UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM The Medium is the Messenger: An Exploration into Ethel Le Rossignol’s Visionary Art with Studies of Anna Howitt’s and Hilma af Klint’s works
Kathryn Branch-Channer
Department of History, European Studies and Religious Studies History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents M.A. Thesis in Religious Studies Supervisor: Dr. Marco Pasi Second Reader: Dr. Peter Forshaw Universiteit van Amsterdam Submitted August 2019
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Table of Contents
Introduction 3
1. Spiritualism, Mediumship and Art 4
1.1. The Origins of Spiritualism 4 1.2. Women and Spiritualism in Post-World War I 6 1.3. Female Mediumship 6 1.4. Theosophy 8 1.5. Modernism 9
2. Ethel Le Rossignol in Historical Context 11
2.1. Spiritualism in England During and After World War I 11 2.2. Correspondences 11 2.3. Context 12
3. Ethel Le Rossignol: The Holy Sphere 14
3.1. A Goodly Company 14 3.2. Healing 17 3.3. Gender and Sexuality 18 3.4. Exhibition and Audience 18
4. Anna Mary Howitt: A Glorious Fruition 20
4.1. Spirit Drawing Methods 21 4.2. Symbolism 22 4.3. Anna Mary Howitt and Ethel Le Rossignol 23
5. Hilma af Klint: Freedom and Opposition 26
5.1. Theosophy and Feminist Politics 27 5.2. Hilma af Klint: Background 27 5.3. Evolution and Gender 29 5.4. Automatism 29 5.5. Exhibitions and Intentions 29 5.6. Hilma af Klint and Ethel Le Rossignol 30
Final Conclusion 32
Image Appendix 34
Bibliography 53
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Introduction
Intuition is a practice, but can it make you a master of art? The interest in this thesis comes from the number of female artists active in mediumship at the turn of the century and what motivated them to create their radical spirit art. This thesis aims to illuminate the artistic oeuvre of Ethel Le Rossignol with comparison to two more visionary female artists, Anna Mary Howitt, and Hilma af Klint. Their context, influences and recurring common themes will be analysed in the attempt to discover how their work and lives interact, and whether there lies a common space where these women share their creativity and goals.
In the last decade, the study of western esotericism has become an established field in religious studies. From the beginning, it has engaged in self-critical reflection over how scholarly research can be correctly determined. The question of how to study it is still discussed. This problem is highlighted by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, professor and chair of History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam, in the article ‘Empirical method in the study of esotericism’ where he discusses the debate over reductionism and religionism and proposes that the empirical method is the most useful for academic research of esoteric studies. He states that “empirical researchers do not limit themselves to the empirical because they wish to claim it is the only reality (privately they may believe the opposite), but simply because it is the only one accessible to them for investigation”1.
I have chosen to discuss these women and their work with this empirical method. Women artists and esotericism throughout the modern lineage of art history have been consistently excluded. This is certainly changing in the past few decades, with recent exhibitions such as Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Guggenheim in New York (October 28th, 2018 - April 23rd 2019), and World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz at the Lenbauchhaus in Munich (November 6, 2018 - March 10, 2019). By studying their work from a historical point of view, the analysis of their work is exhibited in the most inclusive format, remaining factual and open to further discussions. The neglect of western esotericism as a part of the historical inquiry has left gaps in our knowledge, and the same goes for female artists in the art history canon. The vast amount of context given is the framework for these artists' lives, influences and for understanding their work to the fullest degree because their work may have not been treated seriously for so long. Academic articulation is important because it takes their work seriously. There is no rigid tradition of synthesis in place, therefore, I have used a comparative method to gain a productive ‘bigger picture’ view of female mediumistic artists during the turn of the century across Europe. This is a way to bring visibility to artists that heavily engaged in intensive personal research and artistic methods, consuming a lot of their lives with the purpose of their messages.
The main publications relied on for this thesis are The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (1989) and The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in the late Victorian England (2004) by Alex Owen, two works which highlight topics surrounding consciousness and Spiritualism in the late 19th and early 20th century, women, power and mediumship. The Divine Feminine by Joy Dixon has provided background reading for the relationship between women and the Theosophical Society.
Ethel Le Rossignol, Anna Mary Howitt, and Hilma af Klint used their intuition, a knowledge they believed to be of something higher than this earth, and developed work against societal norms. I hope this thesis will highlight these women artists' works, context, influences, themes and their missions.
1 Hanegraaff, Empirical method in the study of esotericism, page 102.
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1. Spiritualism, Mediumism and Art
This chapter lays the groundwork for investigating developments in Spiritualism and mediumship in relation to women, alongside the assumptions of secularisation and the decline of traditional religion in the early 20th century. Spiritualism, argued by Anne Braude in Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Right in Nineteenth Century America (1989), became an important movement for feminism and vice versa. Therefore , it could be argued that it helped to shape certain aspects of female artistic and cultural life. In discussing the idea of the self inside the rational framework of modern life, we can observe the rigid boundaries that could have led creative culture to look further for spiritual or more abstract inspirations.
Anne Braude suggests that by recounting the connection between women’s history and religion, we can write a more accurate account of the past. By studying its importance in artistic currents we can write a more inclusive account of art in the late 19th and early 20th century in relation to esotericism, religion and women. While Braude’s work may be outdated now, and new findings have found the link between the emergence of feminism and the suffrage movement strenuous, Radical Spirits opened a new perspective into women’s history and religion that deserves to be analysed. It is, however, worth bearing in mind that many outspoken Spiritualists were feminists but not all feminists were Spiritualists.
1.1. The Origins of Spiritualism Spiritualism is most often defined by the central belief that individuals are capable of communication with spirits and the deceased. Spiritualism as a philosophy encompasses the idea that the spirit exists separate from matter. Most histories mark the beginning of Spiritualism as 1848 when Margaret and Kate Fox communicated with a spirit who had been murdered at their house in New York. After this, mediums began to pop up all over America. While some Spiritualists performed séances and enacted messages from beyond, from sailors to long lost Egyptian masters, others focused on the artistic side of spiritual communication through spirit photography, drawings, and automatic writing.
British professor of history and gender studies, Alex Owen published her first historical study into the role of women in the Spiritualist movement, The Darkened Room: Women Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England in 1989. In her later work, The Place of Enchantment (2004), she suggests transcendentalism as a forerunner of late-Victorian ‘mysticism’2. Transcendentalism emerged from German Romanticism and was a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. The movement honoured intuitive spiritual experience over empirical affirmation and accepted mystical oneness with God and the natural world.
Spiritualism can also be linked to Swedenborgianism.3 Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), earned an international reputation as a scientist and for his theological works which influenced those seeking alternatives to mainstream religion. He was an inspiration for the likes of William Blake (1757-1827), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), who was a well-known Spiritualist. Many transcendentalists embraced Swedenborg’s worldview, including Margaret Fuller who was a journalist and early leader in the women’s rights movement.4 Swedenborg spoke to the dead and to angels, whom he believed were spirits that had reached a high stage of spiritual evolution.5 This granted him mediumship in the eyes of many Spiritualists who used him as inspiration. Camila Crosland (1812-1895) was an English writer of fiction, poetry, essays, and sketches. In her published work, Light in the Valley: My Experiences of Spiritualism (1857), she writes, “Spiritualists may differ about the degree of pure and Divine inspiration which was the privilege of Emanuel Swedenborg, but none are likely to deny that he was one of
2 Owen, The Place of Enchantment, page 118.
3 Dole, Emanuel Swedenborg: Essays for the new century edition on his life, work and impact.
4 Blanchard, Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution.
5 Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America. (Religion in North America), page 248.
4 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM the most extraordinary mediums of who the world has any record”6. Swedenborg also became a great influence on the modern Theosophical movement which will be discussed later in this chapter.
Mesmerism was another movement that began in the late 18th century and influenced Spiritualism.7 Mesmerism was a method of psychological and physical healing that was developed by Franz Anton Mesmer.8 Mesmer was an Austrian physician who believed that there was an invisible and natural forced that pervaded all living things. This force could be used for different effects. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is a British historian and author best known for scholarly books on esoteric traditions, modern occultism and the history of its intersection with inter-war Germany. In his work The Western Esoteric Tradition: A Historical Introduction (2008), Goodrick-Clarke studies Mesmerism while examining the relationship between science and spirituality. A chapter is dedicated to Mesmer and the influence his ideas had on Spiritualism, tracing the developments of animal magnetism from the combination of the notion of fluid and the powers of the mind in science. Many elements of Mesmerism are found in Spiritualism, and it provided a platform for Spiritualism to develop. However, Mesmerism was largely led, if not only led, by men whereas Spiritualism offered a space for women to become entered in the practice. The ‘imponderable fluid’ of Mesmerism became the medium through which spirits communicate with the living. Spiritualism, as we can see, was a movement the flowed from many different veins of esoteric movements.
Spiritualism could be considered a reaction to the crisis of faith that swept the Western world by the mid-19th century through the increasing materialism, rationalism, and positivism9. New findings of technology and science caused beliefs from traditional religion to be called into question. The story of genesis did not comply with Darwinism. Communication with the afterlife sufficed as definitive evidence that the soul was immortal, and this appealed to people whose faith was uncertain. It could have been especially appealing to those experiencing its’ revival during World War 1 because it opened a possibility of communicating with deceased loved ones. The contact with spirits showed empirical, physical proof of life after death and by doing so it provided ‘scientific’ evidence of its religious truths. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) did not sway Spiritualists’ beliefs like it may have done for wavering Christians. Instead, Spiritualists saw it as a verification of their views concerning human evolution and progress, it only confirmed that the spirit keeps on evolving after it has left the material body. The Spiritualist movement encouraged people to become spiritual investigators, to search the spiritual plane and contact spirits through rituals and séances and to explore the nature of reality. While the connection between Spiritualism and science may amuse some readers now, scientific discoveries in the 19th century complimented the Spiritualist movement. The advances that were made included electricity, the telephone, and the x-ray, all of which could symbolise an invisible dimension and confirm this dimension’s existence in the material world. If you can speak to someone who isn’t in front of you, or see something that isn’t in front of you, then speaking to a spirit was not a far off idea.
Spiritualism can be defined or discussed in different respects. In secular Spiritualism, the Spiritualist explores the supposed existence of the human personality after death and the possibility of communicating with the dead. In this sense, it did not matter so much whether or not this kind of Spiritualist believed in God because their mission was psychological. On the other hand, religious Spiritualism, which is more likely what we are dealing with in the following chapters, describes the view of people who see or hear angelic or saintly presences and do so at the margins of traditional or institutional religions or churches. In either sense, these men and women were inspired to go beyond the material or theological life that was presented to them in their current time. To do this they could join societies, groups, attend lectures, write for publications, host séances and much more.
6 Crosland, Light in the Valley, page 106.
7 Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America. (Religion in North America), page 248.
8 Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, page 174.
9 Lamont, Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence. The Historical Journal, page 897.
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1.2. Women and Spiritualism in post-World War I Many Victorian Spiritualists were free thinkers who rejected mainstream religion altogether. The chilling certainties of positivism and the constant search for laws and behaviours left many radicals dissatisfied. Spiritualism could work as a means of reconciling science and socialism, therefore it became a utopian project for many. From séances to automatic writing, Spiritualists tried to think and act freely without constraints of definitive laws. This could be why it was so popular for women at this time. During the Victorian era came ‘the woman question’, a fascination with a woman’s place and a fear of sexualised gender ambiguity. Aubrey Beardsley’s periodicals exemplify the emerging literature that opened discussions of sexual typologies (fig. 1). Many interrelated issues grouped under the term of ‘the woman question’, these issues stemmed from the rustling feminist and reformist organisations in middle-class restlessness which sprang to life in the mid 19th century. Women at this time in England had no separate legal identity until 1882 when a married woman had her rights over a separate property. The second half of the 19th century was a period of intensely shifting attitudes and social reform, bringing broader horizons for women.
Women of the middle class, who made up a large proportion of the Spiritualist ranks, were unsatisfied with their social and political stance. Alex Owen, in The Place of Enchantment, explores the advances in women’s history during the latter half of the 19th century. Owen states that by the 1890s, as mediumship began to fade, many thousands of women had already made their way into the public domain. Many Spiritualist women, who had progressed in the ranks or had built confidence, moved into careers that were previously unavailable. Even at a young age, many women gave seminars, speeches and delivered séances in the Spiritualist sphere. They had more opportunities to become involved in periodicals, publications and feminist agendas that could give them a platform.
Many people believed that the World War 1 era would lead to a complete change in direction for women. As many male soldiers went to war, a new image of the woman was created. This image was active and hard- working, in society and the workplace. Women seized a new range of working opportunities and won political and legal rights, such as the right to vote in 1920. However, Susan Pyecroft, author of British Working Women and the First World War, argues that women had already taken the opportunity to work before the war.10 During the war, women took jobs because of vast unemployment but this did not guarantee equal pay or acknowledgment. However, it was still a step in the right direction. It is a useful reminder that any generalisation of the First World War and its effects of any category of social beings, such as women or Spiritualists, are dangerous things to make.
1.3. Female Mediumship Spiritualism marked a particular power exchange for women of the late 19th century and early 20th century. This was formed through the praise and practice of female spiritual authority. Anne Braude argues in Radical Spirits that mediumship was closely identified with femininity. Why were women arguably more open to contacting the deceased? Alex Owen argues in The Darkened Room that women’s involvement with Spiritualism was in one sense all about gender expectations, sexual politics and the subversion of existing power relations between men and women.11
A séance is a ritual act where a spirit medium transmits messages from the dead to the living, usually held in a private house and inside a darkened room. When Victorian physiologists and physicists seized séances to probe them for fraudulent activities or experiments into the power of the mind, it became clear that Spiritualist claims could not be investigated with scientific empiricism tools. The investigative methods consisted of limitations and battery restrictions during séances which would most likely prove the investigators right, showing the séance to be a facade and leaving the medium silent and unable to perform activities with confidence. Many investigators were sure this was absolute proof that Spiritualism was fake.
10 During the war, the number of working full-time women rose by 1.3 million. See Pyecroft, British Working Women and the First World War, page 704.
11 Owen, The Darkened Room, page 3.
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Spiritualists claimed that the methods of investigating these phenomenon only succeeded in destroying it, and therefore this becomes a paradoxical situation. Even more so because Spiritualism claimed to compliment scientific naturalism and rational explanation but it could not withstand investigation. The séance was both public and private and the interaction between the two is cause for much analysis under the topic of gender and sexuality. In Gendered Haunts: The Rhetorical and Material Culture of the Late Nineteenth-Century Spirit Cabinet by Elizabeth Lowry, she explores the spirit cabinet and the increasing need for materialisation in the time of Spiritualism. She argues that the spirit cabinet presented women with a discursive space in which to access the public sphere and exert social influence. The séance itself could become a site of rhetoric invention where women could reimagine social constructs and bend the boundaries of class, gender, and race. During a trance the medium could assume a completely different persona, producing a wide variety of reactions for the viewers who thought this to be the spirit effects. It is here that mediums could effectively and radically challenge cultural orthodoxy and subversion of the 19th-century woman ideal. Spiritualism could create a space and provide a framework for the multi-faceted self. Sigmund Freud, who was interested in occultism and psychical research, saw the human mind as a frontier of discovery. A modern psychoanalytic theory proposed a psychical process known as ‘splitting’12 which resulted in the self become different distinct personalities which coexisted together. Freud maintained that this was due to conflict and thought that the ego was made up of a part that observes and that is observed. Psychoanalytic theories are complex, but this may go a little of the way to explain the fractured nature of the self and of the medium and as I will eventually discuss, the mediumistic artist.
Spiritualism was a movement that included more women in its ranks than any religious movements previous, and for this reason, many women were attracted to it during a period of gender disfunction. The Spiritualist culture held a place for women, giving them the opportunity that may have been denied elsewhere. Owen says, “It was firmly held that any individual, male or female, rich or poor could become the conduit for a dialogue with the spirits”13. Women seemed to thrive in séances and these circles quickly kept women as a mainstay. During séances, the medium would act as an intermediary of this world and the next. The acceptance of women as mediums, Owen says, was built on the understanding of femininity.14 Paradoxically, this undercuts the operation of female power. In Victorian England, the Victorian Spiritualist’s gender was generally assumed to be determined by biology, affecting your mental and physical state unchangeably. In this mode of thinking, ‘feminine’ represented an implication that women were naturally predisposed to certain traits and qualities which dictated their role in the sphere of life. Among the most important, was the notion of innate female passivity, a negative attribute that has pervaded Western cultural, religious and esoteric ideas of women for centuries. This ideology of woman was especially suited to religion as it asserted that true womanhood lies in piety, and domesticity. Spiritualism changed the idea of the woman by embracing that they were pious by nature, reclaiming this notion for themselves. Anne Braude summarises, “The very qualities that rendered women incompetent when judged against norms for masculine behaviour rendered them capable of mediumship. Mediumship allowed women to discard limitations on women’s role without questioning accepted ideas about women's nature”15.
Although there were many women involved in Spiritualism, it was likely that equal numbers of men and women spoke on the lecture circuit. However, there was a key difference. For the lectures and public séances the speakers were divided rigidly by their sex and this affected their division of labour. The men would be more likely to call the meetings, introduce guests and address audiences while the women would likely be unconscious while on stage, displaying their passive nature. Aside from the discourse of women as frail, submissive and, passive there was, on the other hand, the Victorian discourse that a woman was depraved, rampantly sexual and hysteric. Usually, these categories were projected onto the poor and the mentally ill.
12 Perez, On Freud’s ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, page 220.
13 Owen, The Darkened Room, page 5.
14 Owen, The Darkened Room, page 6.
15 Owen, The Darkened Room, page 83.
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The freedom of sexuality and expression brought extreme prejudice and ill-informed medical attention to suffering women. It is essential to recognise that the ‘feminine’ was intrinsically linked to class and the majority of Spiritualists tended to be white, middle to upper-class women. These women most often identified with the dominant ideal of womanhood. Spiritualist women took the renunciation of the self at face value and to its logical conclusion. This meant that it became the pride of the Spiritualist practice, and showed the symbol of powerful mediumship.
1.4. Theosophy The Theosophical Movement began to bloom in the late 19th century. By this time, H. P. Blavatsky was practicing Spiritualism. The many tenets that made up Spiritualism, such as materialism, Protestant individualism, ideas of spiritual evolution and Mesmerism, were emphasised in Theosophy too. However, Theosophy contained a central belief that was not apparent in Spiritualism. Theosophy connected to ancient lineages and original divine authority. The movement drew upon old European traditions, Neoplatonism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Egyptian religionism, Kabbalah and Astrology, teaching a single Divine principle and that the purpose of human life is spiritual emancipation. The movement also synthesised attributes of Victorian secular discourse such as Darwinism and individualism. It played a big role in bringing South Asian religious ideas to the western world, and therefore encouraged cultural pride. It was attractive to creative minds and women because it broadened the horizons of spiritual knowledge, encompassing philosophies from the eastern hemisphere and welcoming all members of the public into its ranks as equals. Theosophy also influenced later movements such as Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy and the later ‘New Age’ movements. Historian Joy Dixon notes in her full-length study of the relationship between Theosophy and the feminist movement in England, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (2001), that the reason it was so attractive was because it offered a ‘feminine’ form of spirituality and celebrated the yin and the yang, male and female in spiritual development.16 Annie Besant (1847-1933) became the president of the Theosophical society in 1907. She was a British socialist and popular feminist lecturer, activist, and writer. Besant advocated for women’s rights, contraception and the emancipation of women as early as 1874.17 Joy Dixon notes in The Divine Feminine that “prominent feminists were hundreds of times more likely to join the TS than were members of the general population”18. As an overview of the topic of Theosophy and Spiritualism, we may turn to The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (2012). This collection by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn gives a broad example of current scholarship. In the opening article ‘Recent Scholarship on Spiritualism, Science', Christine Ferguson states that future scholars may face obstacles and suggests “reconsideration of the topic’s current and historiographical and political assumptions”19, reminding new research that Spiritualism may not have been as wholly progressive and uniquely modern as one might assume.
Jeffrey D. Lavoie wrote The Theosophical Society: The History of a Spiritualist Movement in 2012, representing a culmination of years of research into the history of the Theosophical Society detailing it’s early relation to the modern Spiritualist movement between the years 1875-1891. He explores the idea that the Theosophical movement envisioned by Blavatsky and the cofounders of modern Theosophy, was a reformation of Spiritualism. Whether or not this aligns with how Blavatsky’s idea of what the Theosophical movement would do is up for debate. While there are similarities in the movements, Spiritualism flourished through practice and Theosophical encompassed an incomparable complexity. There are definite links and comparisons in the movements and their involvement of similar ideas of the afterlife, however, the Theosophical movement seems more than a sect of Spiritualism, and did more than build upon Spiritualist practices. Lavoie’s research makes a valuable addition to the academic work dedicated to this subject and the
16 Dixon, The Divine Feminine, page 6.
17 Anderson, Bridging Cross-cultural Feminisms: Annie Besant and Women’s Rights in England and India, 1874-1933. Women’s History Review, page 563.
18 Dixon, The Divine Feminine, page 6.
19 Ferguson, Recent Scholarship on Spiritualism, Science, part of: The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, Part 1, Chapter 1, page unknown (eBook).
8 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM religious movements that grew out of this time. It can be useful in arguments that concern shaping spiritual self-definition of the late 19th and early 20th century.
1.5. Modernism There have been many studies in recent years concerning the spiritual in art. Esotericism, Art, and Imagination, published in 2008, is a collection of articles in the field of Western esotericism and the arts, including drama, literature, film. This collection of works highlights the diverse topics that are complex in their intersections between religion, the artists and their creativity. Collections of works such as Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible have explored the invisible world that may have attracted many abstract artists since the publication of earlier groundbreaking scholarship such as The Sounding Cosmos by Sixten Ringbom in 1970. The increasing attraction has also been drawn to the connection of the occult and Surrealism, which stemmed from an interest in Spiritualist practice due to their pervasive use of automatism.20 Other works dedicated to the subject include 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin by Catherine De Zeghar in 2005, which was the catalogue to an exhibition. There has been an increasing amount of exhibitions dedicated to the subject of modern art and spirituality, with the foundation laid by The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Art 1880-1985, organised by the Los Angeles County Museum and the Gemeentemuseum of The Hague (The Spiritual in Art, 1986). Exhibitions have shown that opposed to what was originally thought about modernist art historian thinking, modern art and religion have a much stronger relationship. In most recent times Hilma af Klint, who concerns the final chapter of this thesis, has been shown as a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York, a great feat for any artist. Emma Kunz, another female artist, and medium had an opening at the Serpentine Gallery in London early in 2019. Both these artists, alongside Georgiana Houghton were displayed at the Lenbauchaus Gallery in Munich as mentioned before, alongside a symposium dedicated to World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz in January 2019.
The relationship between esotericism and the modern is therefore no longer a secret. There is a range of literature and scholarship available and the awareness that alternative religion and spirituality informed many artists and their inspired practice has risen. This can undeniably alter how we view and understand the historical development of modern artistic discourses and practices, and the interpretations we can draw from some of these artworks now, collapsing previous rationalist and formalist approaches. The reason many radical artists were interested in Theosophy may have simply been that Theosophy reflected ideas in the current occult milieu of the time, rather than a significant attribute unique to the movement itself. It insisted on alternative, astral and four-dimensional reality or invisible realms in which a sacred nature of forms could exist, carrying spiritual truths.
Although there are a myriad of works now dedicated to the subject of esotericism and its relationship to art, Marco Pasi in his article, Hilma af Klint, Western Esotericism and the Problem of Modern Artistic Creativity chapter of Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible, highlights that the question as to why this attraction exists has been far from answered. His article focuses on art as a result of direct inspiration or communication from spiritual entities, or as the result of a visionary or mystical experience. In this, Pasi provides an interpretative model in which we can understand the pattern of spirit communication and art: alienated agency and creative dissociation. By this, he understands that the authorship of a radical discourse is attributed to entities subjectively independent from the author’s self. This alienated agency allows artists freedom of expression precisely because they do not believe they are responsible for the creation. Creative dissociation is a detachment from everyday reality which leads to a radical change of perspective. This can become a tool for challenging existing canons and creating radical artistic works. In this sense, it could be even more attractive to women who are interested in esotericism and art, because if they exist during a time or place where their talents are more likely to be doubted, dissociation could inspire creativity and confidence.
20 Bauduin, The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism, page 1.
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Mediumistic art is a psychic phenomenon in which an individual is possessed by an entity that guides the creative process. My investigation of mediumistic visual representation that was thought to have been manifested through communication with spiritual entities includes a specific focus on Ethel Le Rossignol (1874-1970) and the spirit. To discover more about this woman and the art she produced, I explore a comparative analysis of work produced by other visionary artists including Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) and Anne Mary Howitt (1824-1884). My main sources of scholarship are Janet Oppenheim’s study The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (1985), Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment (2004) and Joy Dixon’s Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (2001). Each study contains valuable information to help me situate Ethel Le Rossignol within the social and political context which involved a fascination with Spiritualism and psychical research alongside an examination of the relationship between this and the Theosophical movement. I believe these artists are worth studying, and in particular Miss Le Rossignol, to understand what they believed and to see it reflected in their symbolism and style.
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2. Ethel Le Rossignol in Historical Context
The fin-de-siècle encountered wild creatives, innovative writers, poets, and artists with an artistic goal that their work may transmit important spiritual messages. Their influence has become a prominent academic subject in recent decades, and even more so for the women artists involved in this period. Our British visionary and medium was named Ethel Le Rossignol (1873-1970). Miss Le Rossignol considered herself enlightened by the communication with a particular spirit referred to as J.P.F. Her visionary narrative, A Goodly Company, which was self-published in 1933, is the main body of her exploration of mediumistic abilities and evolution as an artist.
2.1. Spiritualism in England During and post-World War 1 ‘The modern’ is a period we can refer to as the hinge between 1880-1914 when Britain emerged as an identifiable ‘modern nation’. The approach of ‘the modern era’ was heralded with an optimism marked with anxiety. Victorian Spiritualism had dwindled towards the fin-de-siècle but the period during and after the war saw a rise in Spiritualist practices pursued in an attempt to contact the fallen. Ecclesiastical control and authority diminished further in social and political spheres, hurrying the dissolution of institutional Christianity and its hold of the middle class. Spiritualism became more present in modern culture. On the other hand, it was around this time that agnosticism became articulated in intellectual culture. The 1920s experienced a revival of alternative and unconventional religiosity which was alike to the pre-war period, turning people away from what the churches had to offer. We can observe this attention to Spiritualism through literary and artistic currents earlier in the century. As discussed in Alex Owen’s article The ‘Religious Sense’ in a Post-War Secular Age, Virginia Woolf, and her contemporaries were caught up with ‘mystic religion’21. Many people searched for a spiritual life that was separate from the church they felt they could not relate to anymore, some became atheist and agnostic in the quest for meaning. This state of being has been analysed frequently since Max Weber proclaimed that the fate of our times is the disenchantment of the world, however, the same sentiment may have been expressed long before.22 Modern writings include Christopher Partridge’s study The Re-Enchantment of the West (2004), and Egil Asprem’s studies in The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939. “Modernism was a preeminent concern with consciousness and the modern experience of the self” - this is the “truly central insight to modernity”23 states Owen. Asprem’s work challenges popular notions of secularisation, suggested that one should be careful in assuming the world became less spiritual or interested in magic.24
2.2. Correspondences The main source of Ethel Le Rossignol’s biographical information is a collection of around 20 correspondences to her brother, Arthur Le Rossignol, and her aunt during World War 1. They were donated to the University of Notre Dame, USA and preserved as war memorabilia. There is scarce information about her biographical life, her circles of friends or artists, or her family. Apart from Elaine Margaret Atkinson’s Ph.D. dissertation titled The Fringes of Immortality: A Goodly Company and Artistic Collaborations in Visionary Art, there is no other art-historical scholarship concerning Ethel Le Rossignol.
Constance Ethel Le Rossignol was born in 1873 in Argentina to a family originally from Jersey, Channel Islands.25 In her younger years, she lived in Kensington, London, frequently travelling to France and Belgium as a nurse in the First World War. It is implied that she belonged to a middle or upper-class family
21 Owen, The ‘Religious Sense’ in a Post-War Secular Age, Past & Present, page 159.
22 Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment, page 18.
23 Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, page 115.
24 Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment, page 12.
25 Introvigne, A Goodly Company of Spirits. Available: https://www.cesnur.org/2014/mi-lerossignol.htm Last accessed: 29th June 2019.
11 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM due to her lifestyle, frequented with trips, alongside leisurely activities. Information found from blog posts26 detailing her life from her exhibition at The Horse Hospital in 2014 states that she studied art.27 Her correspondences tell tales of her times as a nurse, wishing for holidays and complaints of men who refused to let her drive her car. She explored France, visiting church ruins and galleries. She seemed to be an independent and intellectual woman. In figure 5, she refers to a ‘lovely’ Pieta, which has been painted over with several layers of colourful paint and seemed to resonate with her.28 Her interest in art is discussed again when she takes a trip to Rouen and meets the head of Beaux-Arts, a sculptor, and his brother who also exhibited in the gallery. The letters discuss in depth her appreciation and impression that these artists made, “his genius brother whom he had trained then found a better artist than himself - They are devoted to teach each other and work together - quite ideal”29. Furthermore, she describes a sublime feeling of exploring a ruined church when it happened to a thunderstorm, relieving the idea of war for just a moment.30 After the war it is suggested that she moved back to Jersey, through the evidence of the photograph presented by Eileen Agar in figure 8, however, this may have been her family home. She married later in life in 1930 to a man named Arthur Beresford Riley.31 Le Rossignol died in 1970, aged 96.
2.3. Context The turn of the century was an era of major transformation for humanity’s perception of the world. This marked a shift in Western society and the art world. Globalisation meant societies, religions, and cultures came into closer contact and a broader spectrum of material became more available than ever before. Scientific and technological advances raced forward. Psychological studies expanded through the works Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961). Depth psychology, as Kurt Almvqvist and Louise Belfrage discuss in the opening chapter of their collected works for Hilma af Klint: Seeing the Invisible, understands these visionary artists as being able to delve into the unconscious realm “in the form of symbolic expressions and primordial archetypes by comparing patterns of expressions cross-culturally and via comparative religion and mythology”32. This type of psychological analysis indicates that what people experience in dreams, creative minds may have experienced in their normal waking lives. This could be an indication of how Ethel Le Rossignol’s psychedelic imagery came to be. Altered states redirect focus and pressure from the artist themselves for them to freely experiment. Similarly, this comes at a time not so far from the Surrealist movement, where artists were influenced by Spiritualist methods of automatism and lucid dreaming. Ethel Le Rossignol’s oeuvre was created in 1920, the same period in which Surrealism began to flourish. There is evidence of Le Rossignol’s acquaintance with Eileen Agar, Surrealist artist, and Joseph Bard in the form of photographs donated to the Tate Modern (fig. 7). The image is dated ‘1930s’ which was after A Goodly Company was created. One photograph of Le Rossignol’s house (fig. 8) suggests that the intention of the meeting was for Ethel Le Rossignol’s brother, Arthur Le Rossignol, to meet Agar as an admirer. We can only conclude that, after this meeting if not before, both Le Rossignol’s were familiar with Surrealism, or at least Eileen Agar, her work and the art scene that surrounded her.
As discussed in Elaine Atkinson’s Fringes of Immortality, Ethel Le Rossignol’s work contains strong Theosophical connotations, suggesting that she would have also been familiar with the Spiritualist and Theosophical movement in Britain. The most popular periodicals on the topic of Spiritualism included The Medium and Daybreak and The Spiritualist, however, these stopped printing before the turn of the
26 I assume this was information given at the exhibition.
27 Available: http://tomruffles.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-goodly-company-ethel-le-rossignol-at.html Last accessed: 25th April 2019.
28 Refer to Figure 5. A letter written during the war by Ethel Le Rossignol to her ‘Auntie Anna’ on October 24th, 1915.
29 Refer to Figure 5. A letter written during the war by Ethel Le Rossignol to her ‘Auntie Anna’ on October 24th, 1915.
30 Kurt Almqvist & Louise Belfrage. Hilma af Klint in Historical Context, page 7.
31 Available: http://tomruffles.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-goodly-company-ethel-le-rossignol-at.html Last accessed: 25th April 2019.
32 Kurt Almvqvist and Louise Belfrage, Hilma af Klint: Seeing the Invisible, page 8.
12 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM century.3334 Eve: The Ladies Pictorial and The Sketch began running prints in the 1920s and appealed to women living through the aftermath of the war, experiencing a shift in societal gender constructs and perhaps grasping new-found freedom. The journals are playful with hints of eccentric sensuality and they sometimes included images of art created by women and Spiritualist artists.3536 Through the exhibition of women’s new artistic independence that was permeating Western culture and the influence of Spiritualism, we can observe women’s capacity of artists and their grief which continued for many years after the Great War. We can view their art as a catharsis which enabled them to heal and express the devastation that they and society felt.
Women’s mediumistic images were frequently misunderstood by people who were unfamiliar or did not welcome Spiritualist or Theosophical ideas, especially concerning communication with spirits. Frederic Marvin (1847-1918), an American physician, attempted to pathologise mediumship. His views are consistent with somatic ideas of psychopathology and ideas about the vulnerability of women.37 The idea that Spiritualism could cause mental problems is discussed frequently in his study The Pathology and Treatment of Mediomania (1874). Despite the ongoing backlash, visionary artists participated in the exploration of esoteric spirituality. As a result, women like Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, and Ethel Le Rossignol honourably risked ridicule and perhaps even the confinement of an asylum for the mentally unwell.
Many other artists during the beginning of the 20th century benefited from the knowledge and study of occult sources, in particular, the Theosophical movement. Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, the heralded fathers of modern and abstract art have in more recent years been analysed in relation to their esoteric influences and what this suggests about the meaning of their work. While these artists and their work were altered by these occult sources, the visionary artists I will discuss believed their work to be directly channelled from the spiritual sphere, through communication with spirits or High Masters. Jon Thompson, curator of the 2006 exhibition Inner Worlds Outside, labelled visionary art as an example of outsider art. He characterised visionary art as a product of a “quintessentially modern state of consciousness that arose as part of the spirit of fin-de-siècle”3839. Thompson advocates that the avant-garde is indistinguishable from outsider art, positing high modernism as born from a radical breaking point through the production of mediumistic art. Art created by the self-proclaimed medium artist tends to be labelled as ‘outsider’ or indicative of ‘insanity’ rather than an expression of the avant-garde and as a result, it has not been considered worthy of academic study. The creation of mediumistic art and the expression of spiritual spheres in visual culture is important to be understood for its function in the late 19th and early 20th century and as an expression of modern life.
33 From Pat Deveney’s Journal Database. Available: http://www.iapsop.com/archive/materials/medium_and_daybreak/index.html Last accessed: 1st May 2019.
34 From Pat Deveney’s Journal Database. Available: http://www.iapsop.com/archive/materials/spiritualist/index.html Last accessed: 1st May 2019.
35 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 90.
36 “Why Oh Why?” The Sketch (10 March 1920), The Society of Women Artists Exhibitors 1855-1996, Volume 3, 1996. page 396.
37 Carlos Alvarado and Nancy L Zingrone, ‘The Pathology and Treatment of Mediomania’ by Frederic Rowland, page 229.
38 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 90.
39 Thompson, “The Mad, the ‘Brut’, the ‘Primitive’ and the Modern”. Inner Worlds Outside, page 11, 12, 59.
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3. Ethel Le Rossignol: The Holy Sphere
In recent years there has been a surge of attention towards female mediumistic artists of the late 19th and early 20th century. The most recent exhibition for Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim in New York has illuminated awareness in the public of af Klint’s efforts to make the invisible visible and place her into art history. In trying to categorise Ethel Le Rossignol into an artistic movement, for example, Surrealism, Art Deco or Outsider Art, we find ourselves short of an explanation. We can, however, view her under the term of mediumistic art where we find many other women attempting to deliver what they deemed revolutionary messages. Atkinson wrote her Ph.D. dissertation The Fringes of Immortality: A Goodly Company and Artistic Collaborations in Visionary Art 1880-1930 which explores Le Rossignol’s relationship to Theosophy. This chapter will contextualise Miss Le Rossignol’s work in the effort to understand her depiction of sexuality and gender, as well as acknowledging the influence that Christianity, Theosophy, automatism and modern science may have had.
3.1. A Goodly Company In her introduction to A Goodly Company, Ethel Le Rossignol states she practiced and doubted her skills in automatic until she drew a figure who has a “likeness to a friend” which “as he had been agnostic, his surprise at this was great”40. She explains that she was told to learn to dream as a method of communication and to spend time in the resting state before sleep so that answers could come to her. She spent years perfecting and developing this method and was encouraged by the spirit to not have any doubts in the matter. “Oh, you doubter, you are a sceptic of the first water. I am amused at your absurd ideas about spirits. We are quite as solid as you, only of a finer substance … In your soul-body you come here quite often - it is really rather beautiful to see people in their soul-bodies - they are not aware they come so often and are not conscious of doing so”41. He, as she genders him, tell her, “I want you to believe so much that I am the friend who used to talk and joke and laugh with you. I am not a sort of shade, but so living and happy”42. Through reading Ethel Le Rossignol’s correspondences with this spirit, it becomes obvious that she has lost someone close to her, potentially during the war. The artworks progress and evolve as a visionary narrative accompanied by explanations. Aesthetically, the works become more complicated and colourful as the pages go on. A Goodly Company is a playbill of drawings, paintings and writings that radiate ecstatic joy. Comparable to psychedelic art, Le Rossignol pieces together a story of spiritual evolution with the intention of reassurance of the afterlife.
A Goodly Company is separated into three parts. Paintings are ordered by their complexity and representation of the stage of spiritual evolution they belong to. The first part describes humanity’s beginning in the material world and shows fourteen black and white pencil illustrations. Then, there are fourteen more which represent the struggle, patience and endurance of humanity as it evolves. This section includes the material realm as well as the lower and middle spheres of the spiritual realm, it is the next stage of the evolutionary process for the spirit. These pictures contain representations of Darwinian theory, and also embrace Theosophical philosophy in the idea that they symbolise the increasing progression of the soul after death in the material world. Thirdly, the final collection of images, which are now painted with gold-leaf and psychedelic colours, represent the highest realms of the spiritual spheres. In these images, souls enter the ethereal realms and gains perfect knowledge, wisdom and love through intercommunication with God. She notes during her description of Sphere of Harmony, her Figure No. 2, that “In these first pictures, “I” is the communicator mentioned in the introduction. He gradually becomes impersonal”43.
40 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 2.
41 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 2.
42 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 2.
43 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 8.
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Electronic communications, starting with the telegraph and Morse code in the first half of the 19th century, worked to dissociate communication from distance, enriching communication possibilities. New technologies made it possible for people to converse across larger distances or empty space. These scientific discoveries enabled invisible waves to become identified across invisible realms that were previously inconceivable. The fourth dimension has been a notable influence on the evolution of modern art44, studied in The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art 1983 by L. D. Henderson. The fourth dimension inspired early modern artists such as František Kupka (1871-1957) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). It is likely that because Le Rossignol was interested in esoteric writings that she was acquainted with these theories too. Ethel Le Rossignol may have been influenced by this new technology and new science in several ways. Her work suggests interconnections between spirits dancing mathematically in an otherworldly space which seems to be undulating from a divine source in the bottom centre of the image (fig. 9). She describes “without this current animating every unity of particles, they could not remain a unity, but would resume the arrangement of the inanimate conveyance”45. Her language is infused with science and echoes the Theosophical teaching of mystical oneness. This speculation implies a question of influence because the advancement of science and technology is cultural and historically specific whereas Le Rossignol was being contacted by the spirit who lives outside of time and space in the spiritual sphere. However, through reading her annotations it seems she takes on the role of interpreter for her spirit and so her cultural and personal artistic influences may shine through.
Throughout Le Rossignol’s writing there is a recurrence of Christian language and themes. It is unclear whether Le Rossignol belonged to any Christian organisation as her biographical information is scarce. The opening to ‘Part 1’ of her narrative begins with a quote by F. W. Faber, theologian, and Catholic priest. However, this is also met with language used from Judaism, “Seraph”, and Buddhism, “Ohm”, as well as Neoplatonism and Platonism in the discussion of the music of the spheres. This encompassment of major religions reflects the Theosophical overtones of A Goodly Company, in which ideas from Eastern religions and philosophies are drawn upon. We can see in Figure No. 41 (fig. 9), The Unsealing of the Mysteries that she refers to the “POWER of the PHAROS”46 and the figures wear golden ornamental crowns. We are expected as the viewer to unravel the meanings that are ingrained within the image. Elaine Atkinson informs us of this link and connects Le Rossignol to Besant’s Christian ideologies and writings.47 Le Rossignol represents the spirits in her paintings, especially those of the higher spheres, wearing crowns made of gold, symbolising enlightenment and wisdom. This is consistent with Besant’s writings of the mythological stories about the Sun-God of ancient Egyptian faith.48
In Le Rossignol’s The Sight of the Master (1920-1929) (fig. 10) she shows the “aspirant has now advanced to the sight of the Immanent Master”49 who is also referred to as the “Christ Ideal”50. The symbol of Jesus Christ is frequently referred to in her writings, the Christian faith is figurative of all humanity. Her Christ is surrounded by the Theosophical symbol of the double triangle. Here we are also met with “seven flowing colours” that “reveal a universe of ardent energy”51. Seven is a persistent number throughout A Goodly Company, “seven eyes” which later represents the “Unity of all minds”52 (fig. 11). The number seven is
44 Bohn, ‘Writing the Fourth Dimension’, Comparative Critical Studies, page 121.
45 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 15.
46 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 63.
47 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 172.
48 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 208.
49 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 51.
50 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 51.
51 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 51.
52 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 16.
15 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM mentioned in Theosophical philosophy, most likely where Le Rossignol became acquainted with the number symbolism. The seven light rays which extend from the Christ figure represent the hierarchy of the Theosophical Masters53, analogous to the seven lamps of fire in the Book of Revelation and the ‘seven ways of bliss’54 described in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine as well as many chapters dedicated to ‘Seven Cosmic Elements - Seven Races of Mankind’55 ‘The Fiery Whirlwind and the Primordial Seven’56 and ‘The Seven Creations’57. In the Theosophical emblem, six small triangles are surrounding and emanating from a central space, the Seventh Principle. All six sides touch the side of the serpent - the encircling wheel of cyclic evolution.
Le Rossignol relies on the figure of Christ as a representation of holiness. In The Sight of the Master, Christ is shown positioned in the upper part of the picture with his arms extended outwards. He is surrounded by colours of the rainbow which represent the energy of the aura. These are bright and positive whereas negative personas may have auric colours that are black or brown and are not as visibly open as ones surrounded by light, like the ones we can see in many of her other paintings such as The Soul Unloving After Death (fig. 12). This is also recurrent of Christian ideas of good and evil, sin and redemption, light and dark. In her annotations for No. 19 in the series, she describes a soul who has been evil in the earthly sphere, which the spirit world can see clearly, and that cannot evolve any higher because of this until they repent, “spirit aura wasted and torn by sin can be restored by working good”58.
Le Rossignol’s visionary art shows the transcendence of the soul towards unity with God alongside Christian connotations and perceptions of Christ’s life narrative. In Esoteric Christianity (1905) by Annie Besant, she discusses historical theatrical productions depicting a Sun-God.59 “Depictions of the Sun-God [are] sometimes found sculptured within a circle of the horizon, with the head and feet touching the circle at the North and South, and the outstretched hands at East and West”60. The depiction of this Christ or Sun-God spirit is conceptualised in Le Rossignol’s narrative and in particular, The Sight of the Master. This image shows, “The current from the CRUX attracts the particles of energy and an inexhaustible radiance”61, the Master is “raised to a state of ideal realisation”62. Annie Besant taught that when humanity can focus on the esoteric rather than the materiality, we can better understand Christ’s sacrifice. In Theosophical philosophy, the death of Christ does not exonerate humankind of their sins but instead redirects to the salvation gained through this self-sacrifice. Christ is the embodiment of sacrifice and that lies at the root of spiritual evolution. Only when we evolve towards enlightenment will we understand the true meaning of this. In focusing on Christ as a symbol of pure joy instead of the suffering, Le Rossignol shows an understanding of contemporary Theosophical ideas that differ between a Catholic Christian and a Theosophical philosophy.
53 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 205.
54 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, page 38. See: Annie Besant’s description of the seven components that make up the physical and spiritual body The Seven Principles of Man, 1907.
55 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, page contents ix.
56 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, page contents ix.
57 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, page xiv.
58 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 28.
59 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 208.
60 Besant, Esoteric Christianity, page 52.
61 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 52.
62 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 52.
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Rosicrucianism refers to a movement of the early 17th century, its name derived from the “Christian Rosenkreutz” or “Rose Cross” and has influenced modern Theosophy and Alchemy and many other esoteric teachings. In recent scholarship, Rosicrucianism is discussed in Arthur Versluis’ Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism (2007), an overview from antiquity onwards on various Western religious esoteric movements, and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (2008). More specifically it is studied in Christopher McIntosh’s The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (1989). In the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism compiled by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Rosicrucianism is said to have its origin in 1614 and has roots in alchemy.63 In this description, Hanegraaff highlights the importance of the multiple symbolic elements of the Chemical Wedding. The Chemical Wedding, to describe briefly is the marriage of Mercury and Venus personified which in transmutation, the royal couple completes the supreme act of unification that completes the Great Work. Rosicrucianism of the 19th-century and 20th-century could rightly claim a direct connection to 17th-century counterparts.64 Ethel Le Rossignol’s work shows the influence of the Rosicrucian movement through frequent use of The Rose. The Rose appears in numerous images of Le Rossignol’s narrative, more frequently towards the end. Looking closely at fig. 11 we can see the words ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’ inscribed on a colourful rose. The image contains spirits dancing, enveloped by swirling gold patterns. In the centre, the “Rose of Unity”65 connects to the largest spirit and their crown. The image is titled The Creative Power of Spirit. In the lower left of the image, a soul in turmoil coloured in red and purples cannot ascent to the higher spheres. Two hands line the top and right side of the image. Smaller spirits work together in harmony to move upwards in the painting and the spirit world.
3.2. Healing For the majority of Le Rossignol’s paintings, she uses a circle as the canvas. This connotes several meanings, the first is that she regularly describes her work in ‘spheres’ and therefore the circular scenes would be a depiction of different material and spiritual spheres that represent a space outside of time.
The mandala is a Sanskrit term मणल meaning, ‘circle’. Many modern thinkers, such as Carl Gustav Jung, have taken mandalas seriously, analysing them as maps of consciousness or projected images of the psychic condition of their author. Carl Jung (1875-1961), psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, worked with the mandala with his suffering patients. Without outside knowledge or coaching, his patients would create mandala-like images as self-devised aids to their search for individuation and integration. Through his studies, he traced mandalas back through European alchemical and religious practices as well as symbols from the ancient East. We should be careful in Jung’s synthesis of religions as it is easy to organise many things together in a readily packaged format. In art therapy, mandalas are now used to represent a mirror of oneself, bringing awareness to the creator.66 In bringing separate parts and designs into the mandala, a person can experience wholeness, as all parts begin to work in harmony together. Le Rossignol’s visionary narrative depicts circular scenes where spirits are evermore working together in harmony to progress in their spiritual evolution. They become more geometric and symmetric, along with more vibrant psychedelic colours which may have been a healing experience for her and the spirit of a friend she once knew. In this sense, they could also be considered mandalas.
Another visionary artist who makes use of mandalas is Emma Kunz. Emma Kunz was born in Switzerland in 1892 and died in 1963.67 When she was 18 years old, she began to use her abilities of telepathy and prophecy. Later in life, she was widely known as a healer. Kunz created large-scale pictures on graph paper
63 Hanegraaff, Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, page 1009.
64 Hanegraaff, Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, page 1018.
65 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 50.
66 Henderson ; Rosen ; Mascaro. Empirical Study on the Healing Nature of Mandalas, page 1.
67 Emma Kunz Zentrum. Available: https://www.emma-kunz.com/en/emma-kunz/. Last accessed 12th Feb 2019.
17 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM and described her work as follows: “Shape and form expressed as measurement, rhythm, symbol, and transformation of figure and principle”68. As a visionary artist, she bequeathed to us a fascinating collection of her works of art that encodes immeasurable knowledge. Each colour and shape had a precise meaning for her to understand, which seems to be true for many mediumistic artists including Ethel Le Rossignol. Her work could be described as a sacred geometry or mandalas for healing purposes. What is striking about this is the overall spiritual message of healing reassurance that these mediumistic artists both try to convey.
The despair of the war and the devastation that swept the nation led many mourning people to call for their dead to be brought home where they could be buried in local cemeteries. This came to little success. In all countries that were touched by the war, there was a sense of community and help for everyone who had lost someone, many joined together to provide knowledge, consolation and commemoration. The relationship to Spiritualism is that by one of the most powerful and disturbing means, the living could see or hear the dead and therefore their dead could return to them to help them cope with loss and trauma. The study of Spiritualism and religion in this context is especially interesting because it indicates the effects of the war on religious imagination, outside the confines of the traditional and institutionalised church. In (fig. 15) Le Rossignol shows many spirits praying in harmony surrounding a face. In her description, she says that the spirits who have given their lives for their brethren advance at a greater speed in the spiritual realm because they have learned that the will of God is love for all mankind. This could relate to the wartime rhetoric.
3.3. Gender and Sexuality Mediumship gave women a discursive space to interpret the progression of women and sexuality at the time. This exploration of passion and sexuality was a way for women of the early 20th century to interact with the subject freely and without authorship. Many of her works show man and woman in loving embrace. Le Rossignol’s Unity of Love: Man and Woman’s Form in One provides evidence that Le Rossignol adheres to the Theosophical philosophy that man and woman should live in harmony as to speed up the process of humanities evolution. In Unity of Love: Man and Woman’s Form in One we see both male and female dance- like curved movements, enacting harmonious unity while showing the physical differences. As Le Rossignol’s images progress, the stylised figures’ gender differences become less prominent, embodying both male and female attributes in androgynous figures as the spirit evolves. This is a recurrent theme in Theosophical and esoteric philosophies, it also pervades modern art through artists such as Hilma af Klint and surrealists who depict the union of the opposite as an ultimate, spiritual goal relating back to the chemical wedding.69 Earlier in Le Rossignol’s visual narrative, masculine and feminines figures act in the material world. However in the more ethereal higher spheres, the harmonious unification is reflected in their embodiment of having both male and female qualities. Le Rossignol makes clear that the woman achieves the same goal in spiritual evolution, and in her androgynous spirits she shows a feminist side to her art.
Le Rossignol’s engagement with gender reflects the social and political context of the post-World War 1 era and the fear that society faced in losing so many people in the Great War. There was an emphasis on the importance of family and conception, birth and rebirth. In many of Le Rossignol’s images, we see parents with children, with auras of rose. The symbol of the Rose is of great importance throughout the narrative, and we can assume because this colour envelops the parents, they are deemed important too. Theosophist’s plans for the ‘New Age’ included reconstructions of society, developing campaigns to improve the “quality and quantity of the nation’s birth”70. Having said this, Annie Besant, who seems to have influenced Le Rossignol directly, was strictly feminist and an advocate of birth control. Besant’s speeches and actions suggest she did not completely abide by pushing conception on the masses.
3.4. Exhibition and Audience
68 Emma Kunz Zentrum. Available: https://www.emma-kunz.com/en/emma-kunz/. Last accessed 12th Feb 2019.
69 Ryle, Reinventing the Yggdrasil: Hilma af Klint and Political Aesthetics, page 2.
70 Atkinson, Evolution and Exegesis, page 452.
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Le Rossignol’s visionary narrative exists at the College of Psychic Studies in London, England. Her work has been shown in a 2014 exhibition at The Horse Hospital in London, publicised as a series of psychic drawings. Elaine Atkinson notes in her dissertation that she was lucky enough to buy some of Le Rossignol’s mediumistic pictures and automatic writings on eBay in 2007, and that the original owner had kept them in a garage for over thirty years before offering them for sale on the internet.71 This owner described Le Rossignol as a mad woman despite her obvious talent and skill as an artist. Her mediumistic narrative shown under the context of Spiritualism represents the teachings espoused by modern Theosophical philosophy. Through these findings she discovers that Le Rossignol was lauded by a man named Stanley De Brath, who was a civil engineer, psychic researcher and Spiritualist, giving many lectures and writing articles for 166 Spiritualist journals including Light, Theosophical Path Magazine and Theosophical Quarterly Magazine. His main focus was the Theosophical concept of the evolution of the human spirit after bodily death, which relates very much to Ethel Le Rossignol’s Theosophical narrative and artistic oeuvre. De Brath praised Le Rossignol’s images for “demonstrating the capacity to facilitate comprehension in all who “would seek to understand the Divine Purpose in the development of the human spirit”72.
Conclusion Le Rossignol describes her mission not as an allegory but as an assurance of the afterlife, supposed to bring peace to humanity because the goal of art is beauty, she writes, and the goal of the spirit artist combines Wisdom with Beauty. Her images are a visionary narrative which educates the audience about the truth of their spiritual heritage. She is strongly influenced by the Theosophical movement and many different religious tenets such as Egyptian mythology, and Rosicrucianism. Her story shows spiritual responsibilities in working together in the path to spiritual enlightenment. Her artwork was influenced by creation, reproduction and evolution. The images offer a bright reassurance as opposed to the bleakness that surrounded England after World War 1, and the spirit(s) that spoke to her pushed her in the direction of publicising her images, which could offer condolences to the public.73 Le Rossignol began to trust that her paintings could show humanity that spiritual life is a fact, and individuals that support each other accelerate towards enlightenment.
She thanks the reader for making the way to the end of A Goodly Company in this closing statement: “To those who have followed the story of these pictures to this final page it can only be repeated that they were given as a joyful reassurance of the spiritual spheres, showing the archangels, the angels and the different creations - lower and higher - as man has slowly evolved through animal to man, from man to spirit, from spirit to angel and from angel to participator in the unveiled purpose of God”74.
71 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 165.
72 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 166.
73 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 3.
74 Le Rossignol, A Goodly Company, page 69.
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4. Anna Mary Howitt: A Glorious Fruition
The creative woman during the Victorian period was notably connected to politics. Art and creative expression became an area for intense debate. As the mid-19th century saw a rise to women becoming artists and feminist activists75, the role of women and how it would change in contemporary society came into question. Women became involved in the arena of cultural production and began to develop artistic identities that reflected larger issues such as gender, representation, and collectivity. The latter may be especially true in the case of Anna Mary Howitt. Alexandra Wettlaufer, American author, points out in her article The Politics and Poetics of Sisterhood: Anna Mary Howitt’s “The Sister’s in Art”, Howitt’s deep connection to the creative sisterhood she helped to form, and the women involved in it with her and how they helped each other to grow. The art world was being prised open to encompass women in its norms. Not only did women stand on the outside of the art world, Spiritualist artists stood even further. Their purpose claimed it possible to assimilate spirits through visual art. However, Spiritualism enters a conundrum with itself in its critique of materialism yet insisting on material forms for solid belief.
One of the first, if not the first, medium artists to emerge in Britain was Anna Mary Howitt. Alongside her, her sisterhood and artistic circles played a part in modern Spiritualism and feminism in London during this period. Her artwork and illustrations, which were joyfully encouraged and harshly critiqued, may have helped to shape modern mediumistic art, and perhaps some of her techniques, such as her early use of automatism influenced modern art movements such as abstraction and surrealism. Hewitt was later known as Howitt-Watts after her marriage to the poet, Alaric Alfred Watts. She was the daughter to prolific Quaker writers and publishers William Howitt (1792-1879) and Mary Botham (1799-1888) who both had connections to the literary and art world. They were leading Spiritualists and supporters of animal magnetism and Mesmerism.76
Anna Mary Howitt’s life was infused with religion and creativity from an early age, and her art and illustrations echo a strong spiritual and feminine message. In using Howitt as my first comparable chapter, we can encompass an understanding of an important figure before Le Rossignol’s time in the efforts to draw similarities and differences of inspiration, meaning and method. Both artists, residing in London, England, can help to illuminate the cause of their mediumistic art and help define circumstances under which this art may be created. The chapter will begin by giving background to Anna Mary Howitt’s story, with later art historical analysis of some of Howitt’s water colour paintings and sketches. I became interested in Howitt by becoming increasingly fascinated with Spiritualism and art. This led me to the University of Cambridge archives where her drawings and paintings were donated to the Society of Psychical Research. All images are reproduced from this source.
Anna Mary Howitt was formally trained as an artist in her twenties when she entered Henry Sass’s Art Academy in London in 1846.77 She was a Christian and associated herself with the Pre-Raphaelite artists.78 Afterwards, she accompanied fellow female artist Jane Benham to Munich where she studied further under the guidance of Wilhelm von Kaulbach. From this experience, she eventually published a collection of articles dedicated to her time in Munich in the form of the book, An Art Student in Munich (1853). Her illustrations then appeared in the Illustrated Magazine of Art, and later in Camila Crosland’s Light in the Valley (1857) in which she is known as ‘Comfort’. After the rejection of one of her paintings for the Royal Academy, Howitt found refuge in Spiritualism which her parents were already interested in. Her father,
75 Oberter, The Sublimation of Matter into Spirit: Anna Mary Howitt's Automatic Drawings, page 333.
76 Oppenheim, The Other World, page 221. Mary Botham-Howitt translated Joseph Ennemoser’s History of Magic 1819, who was a late proponent of Franz Mesmer’s Animal Magnetism.
77 Oberter, The Sublimation of Matter into Spirit: Anna Mary Howitt's Automatic Drawings, page 333.
78 Oberter, The Sublimation of Matter into Spirit: Anna Mary Howitt's Automatic Drawings, page 333.
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William Howitt would become one of the leading Spiritualist journalists of this period in England. Her illustrations in Light in the Valley would be among the first spirit drawings to reach a wider public. Howitt wrote extensively for Spiritualist journals combining her belief in Spiritualism and her faith in Christianity. Her watercolours display an obvious connection between the two as mother and child, angels and Christ figures are encompassed by bright floral patterns and colours. Anna Mary Howitt turned exclusively to automatic writing and drawings from 1857. She was applauded by many for her work as described by the many notes of donation and praise found in the Society for Psychical Research archives. Many of the letters show that she had great sympathy and would send spirit drawings to her friends when they were troubled. Lilah Watts describes her having a “beautiful personality, one of those rare natures whose every thought and impulse seems pure and lofty”79 (fig. 19). It is obvious through her illustrations that her formal artistic training and talents stayed with her shaping the way she could conceptualise and produce spirit art. Howitt’s artistic endeavours are largely missing from any art historical lineage or scholarship, her pursuit of Spiritualism ignored as an embarrassing turn to an otherwise fruitful life as a writer or formal artist. However, art and Spiritualism were completely connected for Howitt and her work radiates uplifting movement and colourful scenes of feminine and floral religiosity which were deeply appreciated by many people.
4.1. Spirit Drawing Methods In both Rachel Oberter and Maggie Atkinson’s articles, Anna Mary Howitt is said to have produced images during a trance. Through viewing archived letters from friends and people who donated their collection to the Society of Psychical Research, it seems that most of their experiences suggest that Howitt’s method of creation was more subtle. Letter (fig. 29), writes that “I never knew her go off into a trance, but while in her normal state, of sitting and talking to me, she would have clair-audience and would repeat to me aloud what was said to her and which were responses to some thoughts or remarks of mine, frequently. She had no need to be entranced as her nature was so finely balanced, that her subjective nature was open and receptive as were her natural senses”80. It seems that through this message, Howitt managed her daily life as a psychic, perhaps also telepathically, and was able to hear these spirit voices in her normal day without becoming completely enveloped in a trance. Howitt’s paintings were created with one hand on a paper while a spirit communicated through her. Recurrent in these letters are ideas that as a female medium she was “mentally passive” and finely tempered and open. Furthering the idea of woman as a receptive vehicle for these spirits.
“The hand of the medium feels itself impelled…to rapidly outline with a pencil, or colour, the form of the spirit picture on the paper’. ‘The ‘spirit-picture’, she said, was ‘of the nature of dissolving views”81. The dissolving view was a type of popular magic lantern as a form of entertainment in the Victorian era which produced illusions of images merging with another, using two slides in alternate sequence. Anna Mary Howitt’s drawings display a sense of vulnerability, fitting into the conversation of Spiritualism and materiality vs immateriality. Her drawings and paintings are outlined on tracing paper fitted to each page of large sketchbooks. Delicate, see-through and torn sheets comply with the porousness of matter which, intentionally or not, critiques the former fine art world she existed within. In the art world where paintings were a finished object, Howitt’s watercolours give sensations of permeable depictions slightly of our grasp, almost not there at all. An artwork was bound in intangible ideas of spirits and communication into an earthly visual language, ideas from the heavens rethought as earthly discourse. Rachel Oberter describes this with high stakes, suggesting spirit art carried enormous hazards.82 Yet Howitt’s drawings, vulnerable to touch and soothing to observe, suggest a peaceful flow of spiritual imagination. In addition to Howitt’s view and practice of Spiritualism was the German Romantic movement and in particular G.W.F. Hegel. In Hegel’s Lectures of Aesthetics, he discusses art as a ‘mediating function’ between the directly perceived objective
79 (Fig. 19) Lilah Watts letter donated to the Society of Psychical Research, March 18th, date unspecified.
80 (Fig. 29) Letter by Oriane Lyndale, Greenfield, donated to the Society of Psychical Research, March 21st 1903.
81 Howitt, A Contribution Towards the History of Spirit-Art, page 176.
82 Oberter, The Sublimation of Matter into Spirit: Anna Mary Howitt's Automatic Drawings, page 335.
21 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM world and the ideality of pure thought (from the artist). Oberter points out, Howitt’s phrase ‘the sublimation of matter into spirit’, applied to art, copies Hegel’s notion and we can see this in her writings, “… it should be borne in mind that Spirit seeks to spiritualise man’s ideas, not to hold them bound in the outer form of things and that although all communications clothe themselves in the garments of natural language, that language is but as the body to an idea, the idea itself alone proceeding from spirit, and being itself the spiritual message given from mind to mind”.83
Many attempts made through Howitt’s communication with spirits resulted in spontaneous drawings that were sometimes incoherent. They would then be reevaluated and redefined as the process moved forward. These experiments would consist of colour blocks (fig. 20, 21), circular motions that filled the image sometimes covering figures or attempts of an image beforehand (fig. 22, 23, 24). In this sense, the images defy legibility and show the struggle she may have had to communicate the spirit world clearly in visual forms because the image may have changed before it could be seen. In another sense, the earlier sketches show artistic progression for design, in (fig. 25, 26, 27) the circular motions hold a deeper meaning, surely symbolic of fertility. Linked to this must be artistic confidence, and the confidence of the image on the ideal plane to bring it to materiality. This we could relate to an apprehension of creativity and the belief in oneself to actualise ideas, bringing what they deemed an important message for their circles and the public. In reflection of her experience, Anna Mary Howitt told her husband that she had trouble ‘fixing’ an idea because it was constantly in flux, this may have been the reason she preferred to often use tracing paper as her medium because she was able to copy parts of a design she was happy with to begin another drawing.
4.2. Symbolism The frequent form of motion that Anna Mary Howitt’s sketches take is that of the circle, whether in motion, in the centre or symbolic meaning. “Circles are the highest symbols … Fragments are all parts of circular bodies, as a piece of granite rock is a part of those primitive formations that encircle the earth. Atoms gyrate upon their axes and follow the line of their strongest attractions. Things move in spirals … Sea-shells are built up spirally. Vines ascend forest trees spirally. Particles of steel flying toward a magnet move spirally. This law, with few exceptions, applies to atoms, worlds, systems, civilisations, and all those historic cycles of ever-recurring spiritual epochs and eras that distinguish antiquity.”84 Circles appear frequently in her preliminary automatic drawings as a symbol of creation and the all-encompassing world, the microcosm, and macrocosm. Throughout this dissertation we see the circle echo through the works of all three visionary artists I discuss. Ethel Le Rossignol uses the circle as a canvas, which inside she portrays spiritual evolution. The circular form gives her the shape of infinity to show the spiritual realm in visual language. Through this shape the viewer is attracted to a portal of vision which defies the limits of a rectangular canvas, suiting the change in function for both Howitt and Le Rossignol’s artworks. Maggie Atkinson discusses the case of Georgiana Houghton, visionary artist active in the mid-19th-century, in her article Healing Vibrations Through Visionary Art. Georgiana Houghton, too, believed that she was expressing the ideas of the nature of the spiritual realms through producing abstracted and mystical paintings (fig. 28). Her images show layered interconnected circles revealing the transcendental value and significance of this shape. Inherent in visionary art is the transgression of boundaries and manipulations of space. Using the artwork as a window to conceptualise the spirit world and the material world places the artwork and the viewer in an unusual position. Atkinson suggests, “Spiritualism, religious conviction, and artistic practice, culminated in intricately rendered drawings and paintings that encouraged spiritual enlightenment and healing in viewers”85.
83 “Anna Mary Howitt, ‘Preface’, in Glimpses of a Brighter Land, page xvii. The notion of ideas being clothed in form most likely derives from Hegel. As Gene Blocker points out, the clothes metaphor was recurrent in Hegel’s writings. See Gene Blocker, ‘Hegel on Aesthetic Internalization’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 11.4 (1971): 341–53, p. 352” Found in: Oberter, The Sublimation of Matter into Spirit: Anna Mary Howitt's automatic drawings, page 332.
84 Peebles, Seers of the Ages Embracing Spiritualism Past and Present, page 191.
85 Atkinson, Healing Vibrations Through Visionary Art. Religion and the Arts, page 341.
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In the image (fig. 32), Howitt sketches a representation of the “Life of the painting medium” which is written at the top right corner. In this, she outlines and connects various colours to certain emotions or themes. Towards the left side, accompanying each deeper/darker circle, she links, white: Love of God’s will, blue: Love of parents, red: Life may love with astral souls, purple: Life in astral studies in learning of art. The top deeper sketched circle however, is linked to “Life in Germany” and the “Philosophy of Religion”. We see this method occur in mediumistic art frequently, from Georgiana Houghton to Emma Kunz to Ethel Le Rossignol and Hilma af Klint. This is most likely related to Goethe’s theory of colours which influenced many esoteric teachings. In the “Life of the painting medium”, ideas and considerations are frequently overwritten and circled. Creating partially un-legible instructions, as well as a chaotic representation of what it would be like to live the life of a painting medium. Howitt and Le Rossignol use almost identical phrases in their visionary art, their love for art and the “love of spirit life” echoes through their work. This image displays interconnected pieces of what mediumistic art means for Howitt, a mind map fitting to that of a busy and open mind through curves and circles. The notes are personal and it becomes clear that Howitt’s main inspiration is that of love. The whole image seems to be encompassed in a cell-like shape, relating to the idea of microcosm and macrocosm but also combining with scientific influences also confirm the relationship between Spiritualism and modern scientific influence. It could also relate to ideas of womanhood and the source of creation.
In her writings for Light magazine in October 1888, Howitt describes her connection to flowers as with Christianity as one of the “most exquisite creations of God”86 and associates them especially with heaven. Flowers in Spiritualism are often denoted as a symbolic language of the ethereal world. We see many bright, floral forms in the work of Georgiana Houghton, who was acquainted with Howitt (fig. 35). Botany was a fashionable study and activity in the 18th and 19th century England. It was more prominent after the emergence of the Linnaean sexual system named and classified plants. Many women that were drawn to nature or Spiritualism seemed to be acquainted with botany. As a result of this, the study of flowers and plants became associated with the feminine. Some of the earliest influential books and drawings related to botany were created by women. Anna Atley published the first book illustrated by photographs. She may have been the first woman to create a photograph. Her book Sun Gardens and Cyanotypes were extensive botany investigations of ferns, flowers, feathers, algae and lace in which delicate, abstract ethereal images grace the pages (fig. 36).
Howitt describes the creation of her work Christ Among the Spheres, reproduced in Camila Crosland’s book in 1857. She explains how often her image will change during her artistic process and can sometimes cause her great stress. Howitt describes a child being drawn behind a network of prison bars and an angel representing Christ locking the cage. This then changes into a winged woman’s head and at this point, she takes a two month break due to the distress of the image. Later, she expands her development of the image to encompass more figures, a sleeping Eve wearing Egyptian drapery. Egyptian sphinx and pyramids appear in some of Howitt’s sketches in common with Le Rossignol. Perhaps this shows their belief in the mysterious wisdom they believe they are conveying. The depiction of progress from a lower spiritual sphere into spiritual enlightenment and freedom, both artists highlight and thematise ideas of a beginning, flux, growth and evolution. In Howitt’s earlier spirit drawings, we see a sense of incompletion expressing mystery in dark heavy forms. Later, her images contrast with colour, floral and positive figures (fig. 33, 34). Applications of vibrant colours appear the swirl and surround spiritual figures help to simulate the unbound energies (fig. 37). Harmonious automatic floral patterns act to create flow, drawing the viewer’s eye in direction to gaze over the entire picture. In these later drawings, which dominantly depict female figures and woman with child, Howitt reveals the realisation of a female manifestation of the divine opposed to her early depiction of a crucified Christ (fig. 38, 39). The images bounce with lightness and freedom, evoking a sense of joy and openness. This could be reflecting how Howitt feels like a feminist artist, and how the second coming of Christ is in fact female, ushering in a feminine perspective towards religion and spirituality.
4.2. Anna Mary Howitt and Ethel Le Rossignol
86 Atkinson, The Fringes of Immortality, page 43.
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Throughout the decades of the late 19th century, one of the central questions that became actualised later by abstraction was whether art could overcome its material nature to visualise the invisible. Howitt and her spirit drawings predict these artistic arguments over how it is possible to represent the divine, or messages from spiritual sources. The desired result of Symbolism became ‘dematerialization’87, deliberately including signs and symbols referring to nature but only signs of an ideal and conceptual realm. Wassily Kandinsky moved further forward from this and arrived at abstraction, but his doubts remained in dissolving the material form. In his 1911 treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky writes that taking away all traces of mimesis is too out of reach for artists and people of the present, “they are too indefinite for him. To limit himself to the purely indefinite would be to rob himself of possibilities, to exclude the human element and therefore to weaken his power of expression”88. Therefore we see Kandinsky and perhaps other early abstract artists faced the same issues that Anna Mary Howitt did, refining something that doesn’t exist in the material world. Spirit art overreaches conventional and formal art concepts by defying the distinction between science and religion, a ritual from method and artistic genius from an ordinary person. Mediumistic art has questioned the limits of art history and aesthetic philosophy and has broad socio-cultural underpinnings. The spiritual served as a myriad of possibilities that could radically change art history, Howitt among the other artists could not completely accommodate the spiritual without knowing the debts to a material presentation.
Spiritualism could act as a vehicle for spirit artists to overcome initial anxieties with their work or, if applicable, their past trauma. Howitt’s use of automatism conveys a sense of mental freedom in which she creates the space to be creative and let go of previous artistic assumptions (fig. 30). In this image she practices automatic writing, the image spells out ‘Love’ and is a swirling, ornate floral depiction of spirit communication. This sense of split persona relates to a displacement of authorship which may have been felt by women and especially female artists to overcome the obstacle of misogyny in society and art at the time. It could also be that these disassociating experiences removed people or mediums from a place that surrounded death and sadness. (Fig. 31) reads, “Drawings were the result of some great earthly sorrow, with which the artist had such great sympathy that beings came to impress her in her art capacity”89.
Although Anna Mary Howitt and Ethel Le Rossignol lived in different cultural contexts and an uncomplicated comparison cannot be easily drawn, I would like to make some general observations. For this purpose, their worlds can be viewed within the broader context of British mediumship and women artists. In giving space to discuss an artist from early modern Spiritualism, I can elevate Le Rossignol’s work to a platform early encompassing tenants of basic and early Spiritualism through the aspects of form, symbolism, and femininity. The intention is to discover the threads which pull through the decades of these two artists. With knowledge of Howitt's and Le Rossignol’s mediumistic talents, their images offer further insight for the viewer that immediately creates a space where the audience must meditate on the mediation between spirit and earthly plane. They must do this in an attempt to figure out what the specific message from the third party may be. Both these mediumistic artists intended their work to convey a message from the spiritual world as reassurance of the spiritual plane, (fig. 31) “hence it would be difficult to classify all the drawings, for they convey emotions or thoughts, in forms of flowers and scrolls; and the one aim of all the beautiful imagery was to reveal, that was is sad and unfinished on the earthly plane, has a glorious fruition on the spiritual plane”90.
As discussed in the previous chapter, little is known about Le Rossignol’s exhibition and reception. However, it is known that she displayed her work to members of the Theosophical Society, and was praised immensely by De Brath. Although many artists face rejection, especially women and those involved with the spiritual in
87 Hirsh, Symbolist Art and Literature, page 95.
88 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, page 68.
89 (Fig. 31) Letter by Oriane Lyndale, Greenfield, donated to the Society of Psychical Research, March 21st 1903.
90 (Fig. 31) Letter by Oriane Lyndale, Greenfield, donated to the Society of Psychical Research, March 21st 1903.
24 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM art, Howitt and Le Rossignol were praised for their talents. It seems their place in society and their opinions situated them into a friendly context that they felt comfortable wishing to display their work with the guidance of the spirits. Their message was one that must be heard as a consolation for the public. For Ethel Le Rossignol, communication with her spirit was clear guidance through conversation. She learned to harness and evolve her talent as an artist to eventually paint psychedelic visionary narratives with confidence in her medium abilities through her dreams. She attributed the works to the spirit, displacing the authorship of them and creatively disassociating from it. For Le Rossignol, what we see is a collection of finite work that has been the conclusion of previous artistic refinement. We are unable to view the sketches and attempts that she made to translate her communication with her spirit, J.P.F., but the progression of images from sketch into colour is the same evolution for both artists.
Both artists are thoroughly influenced by figures of Christ. We can see in their oeuvres a progression of ideas based on their representation of Christ figures. For Howitt, this evolves into a female Christ which is reflecting her views of feminism and what she may have felt was needed for spirits of this era to progress at this time in history. The modern woman’s suffrage movement was only just beginning and in this time women were needed more to be able to push for humanities progression and equality. In Light in the Valley, ‘Comfort’ narrates her image Christ Without Hands, “on the place of both hands; man’s word and woman’s word, the right and left of creation, the eastern and western hemispheres. The woman’s word is about to come forth with power”91. She goes on, “The woman manifestation of the Divine is about to appear; it was hidden in Me, the Christ, just as woman was hidden in man until the conditions in the outer world were ready for her reception. Now she is about to appear, be ye ready to receive”92. For Le Rossignol, creating her work after a period of great sadness from the War, her Christ figures evolve towards an unidentifiable gender. Complimenting Howitt’s approach, Le Rossignol’s spirit drawings seem to point towards an inclusive androgynous future in spiritual evolution, with all spirits working together to move forward into a universal fulfilment.
Spiritualism tried to adhere to positivist thought but the balance between natural and supernatural was not always so simple. Spiritualism could not always provide the answers yet strived to present physical forms of evidence that the afterlife was a true reality. Spiritualism re-negotiated boundaries between science, the material and the supernatural, ‘re-enchanting’ the increasingly materialistic modern world.
91 Crosland, Light of the Valley, page 134.
92 Crosland, Light of the Valley, page 134.
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5. Hilma af Klint: Freedom and Opposition
In the late 19th century Theosophy replaced Spiritualism as the most popular esoteric movement. The early 20th century saw the emergence of abstract art. The pioneer of this movement is a topic much debated over the recent years, as several artists have come out from under the woodwork to reveal an exciting oeuvre of abstract painting before art history scholarship had previously concluded. The first treatise wrote for abstract art was by the renowned artist Wassily Kandinsky, titled Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910). The huge interest and influence that the avant-garde artists of this era submitted to were that of the occult, and particularly the Theosophical movement which adhered to occult sciences and fused eastern esoteric teachings, Spiritualism, and modern technology and scientific discoveries. To discuss these topics implications, it is essential to observe the relationship between religion and modern art. Before the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment era, time was, in the Western world, defined by religion that saw the end of time. The less traditionally religious Enlightenment-era added the implication that history was open-ended and that we lived in a limitless future. The scientific revolution undoubtedly impacted the revolution in art. Time became a more flexible concept. Cinema and photography allowed experiments into art and time. Time became a concept that could be moved around, backward or forwards, unidirectional for artists. With new technologies such as the telephone and the x-ray alongside new concepts of time came inspired writings such as the Theosophical text, A Primer of High Space (The Fourth Dimension) (1913) written by Claude Bragdon. Suddenly, it became possible to affirm things that the human eye could not see. Clairvoyance was no longer a facade.
The relationship between religion and art goes back for centuries. We can note that in more modern times, the Renaissance drastically changed the relationship of the church to high culture. Esoteric symbols and occult sciences transformed into works of art did not occur fully until the modern world, starting with Romanticism and Symbolism. Recent investigations such as Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment suggest that the late 19th and early 20th revival of spiritual beliefs and currents which were previously marginalised was a significant part of the modernist project. We have to remember that it would be wrong to assume Europe completely abandoned religion. An interest continued although it expanded to a width not seen before. This included the study of the far eastern and Middle-East religious and philosophical systems. It seemed that many creatives were interested in broadening their knowledge of how religious philosophy different to their own functioned, and therefore it became fashionable. Art did not remove itself from religion, but it did however, begin to treat Christianity in a way that encompassed other cultural spheres. Christianity no longer stood at the centre of absolute truth and morality.
The occult stage gathered many different intellectuals and artists. Many of these artists read extensively in occult subjects, with Theosophy being one of the most popular. Introducing Hilma af Klint alongside Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich as her contemporaries seems disjointed. It is one thing to become involved in the occult, to read deeply about secret doctrines and gain interest and knowledge, but for af Klint her exploration in art comes from a personal invitation and commission from who she deemed to be the hidden masters of the spiritual world. In this subjective experience, her mentally and most likely physically draining involvement with this mission through altered states of consciousness and auditory messages, seems to indicate a much different kind of art, or scientific investigation. In this chapter, I will explore the ways Hilma af Klint used Theosophical philosophy to illustrate her botanical, mandala-like motifs and move further than the interaction of modernism and occultism towards the visual culture created by mediums at the beginning of the 20th century. I will discuss how and why modern Theosophy as a set of beliefs and practices of the Theosophical Society may have been of interest to women artists during this time. I also wish to explore methods of artistic creation in the form of automatism, exploring the relevance of this method from a gender perspective.
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5.1. Theosophy and Feminist Politics Theosophy played an important role in feminism during the early 20th century. Women’s involvement in occult movements and groups became notable during the suffrage movement and onwards.93 Janet Oppenheim, author of The Other World discusses an integral part that Spiritualism played for the empowerment of feminism. Moving further from that, Theosophy too was a crucial component in the feminist political culture. The Theosophical Society admitted women into its official ranks, this level of acceptance was greeted with many women who struggled to find a space for their voices and where their spiritual capacities could be evaluated. The Theosophical Society formed “a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour”94. However, this involvement also came with an ever-shifting discourse that became fraught with controversies. Annie Besant, who led the Theosophical Society as president from 1907 to 1933, encountered most of these struggles. Besant herself was a provocative feminist, leading talks on free love and abortion. Joy Dixon confirms in The Divine Feminine that Theosophy’s links to the English feminist movement were particularly marked by the idea that “women’s spirituality emerged from these struggles as a precarious, contradictory and unstable formation”95.
Dixon argues that Theosophy offered women social and intellectual opportunities that had previously been unattainable for them in previous religions regardless of whether it served as a site for struggle and opposing ideas of womanhood. This only proved further that the movement could help important debates arise and move forward. With Spiritualism, women omitted to a more passive state where their main activity was mediumship. With Theosophy, women had the potential to become leaders. With two of the most notable leaders of the movement being women, Blavatsky as the founder and later Besant, Theosophy formed a space where women could be celebrated as a spiritual authority. The Theosophical movements idea of God was that of an all-embracing, impersonal and genderless Divine Principle; because of this it rejected the traditional notion of masculine and all-knowing man in the sky. This gave people a notion of self- consciousness in generally non-gendered terms which allowed them to access occult techniques irrespective of their sex or gender. Because of this, we can see why Theosophy was a liberating force from what had become the structure of the mainstream modern world.
5.2. Hilma af Klint Hilma af Klint was born near Stockholm, Sweden in 1862.96 During her school years, she was taught mathematics and botany while she began her journey as a painter. The society that Hilma af Klint grew up in was male-dominated, the art academy she was welcomed to had only just started accepting female students. The liberation of women in the modern era had only just begun. In 1887, af Klint graduated with honours from the Swedish Royal Academy of Fine Arts.97 The academy acknowledged her talent by allowing her to work in a highly sought after studio, officially sponsored and at the heart of the Stockholm art scene. By the time she moved into the studio, she had already begun her exploration into Spiritualism. The tragedy of her younger sisters death when af Klint was eighteen had enriched her interest in séances and spiritual studies. For years Hilma af Klint expressed herself in the formal structures of the art academy through paintings of landscapes and portraits.
93 Studied in Dixon’s Divine Feminine, Owen’s The Darkened Room and Oppenheim’s The Other World.
94 Abdill, The Universal Brotherhood of Humanity. Available: https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/42- publications/quest-magazine/1642-the-universal-brotherhood-of-humanity. Last accessed 12th Feb 2019.
95 Dixon, The Divine Feminine, page 6.
96 Schjeldahl, Out of Time, page 1.
97 Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum. Available: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint Last accessed: 1st May 2019.
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With a Christian background indicative of her spiritual interests, by 1879, Hilma af Klint had already begun participated in séances and joined the Spiritist Literature Association.98 At this time, Spiritualism was still in its heyday and séances were a popular activity. The movement reached a peak at the end of the 19th century, with over eighteen million followers in the western world. The Federation of the Theosophical Society was introduced in Sweden in 1889 and The Theosophical Society was established in 1895, both of which af Klint was a member.99 According to the Theosophical movement, humans have seven states of consciousness. The philosophy maintains that the universe is a single unit - “Macrocosmos” is the same as “Microcosmos”, a theory which echoes through af Klint’s work.100 The founder of the Theosophical Society, Blavatsky, released her two-volume work The Secret Doctrine in 1888, which af Klint will have been acquainted with. The books reconcile ancient Eastern wisdom with modern science. Not only Hilma af Klint influenced by Theosophy, but tenants of Rosicrucianism and alchemy are recorded in her notebooks and are suggested in many floral, abstract works sprinkled with various symbols as well as alchemical ideas of transmutation.
Hilma af Klint’s life as an artist became centred in Stockholm. This is where she founded the group named The Five. The Five were a group af Klint established in 1896 with four other women who were also interested in art and Spiritualism. The women trained for many years to mentally prepare for spiritual messages. Hilma af Klint would receive messages from the ‘High Masters’ who would then propose commissions that would be documented and evolved thoroughly in notebooks consisting of diagrams, sketches and writings. Af Klint referred to the spirits she was in contact with as Ameliel, Gregor, Ananda and Clemens, who asked her to paint on the astral plane.101
In af Klint’s earlier paintings we can note her gift for precision and observation. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s she painted delicate botanical studies in watercolour. The shift in her perspective came in the mid-1890s, breaking away from physical and material reality towards the invisible, turning her cheek away from the early naturalistic style. Even though her style changed dramatically, she continued to combine the artist with the researcher, embarking on an experiment and carrying it out systematically and extensively towards a final product. Af Klint’s abstract works began in 1906 but they started to develop 10 years previously. In 1908, she became acquainted with Rudolf Steiner and therefore was familiar with his work. Her main body of work was created under the title The Paintings for the Temple, aptly named after their intention. She did not exhibit to a large audience during her lifetime but recent findings have shown that she did not cease to try.102 Due to the circumstances of her gender and message, it could have affected her popularity. She met Steiner again but was unsuccessful in her attempts to have her spiritual message and artwork appreciated. He advised she move away from contacting spirits and focus on her inner inspiration. Despite this, she became a member of the Anthroposophical Society in 1920 and continued to paint after a four-year break, although her style was altered. She intensively studied Goethe’s colour theory in the years of her artistic absence.
It is difficult to believe that she would not have known the radical style of her work so I wonder, how unique and extraordinary were her experiences? Are there significant examples of Esoteric Christianity and Theosophical influence in her work that may indicate a connection between af Klint and Ethel Le Rossignol?
98 Johan af Klint and Hedvig Ersman, Spiritual Journey of Artist Hilma af Klint. Available: https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/ checklist/inspiration-and-influence-the-spiritual-journey-of-artist-hilma-af-klint Last accessed: 1st May 2019.
99 Johan af Klint and Hedvig Ersman, Spiritual Journey of Artist Hilma af Klint. Available: https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/ checklist/inspiration-and-influence-the-spiritual-journey-of-artist-hilma-af-klint Last accessed: 1st May 2019.
100 Johan af Klint and Hedvig Ersman, Spiritual Journey of Artist Hilma af Klint. Available: https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/ checklist/inspiration-and-influence-the-spiritual-journey-of-artist-hilma-af-klint Last accessed: 1st May 2019.
101 Muller-Westermann, Hilma af Klint in her Time and Ours, page 184.
102 This information was presented at the symposium for World Receivers in Munich, Germany by Julia Voss in January 2019. See: Karin Althaus, Matthias Mühling, Sebastian Schneider, World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, 2019.
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5.3. Evolution and Gender Darwin linked humans to animals and the natural world in a stage of evolution, he introduced natural selection and therefore an idea of survival and struggle. Darwin’s theory undermined Genesis and demarcated humans to the primordial ooze along with everything else by a chance variation. In 1908 af Klint created a series entitled Evolutionen, in which her work contemplates notions of gender and science through evolution. It is interesting that these works are developed as a sequence with subgroups, numbered in a way that recalls scientific research. In some of af Klint’s images, we can associate her ideas of human and spiritual evolution with Christianity. In Evolution no. 7 the sensuous representation and flow moves upwards, a cross emerges from male and female snails at the bottom of the painting and then supported by another set of unsexed dark snails (fig. 42). Snails are hermaphrodite animals by nature, and so af Klint uses them as a symbol frequently in her work, which shows we are aspects of both male and female that may come together. In this sense af Klint and her representation of evolution does not encounter the aspect of chance, it is mindful and progressive. An enticing aspect to Hilma af Klint’s art is her representation of gender. Her connection between colours and what they represent has been analysed before, yellow for male and blue for female. We can see this appear in many of her works (fig. 43). What is interesting about af Klint’s work is her persistent endeavour to unite the male and female in forms in themes of progress and evolution. In many of her works, af Klint attempts to unify oppositions, visible and invisible, microcosm and macrocosm. According to Stephen Kern in Hilma af Klint and Fin-de-siecle Culture, Klint’s most important concern was that of sexual opposition and sexual fusion, the source of renewed life through sexual reproduction.103 Af Klint had been given the gift of complete artistic freedom through a displacement of authorship. Voices guided her to create the works and allowed her to explore sexuality openly without judgment.
5.4. Automatism Automatism is a method frequently practiced in visionary art, the practice predates the Surrealist movement although it was popular and has different intentions to its use in Spiritualist practice. Surrealism sought to free the mind of all pre-existing boundaries whereas Spiritualist automatism was directed at spirit communication and materialisation. Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, in his essay The Automatic Message, comments with displeasure upon the common nature of botanical motifs in mediumistic drawings. Taking a glance of some of The Fives diaries there is a prevalent array of botanical traits and many of Hilma af Klint’s works display botanical ornamentation (fig. 43). A remark made by a chief proponent of Outsider art, Roger Cardinal says that recurrent features include, “dense ornamentation … configurations which occupy an equivocal ground in between the figurative and the decorative … other configurations which hesitate between representation and an enigmatic calligraphy”104. Spirit flowers appear frequently in mediumistic and visionary artworks created by women. The representation of flowers through the communication of spiritual entities could be thought of as a useful natural bridge between the material and spiritual world. Hilma af Klint’s interest in botany does not receive as much attention as her spirituality, although Julia Voss explores af Klint’s interest in science in her essay ‘Hilma af Klint and the Evolution of Art’ part of the Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen collection of articles.
5.5. Intention and Exhibition In Hilma af Klint’s final years, she decided her works should not be exhibited to the public or a large audience until at least 20 years after her death.105 This is a fact often mentioned in excerpts for her recent exhibitions at the Modern Museet, Stockholm, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.106 The astonishment of this is that her work has never circulated the art market. Not only does she exist out of time, through her representation of abstract shapes that echo her spiritual truths, operating in a space that defies an
103 Kern, Stephen, Hilma af Klint and Fin-de-Siècle Culture: Abstraction, Technology, Androgyne, Nihilism, page 33.
104 Cardinal is quoted from the subtitle of the exhibition in London, 1979, Outsiders: An Art without Precedent or Tradition. See: Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf Jr. The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, page 41.
105 Muller-Westermann, Hilma af Klint in her Time and Ours, page 184.
106 Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum. Available: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint Last accessed: 1st May 2019.
29 UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM art historical time stamp. She also exists outside the art market world. Af Klint believed her contemporaries were not yet able to grasp the full meaning of her work, and it should be left for future generations. The Spiritual in Art curated by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986 was the first time a minimal amount of her work was shown, and at this point, not much information was available about her or her life. Her work is only available through exhibitions and symposiums dedicated to her and the women that are becoming known as her contemporaries. Af Klint herself intended a large portion of her works to be shown in a temple, hence the title of the series Paintings for the Temple. In this she imagined, the viewer circling the paintings upwards and in sequence so that the audience may be uplifted and enlightened and become more knowledgeable through the viewing process. It did not make total sense for her work to be shown out of sequence as they provide theories and diagrams of a mystical evolution.
Hilma af Klint and the work she created begs the question of authorship. If these are images from the ‘High Masters’ can Hilma af Klint take sole credit? Did she want to? If someone does not believe they are responsible for the artwork or that the work is part of a bigger transcendental, spiritual agenda, then the artist can gain confidence in transgressing cultural and aesthetic boundaries. Creative dissociation, as Marco Pasi describes, is a concept developed by Michael Grosso, American psychologist. This means a state in which the ordinary self can detach from everyday reality and the ordinary self can lose its autonomy to gain higher consciousness which then can lead to innovative and new artistic works. This may also relate to past trauma because dissociation is a symptom of many anxiety-related and post-traumatic stress disorders, this way the person may detach from reality in order not to deal directly with material reality. In this space, the trauma can be put aside, and in the case of these visionary artists, become transformed. To look at this from a gendered perspective, women may have also needed the means to elevate their confidence and expression as creatives in a time where this was not the cultural norm. Spiritualism had already given rise to many feminist talks and gatherings, and later the Theosophical Society did the same. The attraction for these religious movements plus creativity must have been extremely appealing to many women in a quest for self- expression.
5.6. Hilma af Klint and Ethel Le Rossignol When Theosophy made its attempt after Spiritualism to reconcile science and religion in the modern age, it became vogue for creative minds. To alleviate people’s minds and to allow for this manifestation of spirituality to exist, the invisible had to be brought into the visible. Many women found this attractive. Women rose as mediums, leading séances, seminars and became leading members in organisations. The World War saw a rise to women in education and the workplace, giving them the freedom to explore themselves in new spaces. Mediumship, as discussed in Chapter 2, enabled many women to deconstruct rigid boundaries. In combination with art, we can see that the female medium artist could practice a new self and experiment freely, without constraints of the material world. The mental capacity of Hilma af Klint and Ethel Le Rossignol becomes evident in swirling patterns and psychedelic optic colours accompanied with notes and investigations into other, unseen dimensions. The scientific spirituality that inspired Theosophy and Anthroposophy sought to harmonise our place in an increasingly materialistic world. Le Rossignol’s and af Klint’s work is the epitome of harmony, combining forces of gender, spirit, and colour.
The two share similarities in their influences. Rosicrucianism tenets are found in both their works with the reappearance of roses. Both artists reconstruct gender, especially in terms of evolution as their images evolve towards androgynous representation. Le Rossignol’s ideas and visual portrayal seem much more earthly, I can only speculate that her time spent close to the suffering of the war forced her to represent more earthly figures and material bodies, as this is where she experienced intense life and death situations. In this multi- layered universe both Le Rossignol and af Klint visualise, they both create a multi-layered self as a medium, as an artist, as a woman and as spirit. The spirits who are deemed responsible for the messages of the works help each artist creatively burst with views on how the spirit may evolve past death. Despite their obvious stylistic differences, the practice of automatism which evokes the spiritual as an egalitarian space allows these women to conceptualise and reveal the spiritual realm.
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While Hilma af Klint was rooted in movements born out of the turbulent turn of the century, in many ways her practice speaks directly to the spiritual and philosophical perspectives of today. It is the works interiority that creates an extraordinary force. Ethel Le Rossignol’s A Goodly Company was painted in 1920, at the same time Hilma af Klint had finished her paintings for the temple. Although the grand portion of af Klint’s work precedes A Goodly Company, Le Rossignol’s style remains visually outdated in comparison. Le Rossignol’s work is signified by stylistic tendencies to the era she created it within, likening it to Art Deco. Le Rossignol’s images reflect a romantic notion of the soul, depicted in Christian figures under themes of love and evolution whereas Hilma af Klint transcends the idea of the material place. In Le Rossignol’s writings, she specifies that her work is more a translation of how the spirits convey information for her to convey to the public, perhaps this explains why her style is interpreted in a coherent form, so that more people may understand the narrative. Occult references do not exhaust the meaning of these artist’s works. Hilma af Klint and Ethel Le Rossignol devise a personal cosmology. The importance of their messages is above anything else, and their art could be deemed visual research in realms other than the earthly plane.
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Conclusion
In researching these visionary artists, I wished to shed light on their lives and how their work may reflect their place in society and history. I investigated their artwork to gain insight into their influences so that a common space can be found, where potentially other artists may be found too. The purpose of this was to include these artists into art history and western esotericism scholarship. This proved quite difficult in reflection. In connecting with the paintings, it limited the expression of experience. Through this investigation, I have suggested reasons for their work reflective of society, creative dissociation, gender roles, wartime rhetoric and in relationship to Spiritualism and Theosophy. This, I hope, has encompassed enough framework and groundwork to develop a strong foundation for further studies into Ethel Le Rossignol, Anna Mary Howitt, and Hilma af Klint. I encountered little information surrounding Le Rossignol and therefore proved that a comparative approach was the most productive. However, if one wishes to understand the work in the way it was intended, the immersion of primary sources the artists read and developing one’s artistic practice may be the only way or the boundaries of modern art historical scholarship must become more empathetic.
It seems easy to embrace an opposition between Spiritualism and rational thought, but art has had a history of opposing rational ideas to the present day. So why is it that Spiritualist artists remain completely unknown or belatedly acknowledged? We readily come to terms with the fact that creativity does not have much to do with common sense, so why when paired with Spiritualism does it become even more untouchable? Acknowledging that all these women did not deem themselves the authors of their work is a challenge to Western cultural norms and mainstream scholarship of art history. To encompass them within this, the boundaries which define art must become more permeable. Visionary images have often been characterised as proof of insanity yet we can see that these radical expressions of these women’s reality anticipate modernist art. The idea that most people have about artistic creation is that the artists can turn their ideas into solid objects, whether these objects are of value or not, in terms of art, is up to the art market to decide. All of these women attempted to exhibit their work, however, under the religious movement they were influenced by not for the mainstream artistic academy. Anna Mary Howitt and Hilma af Klint’s formal work was appreciated and honoured yet their investigation into spiritual matters meant they were shunned by the academy. By their attempts to exhibit under the umbrella of Spiritualism, we can assume that they wanted to honour their spiritual message more than they wanted to become established artists, this in itself is a rejection of the dominant artistic discourse at the time.
Mediumistic artistic creation is a critical instrument that counteracts many popular artists’ places and roles at the turn of the century. With new methods such as automatism, women could practice creativity in a space that was free of gendered social and political undercutting and free from their cultural prejudice. The female medium artist began to occupy a new space of action and try out new themes and formats. This enabled them to create inspiring images, which were potentially healing for them and the viewer. The mediumistic artist brings a certain process where the art allows the viewer to meditate as their eyes attempt to unravel the sophisticated meanings hidden in automatic writings, symbols, and interconnected layers. Perhaps in this way, the element of performance that we are forced to participate in makes the art transcend its own time. The complex imagery begs this response because it is overwhelming to try to understand every embedded code.
In appreciating these three women and their collections and collaborations, it could be said that they are inadvertently achieving what the underlying message of their work was, challenging neglect and oblivion. There are many factors at play as to why Ethel Le Rossignol created her grand narrative in the style and intention she did. Through the influences of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism we can see that her art was infiltrated with Egyptian and eastern motifs as well as biblical ideas of creation, evolution, and genesis. Her self-image as a medium was that of the messenger, her spirit who began as a passed friend later became impersonal as her psychedelic narrative reached an awe-inspiring stage of complicated and complex connotations and symbolic meanings. Yet her oeuvre ended modestly, with a reminder that the sole purpose is as a reassurance for the afterlife, and one needs not to be afraid.
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Image Appendix
(Fig. 1) Aubrey Beardsley, Enter Herodias, 1894. Illustration for Salome by Oscar Wilde.
(Fig, 2) Ethel Le Rossignol, Letter to ‘Auntie Anna’ June 10th, 1915.
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(Fig. 3) Ethel Le Rossignol, Letter to ‘Auntie Anna’ June 10th, 1915.
(Fig. 4) Ethel Le Rossignol, Letter to ‘Auntie Anna’ June 10th, 1915.
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(Fig. 5) Ethel Le Rossignol to Auntie Anna Oct 24th, 1915.
(Fig. 6) Ethel Le Rossignol to Auntie Anna Oct 24th, 1915.
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(Fig. 7) ‘Photography of Ethel Le Rossignol’ by Eileen Agar, dated 1930s Presented to Tate Archive by Eileen Agar in 1989 and transferred from the photography collection in 2012.
(Fig. 8) ‘Photography of Le Rossignol’s House’ by Eileen Agar, 1930s Description: Photograph of a house where the sister of Eileen Agar’s admirer, Arthur Le Rossignol, lived. It could be reached by boat from Falmouth.107
107 This description can be found by accessing the Tate Modern website and viewing Eileen Agar’s photograph collection. Available: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/items/tga-8927-2-19/agar-photograph-of-le-rossignols-house Last accessed: 12th Feb 2019
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(Fig. 9) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 41, The Unsealing of the Mysteries. 1920-1929. Gouache/watercolour on paper.
(Fig. 10) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 33, The Sight of the Master. 1920-1929. Gouache/watercolour on paper.
(Fig. 11) Detail of the “seven Eyes” in Workers in the Sphere of Holiness. Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 10, Workers in the Sphere of Holiness. 1920-1929. Pencil on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press, 1933.
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(Fig. 12) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 19, The Unloving Soul After Death. 1920-1929. Gouache/watercolour on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press, 1933.
(Fig. 13) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 31, The Creative Power of the Spirit. 1920-1929. Gouache/watercolour on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press, 1933.
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(Fig. 14) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 40, The Master as Distributor. 1920-1929. Gouache/watercolour on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press, 1933.
(Fig. 15) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 9, Sphere of Holiness. 1920-1929. Pencil on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press, 1933.
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(Fig. 16) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 42, Consummation. 1920-1929. Gouache/ watercolour on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press, 1933.
(Fig. 17) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 24, Birth of Animal Soul in Astral Form. 1920-1929. Gouache/watercolour on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press, 1933.
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(Fig. 18) Ethel Le Rossignol. Figure No. 23, Mystery of Birth and Spiritual Love. 1920-1929. Gouache/watercolour on paper. Reproduced from: A Goodly Company, printed at The Chiswick Press.
(Fig. 19) Letter by Lillah Watts in a collection of many letters donated to the Society of Psychical Research
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[From left to right] (Fig. 20) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Pencil and watercolour on paper. Date unknown. (Fig. 21) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Pencil and watercolour on paper. Date unknown.
[Top left, top right, bottom] (Fig. 22, 23, 24) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawings. Pencil on paper. Date unknown.
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[Top left, top right, bottom] (Fig. 25, 26, 27) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawings. Pencil on paper. Date unknown.
(Fig. 28) Georgiana Houghton. Glory Be to God. 1868.
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(Fig. 29) Letter by Oriane Lyndale, Greenfield in a collection of many letters donated to the Society of Psychical Research.
(Fig. 30) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Pencil on paper. Date unknown.
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(Fig. 31) Letter by Oriane Lyndale, Greenfield in a collection of many letters donated to the Society of Psychical Research.
(Fig. 32) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Pencil on paper. Date unknown.
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(Fig. 33) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Watercolour on tracing paper. Date unknown.
(Fig. 34) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Watercolour on tracing paper. Date unknown.
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(Fig. 35) Georgiana Houghton. The Flower of William Harman Butler. Watercolour on paper. 1861.
(Fig. 36) Anna Atkins. Cyanotypes. Photograph. 1843.
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(Fig. 37) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Watercolour on tracing paper. Date unknown.
(Fig. 38) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawing. Pencil on paper. Date unknown.
(Fig. 39) Anna Mary Howitt. Untitled automatic drawings. Pencil on paper. Date unknown.
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(Fig. 40) Hilma af Klint. Tree of Knowledge No. 1. The W Series. Watercolour on canvas paper. 1913.
(Fig. 41) The tree of knowledge, taken from Figure secrete dei Rosacroce, Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians.
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(Fig. 42) Hilma af Klint. Evolution No. 7. Group VI. The WUS. 1906.
(Fig. 43) Hilma af Klint. Evolution, No. 4. Group VI. The WUS. 1906.
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(Fig. 45) Hilma af Klint. Childhood. The Ten Largest. 1907.
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