A year ago, art writer Simon Grant emailed me an image of a strange but beautiful watercolour of swirling abstract forms. “When do you think this was painted?” he asked. I assumed it was a psychedelic work of the 1960s, but I was 100 years out. It had been produced in London by a spiritualist medium called Georgiana Houghton (1817-84), some half a century before abstract art was invented. I was hooked.
Houghton was an early exponent of spiritualism at a time when the practice of communing with the dead was at its height, and claimed that spirits guided her hand to create images.
A particularly interesting aspect of researching Houghton and her work was discovering more about the exhibition she staged in London, at a gallery in Old Bond Street, in 1871. She financed the project herself – it nearly bankrupted her – and showed 155 drawings in an attempt to place her work in the mainstream as a new form of religious art.
The critical responses to the show in newspapers and journals are revealing, as writers struggled to describe the unexpected works. Evocatively, the News of the World critic compared them to “a canvas of Turner’s, over which troops of fairies have been meandering, dropping jewels as they went”.
Although Houghton was quickly forgotten after her death in 1884, the aim of the Courtauld exhibition is to suggest that she deserves a place in the history of art. We know that Kandinsky and Mondrian were inspired by spiritualism – the tantalising question is whether they might have known anything about Houghton.
Around 200 of Houghton’s drawings are still unaccounted for, perhaps in attics around the country. Finding some of them might open another chapter in her extraordinary story.
Barnaby Wright is the Daniel Katz curator of 20th century art at the Courtauld Gallery.
Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, until 11 September
Houghton was an early exponent of spiritualism at a time when the practice of communing with the dead was at its height, and claimed that spirits guided her hand to create images.
A particularly interesting aspect of researching Houghton and her work was discovering more about the exhibition she staged in London, at a gallery in Old Bond Street, in 1871. She financed the project herself – it nearly bankrupted her – and showed 155 drawings in an attempt to place her work in the mainstream as a new form of religious art.
The critical responses to the show in newspapers and journals are revealing, as writers struggled to describe the unexpected works. Evocatively, the News of the World critic compared them to “a canvas of Turner’s, over which troops of fairies have been meandering, dropping jewels as they went”.
Although Houghton was quickly forgotten after her death in 1884, the aim of the Courtauld exhibition is to suggest that she deserves a place in the history of art. We know that Kandinsky and Mondrian were inspired by spiritualism – the tantalising question is whether they might have known anything about Houghton.
Around 200 of Houghton’s drawings are still unaccounted for, perhaps in attics around the country. Finding some of them might open another chapter in her extraordinary story.
Barnaby Wright is the Daniel Katz curator of 20th century art at the Courtauld Gallery.
Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, until 11 September
