Other Side
About This Book
Spiritualism drew in many artists of the early twentieth century, and it shaped the work of celebrated male modernists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and Klee, who suffered no damage to their reputations for it. Many radical women artists of the same generation, and of the generations before them, were just as immersed in the spiritual, but their role in this history has been largely overlooked. This book turns to them. It follows a group of women whose lives and work span from the twelfth century to the twentieth. They include Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic, composer and artist of the twelfth century; Georgiana Houghton, a nineteenth-century English spiritualist whose paintings have a swirling, cosmic energy; and Hilma af Klint, an early twentieth-century Swedish painter who said she worked with the guidance of spirits and whose recent exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York drew record crowds. Also included are Agnes Pelton, known as the Desert Transcendentalist, who recorded her visions under the wide skies of California; Emma Kunz, a Swiss healer who used geometric drawings in her treatments; and Ithell Colquhoun, a British surrealist and occultist whose estate of more than 5,000 works has recently entered the collection of the Tate. Each of these artists developed a distinct body of work, yet they shared a common wish to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Jennifer Higgie moves between these stories and her own memories of experiences she describes as otherworldly, which give the book a personal thread. The book also considers the comfort of ritual, the ways art history has excluded women, the continuing relevance of myth, the recent surge of interest in alternative ways of understanding the world, and the influence of spiritualism on feminism and on contemporary art. Combining memoir, biography and art history, it offers a fresh reassessment of artists who have been left on the margins of the story.
ISBN: 9781474623322
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