her art still comparatively modest source of income. Houghton had seen at the exhibition was not so easy: “The water- and the art that was fashionable in her day, she did not lose continued in her last years with her mediumistic colour drawings … are so extraordinary in character, and faith in the value of her work and kept on bringing it to the activities and died in 1884. Her name was remembered are so entirely opposed to one’s ideas of art, ancient or attention of the art world. Also significant is the fact that in for a while within British spiritualism, but both she and modern, that criticism in the ordinary manner becomes the 1871 census, when she had to indicate her occupation, her artistic works were eventually largely forgotten. A difficult, not to say impossible”.68 But in spite of the lack she simply called herself an “artist”.72 In this context it is group of her drawings were shipped some time after of a convenient framework for understanding Houghton’s also worth noting that, soon after her exhibition closed, her death to Australia, but there is no clear evidence as art, it is significant that the reviewer could eventually Houghton took some ultimately fruitless steps to promote to when or why. They came into the possession of the appreciate it also, if not mostly, from an aesthetic point the idea of a larger exhibition of spirit drawings, to which Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, in Melbourne, one of the of view: “Many of the drawings may look like singular and different artist mediums would contribute. She herself first spiritualist organisations in the world, which has 7. Georgiana Houghton 73 confused scrawls; but they are elegantly minute in their noted that she owned a number of such works. preserved them to this day. This collection of 35 drawings No title, c. 1872 tracery, frequently beautiful in form, and in their bold and It is certainly understandable that, when historians is the largest that has survived. A smaller group of seven Watercolour and gouache on paper often violent contrasts of colour never inharmonious”.69 began to rescue Houghton’s drawings from oblivion, they drawings, bound into an album, is cared for by the College laid on board, 326 x 237 mm ABCD collection, Paris One visitor observed that the drawings resembled what tried to place her within the narrative of abstraction, of Psychic Studies in London. A single drawing is part of could be seen through a microscope, whilst another identifying her as an early precursor of the radical evolution the ABCD collection, a private ‘art brut’ collection based suggested affinities with fossilised plant life. Such of artistic language in the early twentieth century. Such an in Paris, and three further works are in private hands. This comments offer a tantalising glimpse of wider aesthetic and interpretation undoubtedly has its merits, but perhaps the is all that is known of Houghton’s artistic work, although conceptual frames of reference for the drawings’ detailed most interesting question is not related to the development further drawings may yet come to light. It is to be hoped patterns and structures.70 of abstraction as a specific style, but rather to the cultural, that the present exhibition will bring fresh attention to From a purely financial point of view, the 1871 exhibition social and even psychological circumstances that made it Houghton’s work and will contribute to a better assessment was a failure. Houghton spent most of her savings on it, and possible for Houghton to create a body of artistic work that, of its exceptional qualities. it almost ruined her. A subscription was raised by friends in relation to her time, was so consistently and defiantly to help her through this crisis. To her dismay, and in spite radical.74

20 21 notes 1 To give just one example, she is not mentioned Egan, Mrs Guppy Takes a Flight: A Scandal of notes, “archetypal of a man who managed London, Adam & Charles Black, 1904, p. 64. the Mind. They were originally believed to be embroidery works used for house decoration, at all in the classic study of British spiritualism: Victorian Spiritualism, Castle Douglas, Neil Wilson to reconcile the Darwinian view of nature, 29 Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years, New the work of a man going through a nervous for instance on furniture or sofas. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism Publishing, 2015. the inexorable workings of evolution, with a Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 349–50. breakdown. 60 Pall Mall Gazette, 30th May 1871. and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914, 11 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 2nd series, belief in the efficacy of spirit agents at large” 30 Cited in Van Akin Burd (ed.), Christmas Story: 44 On Hugo’s and Sardou’s artworks inspired by 61 The Examiner, 27th May, 1871. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985. pp. 97–101. Houghton knew her as Agnes (Oppenheim, The Other World, p. 296). John Ruskin Venetian Letters of 1876–1877, spiritualism see Entrée des médiums. Spiritisme 62 Ibid. 2 Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in Nichol, before she married Mr Guppy in 1867. 20 Richard J. Noakes, ‘Telegraphy is an occult art: Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1991, p. 68. et Art de Hugo à Breton, exh. cat., Paris, Maison 63 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 2nd series, p. 91. Spiritual Séance, Welded Together by a Species 12 Spear projected a number of machines allegedly Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the diffusion of 31 Cited in Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone de Victor Hugo, 2012. 64 Ibid., p. 80. of Autobiography, 2nd series, London, E.W. Allen, under the direct guidance of the spirits of electricity to the other world’, British Journal for (eds.), The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: 45 The latest date we have comes from a drawing 65 Cited in ibid., p. 77. 1882, p. 76. famous scientists, such as Benjamin Franklin. the History of Science, 1999, vol. 32, pp. 421–59. Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910, exh. cat., London, dated 6th April 1877 (The Monogram of Mrs. 66 Ibid., pp. 77–78. 3 Sara Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Georgiana These included a machine for perpetual motion Cromwell Varley’s cousin John Varley (1850–1933) Tate Gallery Publications, 1997, pp. 154–57. Isabel Houghton). However, some of her other 67 Ibid., p. 78. Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, and an improved version of the recently invented was the grandson of John Varley (1778–1842), 32 Elizabeth R. and Joseph Pennell, Life of James works from the same period are not dated and 68 Cited ibid., p. 82. Brighton, Victorian Secrets, 2013, p. 5. sewing machine. None of these machines was painter and astrologer who collaborated with McNeill Whistler, London, William Heinemann, may have been produced later. 69 Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 4 Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in ever commercially successful. See John Benedict William Blake on their ‘visionary heads’, which 1920, p. 74. 46 Georgiana Houghton, Catalogue of the Spirit 70 Ibid., pp. 91 and 96. Spiritual Séance, Prefaced and Welded Together Buescher, The Remarkable Life of John Murray could be called the first automatic drawings. 33 The most complete study of British spirit artists Drawings in Water Colours, Exhibited at the 71 In 1865 the Royal Academy accepted two by a Species of Autobiography, 1st series, Spear. Agitator for the Spirit Land, Notre Dame, John Varley Jr was one of three artists who drew in the Victorian period is the unpublished New British Gallery, Old Bond Street. By Miss drawings but never showed them. In all London, Trübner & Co, 1881, p. v. University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. For the illustrations for Annie Besant and Charles doctoral thesis by Rachel Oberter we have Houghton, through Whose Mediumship They subsequent attempts, coming after her 1871 5 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 1st series, p. 14. Spear’s relationship with Georgiana, see pp. 255ff. Leadbeater’s Thought-forms published in 1905. already referred to (note 9). Have Been Executed, London: W. Corby, Printer, exhibition, Houghton’s works were rejected. 6 Ibid., p. 17. Interestingly enough, Spear’s sewing machine 21 The Spiritualist, writer and friend of Houghton’s 34 On A.M. Howitt and her artistic work, see 1871, p. 8. See Houghton, Evenings at Home, 1st series, 7 There is now an enormous body of scholarly project has been used as a subject for a video William Howitt in a letter to D.D. Home (29th Alexandra Wettlaufer, ‘The Politics and Poetics of 47 Ibid. pp. 89–91; and Houghton, Evenings at Home, literature on spiritualism, which has grown work by Danish contemporary artist Joachim April 1876) complains about The Times, who “are Sisterhood. Anna Mary Howitt’s “The Sisters in 48 Ibid, pp. 11–12. 2nd series, pp. 113 and 128. particularly in the last ten years. A brief but Koester (b. 1962), ‘Of Spirits and Empty Spaces’ always writing against spiritualism”: Archives of Art”’, Victorian Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 49 Ibid., pp. 12, 30–32. 72 Census Returns of England and Wales, 1871, excellent introduction, with suggestions for (2012). The Society of Psychical Research, Cambridge pp. 129–46; and Rachel Oberter, ‘“The Sublimation 50 Ibid., pp. 21–26. class RG10, piece 14, folio 59, p. 40, GSU roll: 838752. further reading, is John Patrick Deveney, 13 London Dialectical Society, Report on University, DD Home material SPR.MS28/358. of Matter into Spirit”: Anna Mary Howitt’s 51 Ibid., p. 5. Ten years later, for the 1881 census, she described ‘Spiritualism’, in Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al. (eds.), Spiritualism of the Committee of the London 22 The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 550 (15th Automatic Drawings’, in Kontou and Willburn 52 Houghton’s religious ideas have been discussed herself as an “artist in water colors [sic] under Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Dialectical Society, London, Longmans, Green, July 1871), pp. 71–72. (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion, by Rachel Oberter, ‘Esoteric Art Confronting the spirit guidance”. Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2005, vol. 2, pp. 1074–82. Reader and Dyer. Houghton’s testimony is at pp. 23 The ‘neurotic temperament’ of women was a pp. 333–58. Public Eye: The Abstract Spirit Drawings 73 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 2nd series, p. 104. Also very useful for an introduction to the 153–57. The report included interviews with and phrase often used by doctors, and many in the 35 Oberter, ‘“The Sublimation of Matter into Spirit”’, of Georgiana Houghton’, Victorian Studies, 74 See the following essay in this catalogue for subject is Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn testimonies from practically every prominent medical profession regarded the work of these p. 348. vol. 48, no. 2 (Winter 2006), pp. 221–32; and further considerations about Houghton’s (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to person in the British spiritualist movement women as a sign of their mania, hysteria or 36 Cited in Wettlaufer, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Maggie Atkinson, ‘Healing Vibrations through relationship to abstraction and a possible Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, at the time. Famous persons who were also mental instability. In his pamphlet Spiritualistic Sisterhood’, p. 143. Visionary Art’, Religion and the Arts, vol. 19 comparison with the Swedish painter Hilma af Farnham and Burlington, Ashgate, 2012. known to have an interest in spiritualism without Madness (1877), L. Forbes Winslow stated that 37 Cited in John Hanners, ‘A Tale of Two Artists: (2005), pp. 339–88. Klint (1862–1944). 8 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, necessarily adhering to it, such as Edward Bulwer spiritualism was “the curse of our age” and Anna Mary Howitt’s Portrait of John Banvard’, 53 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 1st series, pp. v–vi. 75 On Hudson and Houghton, see Sarah Willburn, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, Lytton, were also asked to give their opinion on was the main cause of madness in England, Minnesota History Magazine, vol. 50, no. 5, 1987, 54 On the influence of the Joachimite tradition ‘Viewing History and Fantasy through Victorian Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 67, the matter. particularly among “weak-minded women” p. 204. in Victorian Britain, see Warwick Gould and Spirit Photography’, in Kontou and Willburn 151. 14 Owen, The Darkened Room, p. 67. and among those “of that desponding and 38 Camilla Crosland, Light in the Valley, London, Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion, 9 Drawings produced by medium artists in the 15 As The Year-Book of Spiritualism for 1871 melancholic type known as ‘religious insanity’, so G. Routledge and Co., [1857]. of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and pp. 359–81; and Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: context of nineteenth-century spiritualism are recorded: “Among investigators we may number prevalent in the present century”. 39 William M. Wilkinson, Spirit Drawings: A Personal Twentieth Centuries, Oxford, Oxford University Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, often imprecisely referred to as ‘automatic’ in divines, logicians, and teachers in our schools of For more on this see Owen, The Darkened Narrative, London, Chapman and Hall, 1858. Press, 2002. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, secondary literature. However, as Rachel Oberter learning; physicians and lawyers; men of note in Room, pp. 149–56. 40 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 1st series, p. 14. 55 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 2nd series, p. 44. pp. 84–110. conveniently notes, ‘automatic drawing’ was not the art, sciences and literature; statesmen”: cited 24 Owen, The Darkened Room, p. 151. See also 41 Ibid., p. 142. 56 Houghton, Catalogue. 76 Georgiana Houghton, Chronicles of the a term used by Houghton. In fact, most medium in Oppenheim, The Other World, p. 29. See ibid. Houghton, Evenings at Home, 1st series, p. 24. 42 Ibid., p. 143. 57 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 2nd series, p. 72. Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena artists in the 1850s and 1860s referred to this for the rumours about Queen Victoria. 25 See J.B. Bullen, ‘Raising the Dead: Dante Gabriel 43 These works were discovered in an album in 58 Ibid. pp. 101–02. Invisible to the Material Eye. Interblended with practice as ‘spirit drawing’. According to Oberter, 16 For more on this see Owen, The Darkened Room. Rossetti’s “Willowwood” Sonnets’. Portobello market in the 1930s and are now 59 Daily News, 27th May, 1871. Popular during the Personal Narrative, London: E.W. Allen, 1882. the first instance of the term ‘automatic drawing’ 17 Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, 26 Cited in Mark Cole, ‘A Haunting Portrait by in the collection of the Bethlem Museum of Victorian era, ‘Berlin wools’ were colourful was in an essay written in 1875 by Anna Mary Photography, Film c.1900, New Haven, Yale William Holman Hunt’, The Bulletin of the Howitt, but published only after her death in University Press, 2007, p. 82. Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 77, no. 10, p. 361. 1889. The term was later popularised by psychical 18 Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), respected Hunt had become interested in spiritualism after researchers such as F.W.H. Myers and then chemist and physicist, had been inspired by his wife Fanny Waugh died in childbirth in 1866, became part of the vocabulary of Surrealism Faraday’s proposal of a “fourth state of matter” only one year after they had been married. (‘Spiritualism and the Visual Imagination (see Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria, Oxford, 27 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 1st series, in Victorian Britain’, PhD dissertation, Yale Oxford University Press, date?, p. 224) and pp. 167–68. In his séance diary W.R. Rossetti also University, 2007, pp. 13–16). investigated the paranormal from a scientific noted how the pictures of a crane, an angel and a 10 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 1st series, p. 151. perspective. griffin had been produced “by the spirits”. On Mrs Guppy see also Molly Whittington- 19 Alfred Russel Wallace was, as Janet Oppenheim 28 Mortimer Menpes, Whistler as I Knew Him,

22 23 spectres of art lars bang larsen and marco pasi

Before we discuss the way in which spiritualism has society is not so enlightened as it would like to think, been appreciated in modern and contemporary art, it is but fundamentally split between forces that work for the important to reflect on the broader cultural context in betterment of society and forces that are barbarian and which it has been perceived. dehumanising. To Adorno, twentieth-century totalitarian It is easy to consider the views of spiritualism as an regimes were outcomes of such ambiguous processes affront to rational thought: spiritualists are seen to refuse of modernisation; hence there was not necessarily a the modern order of things because they believe in the contradiction between Nazism’s cult of death and its lively activities of the non-human, and are concerned with techno-industrial vision for society. Adorno also sees ghosts and entities that lack body and substance. modernity’s authoritarian and irrational impulse as a The fact that spiritualist art, on the other hand, has feature of the capitalist world’s culture industry. By often been met with resistance is less obvious and more churning out standardised, repetitive consumables and counterintuitive. Western culture is hardly prone to pandering to infantile needs of consumers, the culture understand creativity as a rational activity. Conventionally, industry issues a veiled call for the consumer to fall in the artistic subject – emotionally or perhaps erotically line and adjust to authority. The presence of the occult charged – lies outside the social norm, and cliché has it that in mainstream media – Adorno’s example is the astrology the artist cannot afford too much self-control unless vital column in the respectable Los Angeles Times – represents flows of intuition and inspiration be limited. We readily to him a cowing and disorienting of people, who in an accept that common sense has little to do with art making. alienating world look for compensation for individual So why is it that spiritualist art has been belatedly weakness; in this case the compensation is not the fascist acknowledged by the art institution? Big Brother, but occult higher powers that similarly lead the Following World War II, the occult was for decades way at the cost of “the neglect of interpretative thinking.”1 tainted by its appropriation by fascism. Nazism’s myths However acute Adorno’s critique of the occult may be of Aryan supermen included occult lore of superior historically, and for the political reality of today, he does mutant races, millennial kingdoms and privileged secret not take the antiauthoritarian history of spiritualism into knowledge. It is also in the post-war era, however, that the account. This is a history that has only been recovered by occult surfaces as a phenomenon in the media mainstream historians towards the end of the twentieth century. It – a bankable role for the occult that we recognise today is now a historically well-established fact that since the from numerous media of popular culture, including TV nineteenth century certain spiritualist groups confronted series such as The Returned, and (pseudo-)documentaries religious authorities, and demanded freedom from featuring mediums and haunted places. dogmatism and ecclesiastical monopoly on spirituality. In essays from the 1950s, Theodor Adorno addresses Spiritualist meetings were often platforms where political both issues. First of all, he responded to the fascist radicals such as suffragettes and abolitionists could speak takeover of the occult. He pursued the thesis that modern their mind. More than just parlour games in darkened

24 25 rooms, spiritualism articulated an active resistance against condition cannot be expressed without them. A spiritualist collective, made evident by the fact that somebody else There are different moments in the history of the social institutions – something that no doubt did not help imaginary may be called upon for a dramatization of was always there with her, whether it was the ‘spirit guides’ appreciation of spiritualist art, and it may be useful to its cultural standing. contemporary capital’s so-called immaterial relations of with which she communicated or her fellow explorers of mention them here.6 If there is a common thread that In the 1960s, the counterculture’s appetite for everything production. The manifestation of a ghost through a physical the other world, such as Mrs Guppy, Mrs Honywood and connects most of them, it is probably the idea that otherworldly and subversive made it adopt the occult. body is called a materialisation by spiritualists. Today it is the others she mentions in her writings.5 This is all a far cry creativity does not depend on rational processes, but is Whatever anti-authoritarian power the occult may have the sublime connectivity and intangible transmission of from the self-relying author. Instead, spirit art was often rather related to particular psychological conditions that had, it did little to restore respectability for the spiritualist digital technologies – out of reach of human perception a group affair, and came out of the togetherness of the seem to challenge the integrity of the self, such as frenzy, movement – exactly because the countercultural update and of the old symbolic orders – that are determining our spiritualist scene. enthusiasm, exceptional forms of inspiration, or even of the occult was intended to be dissonant to a Western, lives more than ever. In general, the occult tests the limits This brings us to the question of how we should madness. This is, after all, a ‘romantic paradigm’ that had bourgeois concept of culture. of the visible. One can call the culture of the occult a non- understand Georgiana Houghton’s art today. For a long-lasting influence on the conceptualisation of art If we now change our perspective and look at the present visual culture: it describes a withdrawal from the regime contemporary spiritualists – whose role in the preservation throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. cultural status of figures of the ghost and the spectral, of visual identification, and, from a contemporary point of of her works has to be gratefully acknowledged – her After the popular success of spiritualism in the second the picture is a different one. Something has changed. view, defies the easy exchange of images in our world of drawings still have the same spiritual message and power half of the nineteenth century, it was in the context of Seen against the backdrop of a historical denigration of proliferating screens. Spiritualistic phantasmagoria may be she saw in them when they were produced. This is more psychology that these specific forms of artistic creativity spiritualism, the contemporary need to make ghosts and used to inquire into the fleeting materiality of things and than understandable. But what about the artistic and could first be appreciated. This is the period in which the spectral legible is striking. This is not only the concern objects, because it offers a vocabulary and a dramaturgy for cultural value of these works? What kind of language do dynamic psychiatry emerged, with the elaboration of of many contemporary visual artists, who in the last decade the imperceptible. It is concerned with strange, affective they speak to us, especially if we do not share the religious various theories of the unconscious that would eventually have begun to engage with spiritualist methods or cultural appearances, and detects relations between bodies where and metaphysical assumptions that were so important to lead to the establishment of psychoanalysis. As has been histories, and thereby reach out to an artistic underdog there does not seem to be any: every turn of the table during the person who materially created them? pointed out by several scholars, these new developments of Western art and thinking. Significantly, ghosts and the the séance becomes a signifying micro-drama; every shudder It is certainly incorrect to assume that the cultural had their roots in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- spectral are also abundantly present in the writing of of the medium becomes an intelligible gesture. Hereby we establishment never paid any attention to spiritualist century theories of animal magnetism, and were therefore many prominent theorists who – so to speak – ought to can forge connections to non-human realms and, ultimately, art. There were several attempts at making sense of it, also related, either directly or indirectly, to spiritualism know better. to the fact of death. Maybe we need spiritualism’s untimely, as well as of other forms of creativity that flourished itself.7 Psychoanalysis was the most successful of these For instance, in one of his last books, Specters of Marx, hybrid, out-of-place, sensuous imagination to connect us within spiritualism from its very beginnings. And yet, in new psychological theories, but it was certainly not the the philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote of the globalised with the many radical ambiguities of contemporary life, or, spite of this persistent, if intermittent, interest, the world only one. Other approaches emerged in the context of world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union as being to use Derrida’s pun, the ‘hauntology’ that we live. of nineteenth-century spirit art still remains largely an psychical research, and more particularly in the writings of haunted by an unredeemed Marxist critique of capitalism.2 This discussion of the cultural evaluations of unexplored continent. The only large collections that one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, Another philosopher, Joseph Vogl, has developed a critique spiritualism may seem like a sweeping approach to take include this kind of art are those specializing in ‘art brut’, the Cambridge scholar Frederic W.H. Myers (1843–1901). of finance capital in the guise of a Specter of Capital, which for a contextualization of Houghton’s work. However, or ‘outsider art’. The rest can be found in the archives of In his book Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily “appears as a cipher for those powers from which our some of the answers to the questions above lie in the way dedicated organisations, such as the College of Psychic Death, which was published posthumously in 1903, Myers present takes its laws”.3 In her Ghostly Matters (2008) Avery in which spirit art overreaches a conventional art concept Studies in London and the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, discussed the problem of artistic genius, and referred Gordon describes haunting as a sociological method that by violating the autonomy and the categorical hygiene we both of which are lenders to the present exhibition. But specifically to automatic drawing as a particular case of connects fact and fiction to evoke those subjects and voices use in order to separate religion from science, art from this is surely just the tip of the iceberg. Judging from the what he called the “subliminal uprush”.8 For Myers, a whole which have disappeared from history.4 society, ritual from method, artistic genius from an ordinary number of spirit artists we see mentioned in the spiritualist dimension of the human mind lies beyond the threshold Such academic discourses point to a renewed sensibility individual. The problem with spirit art is that it has never press of the time, we can easily conclude that much has of consciousness. He called it the “subliminal”, as opposed towards the imaginary of which spiritualism is part. There is respected the limits of art history or aesthetic philosophy, been lost, destroyed, or lies at best in some yet unexplored to the “supraliminal” of normal consciousness. But, unlike a cultural, even existential need for the repressed figures of but has broader, socio-cultural underpinnings. Today we archives. It is therefore already a small miracle that Freud’s theory of the unconscious, his supposition was the ghost and the spectral. They are no longer simply seen as are probably more ready to accept the distributed mode significant spiritualist works from Houghton’s time have that the dimension of the subliminal was superior to insubstantial and inauthentic. Something about our current of Houghton’s authorship in terms of her being part of a reached us at all. that of normal consciousness, because it gave access to

26 27 extraordinary forms of knowledge. Spiritualist mediums, who found themselves put for the first time side by side with their practice of automatism and trance, had found a with established, highbrow artists. It was certainly progress way to tap into this collective psychic reservoir. For Myers in the acceptance and recognition of these alternative artistic genius manifested itself when an artist was able forms of artistic production, but it is hard not to see an to combine the inspiration coming from the “subliminal aspect of appropriation there. Medium art was being uprush” with his “supraliminal stream of thought”, that admired by the Surrealists, but not really being given a is, his conscious mental processes.9 Myers’s approach was voice. It was presented as a valid source for inspiration similar to that of the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy and experimentation, but there was no real dialogue (1854–1920), who around the same time published his with medium artists themselves, and their spiritualist famous study of the medium Hélène Smith (pseudonym worldviews were being rejected as illusionary or childish. of Catherine-Elise Müller, 1861–1929).10 Myers was much Prinzhorn’s collection and the new appreciation of more open than Flournoy to the existence of discarnate medium art by the Surrealists were crucial steps towards spirits and their communication with our world, even if the conceptualisation of ‘art brut’ by Jean Dubuffet (1901– he considered it more as a scientific hypothesis than as 1985) after World War II.12 Dubuffet was interested in an a matter for belief. Whatever the differences between art that is not contaminated by culture and intellectualism, Myers and Flournoy, the point is that both formulated but rather manifests itself in its purest, rawest form. It psychological theories through which it was possible is the art of persons who were never exposed to artistic to attach a positive value to spiritualist experiences, training, such as social dropouts, people with mental particularly in relation to artistic creativity. It was a disorders and mediums. The concept of art brut, or significant change from earlier psychiatric interpretations ‘outsider art’ (to use its most common English equivalent), of spiritualism, which tended to see it mainly as a obviously implied a social and cultural critique of the manifestation of insanity and abnormal behaviour. This artistic establishment as it existed at the time, and tried 9. Cover by André Derain of Minotaure, vols. 3–4 (1933) new appreciation influenced the work of psychiatrists 8. André Masson to explode the traditional, formal confines of art. When it such as Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), who theorised the Automatic drawing, 1925–26 comes to our understanding of spiritualist art today, and potential therapeutic effects of the practice of art for the Indian ink on paper, 315 x 245 mm more particularly of Houghton’s drawings, the concept of however, its own limits and ambiguities, as Houghton’s case Musée National d’Art Moderne 13 mentally ill, and who in 1919 began to collect their artworks – Centre Pompidou, Paris art brut is still most relevant. In fact, whereas Surrealism shows. Including Houghton’s drawings within the category at the psychiatric hospital of Heidelberg in which he was an artistic current, with its own historical trajectory of art brut poses, in fact, a number of problems. On the was working.11 and decline, art brut has now developed into an established one hand she does not seem to correspond to Dubuffet’s The door was now open for further appreciations of artistic discourse. André Breton (1896–1966) presented conceptual framework for understanding certain art forms, strict definition of art brut, because she did receive some spiritualist art, which would finally move out of a strict automatism as one of the main components of Surrealist a framework that is culturally, socially and materially form of artistic training before she became involved with psychological framework and enter an artistic one. After art, and the unconscious as the protagonist of valid supported by the existence of dedicated museums, galleries, spiritualism. She was therefore aware of artistic trends the rise of the avant-gardes in the early twentieth century, artistic creation. Quite a few Surrealist artists, such as and publications. It is, therefore, significant that, on the few and developments in her own time and was directly or with their exploration of alternative forms of perception André Masson (1896–1987) and Yves Tanguy (1900–1955), occasions on which Houghton’s art was exhibited in recent indirectly conversing with them while producing her own of reality and of the self, it was only a matter of time experimented directly with the technique of automatism years, it was done consistently within an art brut context.14 art. Furthermore, as the episode of her 1871 exhibition before a new curiosity for spiritualist art would emerge. (fig. 8). However, Breton explicitly rejected spiritualist The concept of art brut has been tremendously shows,15 Houghton also saw herself as an artist who could This happened with Surrealism, which on the one hand interpretations and saw automatic processes from a purely important in giving visibility and cultural legitimacy to a and should be noticed, if not even adopted, by the artistic was interested in the historical records of spiritualist psychological and materialist perspective. Surrealist whole dimension of human creativity that traditionally establishment. On the other hand, the problem with art practices and on the other tried to experiment publications, such as the journal Minotaure (fig. 9), were had been neglected by critics and historians because it did an art brut classification is that it does not leave room with the same practices and adapt them within its own filled with images of artworks by unknown medium artists, not conform to the canons of ‘higher’ forms of art. It has, for differentiation based on artistic quality. Houghton’s

28 29 visual expression, that we find lacking in other spiritualist paintings by af Klint (basically all that she produced during or automatic works that have reached us. The concept of her life), many of which are in very large format. We have art brut can hardly help us to make sense of the striking on the other hand, pending further discoveries, no more difference that clearly exists between Houghton’s drawings than 46 drawings by Houghton, and all of medium or and the typical spirit art produced by other medium artists small format. But other aspects may be more interesting in the same period, at least until the irruption of the artistic than quantity or size, such as the fact that Houghton, avant-gardes in the early twentieth century. unlike af Klint, wanted to present her spirit drawings in Perhaps the most logical term of comparison for an institutional artistic context and actively worked to Houghton’s art is the equally extraordinary case of the make this happen. And it is, of course, not irrelevant that Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944; fig. 10). The Houghton began to produce her ‘abstract’ drawings at two women were both celibate their whole lives, both least forty years before af Klint began to produce hers. trained in art before being involved in occult practices, But, apart from these comparative exercises, which could both convinced of being the channels of important spiritual easily end up being idle speculations, it is the very idea of 11. Lea Porsager ‘Coiled Adolescent Fern’ from Soil Solarization messages by means of their art, both rejecting direct ‘anticipation of abstraction’ that needs to be problematised. (a.k.a. the Sønderholm Experiment), 2014, authorship of their artworks, which they attributed to On the one hand, this idea is based on a paradigm of linear Styrofoam, 79 x 21 cm Installation view from the exibition Believe not spiritual entities, and both forgotten or ignored during their development, which sees every moment in the history of art Every Spirit, but Try the Spirits, Monash University lives – and for a long time after their respective deaths – by as a necessary step forward after the previous one has been Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2015 the artistic establishment. Af Klint’s art was first presented exhausted and superseded. We can wonder whether this to the world in the famous 1986 exhibition, The Spiritual in paradigm is still tenable today.19 On the other hand, in spite afterwards, namely that abstraction would emerge Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985.16 The spiritualist, occultist of the stylistic affinities, it is important to keep in mind and turn out to be one of the most successful artistic and theosophical inspirations of high modernist abstract that there remains a crucial difference between medium innovations of the twentieth century. But if we try – so to painters – among them Mondrian, Kupka, Kandinsky and artists such as Houghton and af Klint and the main actors speak – to abstract from abstraction, we realise that what Malevich – were here for the first time systematically of early abstraction, such as Kandinsky. This lies in the is really astonishing in Houghton’s art is the fact that her acknowledged and contextualised in a major exhibition. fact that Kandinsky did not only paint abstraction, he also spiritualistic experiments empowered her to develop a The fact that af Klint had begun to paint in a non-figurative theorised and to that extent ‘invented’ it. The new style was radically different, innovative style and to be so confident 10. Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) The Ten Largest (De tio största), no. 3, style a few years before all other protagonists of early associated with a theoretical discourse that implied a self- in its qualities as to try to ‘sell’ it not just to the spiritualist Youth, Group IV, 1907 abstraction, even if in the special context of her spiritual conscious positioning in relation to more traditional and community to which she belonged but also to the artistic Oil and tempera on paper, 328 x 240 cm Collection of Hilma af Klint Foundation, Järna, Sweden practices, was certainly one of the startling revelations of established artistic styles. This artistic self-consciousness is establishment of her time. this exhibition. Since her first appearance in 1986 af Klint certainly much less evident in the case of Houghton and af That these practices continue to be perceived by has come to be perceived as an extraordinary ‘pioneer’ Klint, who in the end always attributed whatever originality some artists as inspiring and empowering is shown by inclusion in the category depends on the fact that she of early twentieth-century abstraction, and she has in their works had to the agency of spirits and not to their the fact that, in spite of the stigmatisation and cultural produced her art as a practising medium, but this seems to fact been presented explicitly as such in the latest major own theoretical thinking. marginalisation we alluded to at the beginning of this make her works indistinguishable from those of all other retrospective exhibition, which has toured in several What is perhaps more significant than assessing who essay, they continue to have a presence up to our day in medium artists who are also entitled to be included in the European museums between 2013 and 2015.17 ‘won the race’ to abstraction is engaging with a different contemporary art. More than that, the number of recent same category without further qualification. When we look It would be tempting to present Houghton in the same set of questions, which concern the specific relevance of art exhibitions and publications in which reference is at Houghton’s works today it is difficult not to see in them way and to bank on the allure of her being yet another spiritualist and other esoteric practices for the creation made to the occult and related phenomena shows that this the seeds of an artistic modernity that had not yet taken heretofore neglected precursor of abstraction.18 Houghton’s of particular art forms that challenge existing canons and theme has become relatively fashionable in the last ten shape at the time, but to which Houghton had found a way artistic corpus is, from a purely quantitative point of view, norms of expression.20 Houghton’s drawings surely make years.21 To name but a few examples, artists such as Olivia to have anticipated access. It is a modernity, and a power of less impressive than af Klint’s: we have today around 3,000 special sense to us today because we know what happened Plender, Georgina Starr and Joachim Koester are interested

30 31 The reflections presented in this essay are intended to offer some degree of historical and cultural contextualisation for those – and they are the vast majority – who come to discover Houghton’s art now for the first time. But in the end, we also invite the visitors of this exhibition and the readers of this catalogue to try and appreciate her work by itself, letting themselves simply be touched by the pure energy of its colours and shapes.

notes 1 Theodor W. Adorno: ‘The Stars Down to Earth: avec glossolalie, Paris and Geneva, F. Alcan – Ch. Gibbons, ‘British Abstract Painting of the 1860s: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column’ (1953), Eggimann, 1900; English transl.: From India to The Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton’, 12. Film still from Joachim Koester’s Of Spirits and in Id., The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays the Planet Mars. A Case of Multiple Personality Modern Painters, 1 (Summer 1988), pp. 33–37. Empty Spaces, 2012 on the Irrational in Culture, ed. by Stephen Crook, with Imaginary Languages, Princeton, Princeton The article was published not long after the 1986 London, Routledge, 1994. University Press, 2015. Los Angeles exhibition on the spiritual origins of 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State 11 See Giorgio Bedoni, ‘“L’arte dei folli”. Omaggio a abstract painting, and explicitly takes its cue from in the historical record of spiritualism and occultism, to of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the Hans Prinzhorn’, in Arte, Genio, Follia. Il giorno e it for a presentation of Houghton’s work. As far New International, New York and Abingdon, la notte dell’artista, exh. cat., n.p., Mazzotta, 2009, as we know, Gibbons’s was the first scholarly the extent of recreating atmospheres and situations, even Routledge, 1994. pp. 201–15. essay to focus on Houghton’s drawings since she if they do not experiment with them personally. In other 3 Josef Vogl, The Specter of Capital, Stanford, 12 See Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut. The Origins of died in 1884. For another important discussion of cases, such as Lea Porsager (see fig. 11) or Chiara Fumai, Stanford University Press, 2015. Outsider Art, Paris: Flammarion, 2001. More Houghton as precursor of abstraction, see David 4 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting particularly on the relationship between art brut Phillips, ‘Abstraction and Truth in Nineteenth- practical, performative experimentation with occult and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis, and mediumship, see Michel Thévoz, Art brut, Century Imagery’, Bulletin of the John Rylands techniques becomes crucial. But on a closer look, these University of Minnesota Press, 2008. psychose et médiumnité, Paris: Editions de la University Library of Manchester, 78 (Spring 5 See the previous essay in the present Différence, 1999. 1996), pp. 123–42. distinctions may appear superficial. What is significant catalogue for more details about Houghton’s 13 See also the important discussion in Rachel 19 An important critique of this linear narrative can is the desire of some contemporary artists consciously acquaintances in the spiritualist community of Oberter, ‘Spiritualism and the Visual Imagination be found in Bernard Smith, Modernism’s History. her time. in Victorian Britain’, PhD dissertation, Yale A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas, New to place themselves in an ideal continuity with earlier 6 See Peter Gorsen, ‘The Entrance of Mediumism University, 2007, pp. 27–28. Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998. explorers of the self, being aware of the potential that this into the History of Art. Inexplicability – 14 The two most significant examples are Smith’s book is particularly relevant here because explorative work may have for artistic expression. It is 13. Susan Hiller The Surrealist Key’, in The Message. Kunst the exhibitions ‘The Message. Das Medium he is aware of both Houghton’s and af Klint’s und Okkultismus. Art and Occultism, exh. cat., als Künstler. The Medium as Artist’ at the cases, which he discusses in the broader context From India to the Planet Mars, 1997–2004 telling for instance, that one of Koester’s works focuses Bochum and Cologne, Kunstmuseum Bochum, Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2008; and ‘Entrée des of his argument (see ibid., pp. 70–71). Photographic negative in wall-mounted light box on John Murray Spear (1804–1887), a famous American Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008, médiums: Spiritisme et Art de Hugo à Breton’, at 20 On this point see Marco Pasi, ‘Hilma af Klint, pp. 169–82. the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris, 2012–13. Western Esotericism and the Problem of Modern spiritualist who was a close friend of Houghton and 7 See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the 15 See the previous essay in the present catalogue. Artistic Creativity’, in Kurt Almqvist and Louise conspicuously influenced her work (see fig. 12).22 This survive. I’m not a believer. I always like to quote Freud’s Unconscious: The History and Evolution of 16 The exhibition was held between 1986 and 1987 Belfrage (eds.), Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing Dynamic Psychiatry, New York, Basic Books, 1970; at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the the Invisible, Stockholm, Axel and Margaret shows how spiritualism and other occult-related themes are remark that an uncritical belief in psychic powers … is an and Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2015, pp. 101–16. part of a story that remains to this day largely unexplored. attempt at compensation for what he poignantly called Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. See the 21 See Marco Pasi, ‘Coming Forth by Night’, in Alexis 23 Healing, New Haven and London, Yale University catalogue: The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting Vaillant (ed.), Options with Nostrils, Rotterdam, At the same time, artists today use them to irritate and ‘the lost appeal of life on this Earth’.” Instead of setting Press, 1993. 1890–1985, New York, London and Paris, Los Sternberg Press – Piet Zwart Institute, 2010, displace dominant reality principles. The artist Susan out to establish new truths, Hiller points to the undeniable 8 Frederic W.H. Myers, Human Personality and Angeles County Museum of Art, Abbeville Press pp. 103–11; and Lars Bang Larsen, ‘The Other Side’, Hiller, who has worked with these topics since the early problems in our current definitions of reality – an approach the Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols., London, Publishers, 1986. Frieze. Contemporary Art and Culture, vol. 106 Longmans, Green and Co., 1903. Spirit drawings 17 See Iris Müller-Westermann and Jo Widoff (eds.), (April 2007), pp. 114–19. 1970s (see fig. 13), puts it in this way: “I’m interested in the to the occult that she shares with other contemporary are discussed in vol. 1, pp. 100–01; and vol. 2, Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction, exh. 21 On Spear and his relationship with Houghton see legacy of spiritualism and the occult in terms of the future artists. The aesthetic, experiential and political ambiguities pp. 94–95 and 400–01. cat., Stockholm and Ostfildern, Moderna Museet, also the previous essay in the present catalogue. 9 Myers, Human Personality, vol. 1, p. 71. Hatje Cantz, 2013. 22 E-mail from Susan Hiller to Lars Bang Larsen, rather than the past; in other words, I think our world of the occult makes it an apt vocabulary for questioning 10 Théodore Flournoy, Des Indes à la planète 18 Houghton was presented within this interpretive 20 April 2016. view is very limited and needs a paradigm shift if we are to the categories through which we see the world. Mars: Étude sur un cas de somnambulisme framework in the seminal article by Tom

32 33 catalogue

34 35 catalogue introduction ernst vegelin van claerbergen and barnaby wright

3 The group of 21 of Georgiana Houghton’s spirit drawings The first of the drawings of this near-abstract type seems carrying on ordinary conversation. Houghton also invited notes included in the present exhibition and catalogued here is to be The Holy Trinity (cat. 5). Houghton identifies this guests to witness her at work, citing one such occasion as 1 Georgiana Houghton, Catalogue of the Spirit drawn from the collections of the Victorian Spiritualists’ work as a turning point, calling it the first of the “sacred proof of the authenticity of her process: Drawings in Water Colours, Exhibited at the New British Gallery, Old Bond Street. By Miss Union, Melbourne, Australia, and the College of Psychic symbolism” drawings that express profound sacred themes. Houghton, through Whose Mediumship They Studies, London, with one work from a private owner. With one exception, The Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ … he watched with deep interest the fine lines that went Have Been Executed, London: W. Corby, printer, 1871, p. 6. It represents an overview of the different types of spirit (cat. 9), the drawings remain non-figurative and include on so smoothly and so unerringly under my hand, never 2 Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in drawings that Houghton produced during the 1860s further spirit flowers and fruits as well as spiritual failing to reach exactly their purposed destination, Spiritual Séance, Welded Together by a Species of Autobiography, 2nd series, London, E.W. and first half of the 1870s. This seems to have been her monograms and crowns. Their subjects range from family notwithstanding that I was fully engaged in conversation Allen, 1882, p. 82. most productive period. No works from the later 1870s members and friends to prominent historical figures, such with him all the time; and there would be sudden changes 3 This information is recorded in a note or 1880s are known. The group aims to give a sense of as William Shakespeare, and contemporaries, including of detail, and methods of manipulation, which clearly appended to the frame backboard of Plant of Zilla Rosalia Warren (fig. 5). the development of these remarkable drawings (for a Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter (cat. 11). did not require my mind to be concentrated upon them, 4 Houghton, Evenings at Home, 2nd series. p. 29. description of Houghton’s process see the essay by A remarkable feature of most of the drawings is the which must have been the case had self been the operator, Simon Grant and Marco Pasi in this volume). often detailed inscriptions that appear on the backs. even supposing the possibility of my powers being equal The earliest works in the present selection are from These range from long narrative accounts of their meaning to such perfect work.4 Houghton’s initial year as a spirit artist, 1861; they are (see for example cat. 6) to diagrammatic descriptions of among her very first spirit drawings in watercolour individual pictorial elements (see for example cat. 13). Like Once completed, Houghton stored the drawings (cat. 1–5). These works are broadly figurative and at a the watercolours themselves, the inscriptions profess to meticulously in portfolios. She was extremely careful in glance might be mistaken for more or less conventional be written through Houghton’s hand by her ‘spirit guides’ handling the works and, in preparation for her exhibition flower studies. However, Houghton explains that these are and are sometimes accompanied by elaborate drawings in in 1871, she insisted on mounting the drawings into their renderings of ‘spirit flowers’ and ‘spirit fruits’ of specific pen and ink. These inscriptions remind us that, although rented gilt frames herself and returned them into their individuals that grow within the spirit realm. The flower today it is compelling to describe the works as ‘abstract’, portfolios afterwards. Houghton later stated that most expresses the essence of a person’s life and character for Houghton they were richly symbolic and represented of her works to that date had been included in the 1871 “expressing them by colour and form, until by degrees … features and themes of the spirit realm. exhibition and therefore it is assumed that the majority revealed in the floral emblem”. The fruit “represents the The backs also typically reveal the precise date of of the drawings included in the present exhibition were inner life, with its passions, sentiments and affections, and the drawings and some detail how long each took to shown. However, it has only been possible to match some is covered with minute fibres, indicating the thoughts”.1 complete. In one case this is recorded as eight hours 54 of the titles to Houghton’s 1871 catalogue and these have From the end of 1861, the works move away from being minutes (cat. 5), another 23 days (cat. 9), and in her book, been indicated where known. obviously figurative and consist of seemingly abstract, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance, she stated that she richly layered arrangements of lines, dots and swathes of worked on others for between 20 and 32 weeks. Houghton colour. One reviewer of Houghton’s exhibition of her work also described how she often had two or three drawings in 1871 described them well as “elegantly minute in their underway at the same time. Sometimes her drawings were tracery, frequently beautiful in form, and their bold and produced in the presence of others; her niece recalled often violent contrasts of colour never inharmonious”.2 Houghton drawing without looking at her work and

36 37 1. Flower and Fruit of Henry Lenny, 28th August 1861 2. Flower of Zilla Warren, 31st August 1861

The writing on the verso of this drawing is obscured. A later typed transcript of the writing on the backboard of the frame reads as follows:

The flower of Zilla Rosalia Warren (the loving and much loved sister of the drawing medium), who was married to John Neville Warren on the 18th June 1844, was taken from her loving husband and relations on the 13th February 1851. She was a good daughter, sister, wife, and mother, and was universally lamented when withdrawn from the earth, although the Lord, in His great mercy, has taken her from impending trouble as John Nashville Warren has involved his arrears so seriously through the machinations of a pretended friend that he was afterwards obliged to leave the country, and was thankful to receive the offer of a situation as Head Engineer on the Scinde railway. The Agency of the Scinde railway was a high position, and he accepted the offer with great satisfaction, his only regret being the necessity for leaving his dear children, but he considered that it would be for their worldy advantage, and he made arrangements which he hoped would be satisfactory for them to be taken care of during his absence, which was likely to last for years. He had, however, not acted as his dear Zilla would have wished, for he left no power with her dear sister Georgiana or with her dear Mamma to act in any way for the darlings. They, however, were all that their Mamma would have been had she still dwelt upon the earth, and in her happiness she was most thankful to them for their most tender and loving care.

I must now describe Zilla’s Flower. It is blue because she was true and steadfast in all her dealings, never being induced to swere a hair’s breadth from what she knew to be right. The blue leaf at the back represents that she was a daughter, a wife and a mother, and the centre leaf is much the largest because the duties of a mother are of the highest importance, as bringing souls into the world is a serious responsibility, as those souls must be trained either for good or for evil, and their future state of happiness or misery depends upon the training they receive. The loss of such a mother as Zilla was indeed a severe one for the future of her children. God, however, in His great mercy raised in the hearts of Georgiana and her Mama a never-ceasing fountain of love for the bereaved children of their darling Zilla, and they always strove to fulfil to them the duties of a mother as well as their own of aunt and godmother, grandmother and godmother. He made them treat those dear children as if they were more than their own. He strengthened the Love that was already in their hearts, and made them careless of the slights of Neville and his family, so that the many annoyances they met with did not change with their love or their conduct to the four dear children who they looked upon as Zilla’s legacy, and when Neville went away blinded by his own prejudices, they only resolved that nothing they should do should be made a reason for the children to be withdrawn from them by those to whom he delegated his authority. The dear children fondly loved their Aunt Dor, as they called her, a fondling name given to he Charles George, the eldest, when he was unable to speak plainly, and Aunt Dor she remains to this day with those who have reason to adore her for the love she bears to them. They all look upon her much as if she were in truth the mother whom they were too young to remember, and she has the happiness of a mother in all their little joys and griefs. She also is never withheld by her love, or what a weak mother would miscall love, from reproving them, for any fault small or great, for truly she thinks that by checking a small fault it is prevented from growing into a large one. The veins in the blue leaves signify her very religious hopes, which were increased and cherished by her dear husband. The flower itself, her favourite colour, because of her dear husband, expresses Truth very clearly, being so thoroughly expanded, in fact it even spreads open so as to show the heart. She was very charitable, not only in giving away money, but also her time, which was more valuable to her as she fulfilled all the real duties of the position, working herself at her children’s clothes, and attending to all the necessary arrangements of her household. The marks of blue upon the flower mean her love for her husband, her children, her parents, her sisters and brothers, as well as for all her fellow creatures. The yellow lines from the centre of the flower represent her actions; those which go upwards are those which led her towards Heaven, and those that go downwards are those that express her errors. She was somewhat obstinate, and thus the lines in that direction are more numerous than could have been wished. But she strove against her fault and it has been forgiven. All the leaves mean her temper which was amiable; they vary very much in size because, because she was of a lively spirit, and at times was very witty and full of fun but at other times she would be serious and steady. She was often termed the safety-valve by her sister Helen before she was married, because she could be depended upon to bring them home punctually, and the name was also an allusion to a branch of Mr. Warren’s profession as a Civil Engineer. She was the youngest and ardently loved sister of Georgiana, the drawing medium, who sorrowed deeply when she was taken from her, but even more for the sake of the dear children than for her own, although she had made the brightest point in her home life. She expended her last breath in song. Like Jephtha’s daughter she called upon Angels ever bright and fair, she still sung the air to those ministering Spirits that were around her ready to fulfil her behest.

This drawing was finished August 1st 1861.

[Signed] HENRY LENNY

Henry Lenny is the spirit who dictated this and who composed the drawings. 3. Flower of Warrand Houghton, 18th September 1861 4. Flower of William Harman Butler, 23rd October 1861 5. The Holy Trinity, 29th November 1861 6. Flower of Samuel Warrand, 19th August 1862 7. The Eye of God, 25th September 1862 8. The Sheltering Wing of the Most High, 2nd October 1862 9. The Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ, 8th December 1862 10. The Glory of the Lord, 4th January 1864 11. The Flower of Victoria, Princess Royal of England, 22nd April 1864 12. The Risen Lord, 29th June 1864 13. Glory be to God, 5th July 1864 14. The Strength of the Lord, 8th December 1864 15. The Eye of the Lord, 22nd September 1866? (year partially obscured) 16. The Spiritual Crown of Richard Seymour Chermside, 10th September 1867

This and the following six works are bound into an album bearing the bookplate of G.R. Nicolaus. The album also contains drawings by other spirit medium artists.

overleaf

16.1 Flower of William Stringer, 15th February 1866

16.2 Flower of Catherine Stringer, 22nd February 1866

16.3 Flower of Catherine Emily Stringer, 7th April 1866

16.4 Spiritual Crown of Mrs Oliphant, 13th March 1867

16.5 Monogram of Anne Stringer, 11th January 1869

16.6 Monogram of John Ingram, 6th May 1870 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4

16.5 16.6 17. The Love of God, 3rd August 1868 18. The Monogram of Cromwell Varley, 15th September 1869 19. The Eye of the Lord, 1st September 1870 20. No title, 2nd August 1875 21. No title, 6th October 1875 list of works

1. Flower and Fruit of Henry Lenny 6. Flower of Samuel Warrand 11. The Flower of Victoria, Princess The following seven works are bound into an 16.3 Flower of Catherine Emily 17. The Love of God 28th August 1861 19th August 1862 Royal of England album bearing the bookplate of G.R. Nicolaus. Stringer 3rd August 1868 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board 22nd April 1864 The album also contains drawings by other spirit 7th April 1866 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board medium artists. Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso 326 x 237 mm (paper), 481 x 366 mm (board) 326 x 237 mm (paper), 481 x 366 mm (board) with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso, bound into 237 x 326 mm (paper), 362 x 451 mm (board) No. 15 in the 1871 exhibition No. 41 in the 1871 exhibition 326 x 237 mm (paper), 480 x 360 mm (board) 16. The Spiritual Crown of Richard an album No. 73 in the 1871 exhibition Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia No. 64 in the 1871 exhibition Seymour Chermside 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board) Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia 10th September 1867 No. 123 in the 1871 exhibition 2. Flower of Zilla Warren 7. The Eye of God Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board College of Psychic Studies, London 18. The Monogram of Cromwell 31st August 1861 25th September 1862 12. The Risen Lord with pen and ink inscription on verso, bound into Varley Watercolour and gouache on paper Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board 29th June 1864 an album 16.4 Spiritual Crown of Mrs Oliphant 15th September 1869 with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board) 13th March 1867 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board (now obscured) 237 x 326 mm (paper), 366 x 456 mm (board) with pen and ink inscription on verso No. 135 in the 1871 exhibition Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso 326 x 237 mm (paper) No. 45 in the 1871 exhibition 237 x 326 mm (paper), 362 x 451 mm (board) College of Psychic Studies, London with pen and ink inscription on verso, bound into 252 x 353 mm (paper), 355 x 457 mm (board) No. 16 in the 1871 exhibition Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia an album No. 143 in the 1871 exhibition Private collection 16.1 Flower of William Stringer 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board) Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia 8. The Sheltering Wing of the 13. Glory be to God 15th February 1866 No. 129 in the 1871 exhibition 3. Flower of Warrand Houghton Most High 5th July 1864 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board College of Psychic Studies, London 19. The Eye of the Lord 18th September 1861 2nd October 1862 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso, bound into 1st September 1870 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso an album 16.5 Monogram of Anne Stringer Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso 237 x 326 mm (paper), 362 x 458 mm (board) 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board) 11th January 1869 with pen and ink inscription on verso 326 x 237 mm (paper), 459 x 367 mm (board) 237 x 326 mm (paper), 366 x 456 mm (board) No. 68 in the 1871 exhibition No. 119 in the 1871 exhibition Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board 253 x 356 mm (paper), 351 x 457 mm (board) No. 20 in the 1871 exhibition Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia College of Psychic Studies, London with pen and ink inscription on verso, bound into No. 150 or 151 in the 1871 exhibition Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia an album Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia 9. The Portrait of the Lord Jesus 14. The Strength of the Lord 16.2 Flower of Catherine Stringer 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board) 4. Flower of William Harman Butler Christ 8th December 1864 22nd February 1866 No. 140 in the 1871 exhibition 20. No title 23rd October 1861 8th December 1862 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board College of Psychic Studies, London 2nd August 1875 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso, bound into Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso 237 x 326 mm (paper), 362 x 451 mm (board) an album 16.6 Monogram of John Ingram with pen and ink inscription on verso 326 x 237 mm (paper), 462 x 367 mm (board) 326 x 237 mm (paper), 481 x 369 mm (board) No. 59 in the 1871 exhibition 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board 6th May 1870 254 x 356 mm (paper), 362 x 482 mm (board) No. 26 in the 1871 exhibition Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia No. 120 in the 1871 exhibition Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia College of Psychic Studies, London with pen and ink inscription on verso, bound into 10. The Glory of the Lord 15. The Eye of the Lord an album 21. No title 5. The Holy Trinity 4th January 1864 22nd September 1866? (year partially obscured) 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board) 6th October 1875 29th November 1861 Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board No. 146 in the 1871 exhibition Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board Watercolour and gouache on paper laid on board with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso College of Psychic Studies, London with pen and ink inscription on verso with pen and ink inscription on verso 479 x 349 mm (paper), 485 x 633 mm (board) 327 x 238 mm (paper), 459 x 366 mm (board) 254 x 356 mm (paper), 362 x 482 mm (board) 326 x 237 mm (paper), 481 x 366 mm (board) No. 60 in the 1871 exhibition Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia No. 42 in the 1871 exhibition Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, Australia

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