‘The Other Side’ Explores Spiritist Women Artists – ARTnews.com

In 1936, Ithell Colquhoun appeared alongside other British Surrealists in a London show dedicated to the movement, effectively absorbing her into the group. Up until this point, she had painted otherworldly flowers and strange paintings that had their roots in the Bible. Surrealism seemed like a good fit for all these dreamlike images, but there was a problem: Colquhoun was a registered member of semi-secret occult societies.

By 1939, Colquhoun had broken with Surrealism, whose leaders did not believe the occult to be a valuable source of artistic inspiration. Perhaps Colquhoun left of her own accord, perhaps she was expelled from their ranks. Historians are not clear what happened, exactly.

Time claimed her. In 2019, the Tate acquired Colquhoun’s entire 5,000-piece archive, calling her a “key figure” in the Surrealist movement in its announcement. The best-known British Surrealists, such as Roland Penrose and Paul Nash, cannot say the same for themselves: they are not so well represented in the Tate collection. The joke is on them.

Colquhoun’s art has moved inwards, appearing not only at the Tate, but also in recent editions of the Liverpool and Venice Biennales. If before Colquhoun’s flirtations with the occult were so taboo that even the avant-garde would not touch them, now his experiments with systems of thought such as theosophy seem even more intriguing. Spiritual art like hers, which was once considered taboo even among critics, was embraced with open arms, and even etched into the history of modern art.

Colquhoun is one of the protagonists of Jennifer Higgie’s new book The Other Side: A History of Women in Art and the Spirit World, a survey of female witches of the last two centuries who have translated other fields into painting, photography, illustration and dance. The chapter on Colquhoun follows a similar trajectory to the others: he begins as a mysterious figure (“a ghost, his eyes white in his shadowy face” in a Man Ray portrait), then comes into focus and gets his due. Higgie attributes the slow recognition to the fact that Colquhoun was a genuine non-pareil: “She thumbed her nose at convention: she was bisexual, had mistresses, had no children, and although she believed in the power of the ‘divine feminine’, she maintained that in some moment in the distant past the masculine and feminine energies were united.”

Colquhoun is not the only artist who does not fit the boundaries of her era that Higgie explores. There is Georgiana Houghton, whose spirited drawings full of swirling abstract forms found an audience but few buyers, perhaps because “no one was doing anything like this in the London art world of the 1860s,” as Higgie writes. There’s Helena Blavatsky, whose maverick system of Theosophy inspired a host of modernists, from Piet Mondrian to Marcel Duchamp, but whose edgy beliefs may have kept her out of art history. And naturally, there’s Hilma af Klint, the Swedish abstractionist whose mystical images were supposedly dictated by otherworldly beings with whom she communicated.

What all these women have in common is that they have become Western institutions in recent years. Houghton is currently the subject of a show at the Art Gallery of Australia of NSW that finds a parallel for his drawings in the abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky, a much better known artist. Blavatsky’s name appears regularly in the texts for exhibitions, including af Klint’s 2018 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which became the most popular show ever held there. It turns out that you can put all this art that references invisible worlds, spectral figures and more on the walls of museums, those sacred settings where art history is made.

Is there any way to free these women from the dampening force of canon? Higgie makes a valiant attempt at writing something that isn’t necessarily a story. The other side it broadly has a chronological structure, but it doesn’t always move from point A to point B like a textbook might. In part, that’s an attempt to reflect the very nature of this art, which, as Higgie points out, resists rationality and scientific study.

It is worth quoting Higgie at length here: “For too long, these works have been seen as fascinating curiosities or either abandoned or omitted from the history of Western art, despite the clear and documented reality of their existence. Even in art, reason, order and ambition were considered masculine traits; men were active and intellectual, while women were passive, fragile and emotional. Many of the explorations and innovations of artists who turned out to be women were seen as eccentric, although in the early days of modernism they often drank from the same spiritual well as their male contemporaries, many of whom were praised.

Take the case of Agnes Pelton, a member of the Transcendental Painting Group who painted works she described as “tiny windows” into hitherto unseen universes. This American painter’s visions are vivid and beautiful, filled with semi-translucent globes and bursts of stars that blend into twilight settings. This was simply too strange to exist within the confines of what institutions like the Museum of Modern Art had imagined as relevant, so Pelton didn’t make the cut. It wasn’t until 2023 that MoMA acquired a painting by Pelton.

Higgie’s invocation of Pelton does not derive from a broader inquiry into MoMA’s history of exclusion, although Higgie does address this. Instead, it is stimulated by Higgie’s travels in the Cyclades, specifically, the dark period “when the hard edges of daylight begin to dissolve, the air cools, the birds fall silent, and the indigo sea ripples with pinpricks of starlight.” Higgie isn’t sure Pelton ever visited this part of Greece, not that it really matters. The point is to create a history of art that cannot be seen as objective, as it is so clearly filtered through Higgie’s own experience.

Higgie, an Australian-born critic who previously served as editor for frieze, wrote a book that mixes several modes. It’s a memoir, a pandemic-era travelogue, and art history research all rolled into one, which, unfortunately, is too much for this book. The beaches of the Greek islands contain an intensity that the descriptions of Higgie’s art do not. Pelton and others of his ilk feel domesticated as a result.

For a reader who has closely followed exhibitions such as the 2022 Venice Biennale and the af Klint retrospective at the Guggenheim, almost all the protagonists of The other side they are familiar That’s a shame, too, since the book ends up accidentally affirming a Eurocentric canon that has only recently welcomed women like af Klint. First Nations artists are covered in only a few pages; artists from the Global South remain on the sidelines. It’s hard not to come away thinking that certain spiritualities still matter more than others.

Yet there are reminders that spiritually inclined women artists are still coming into focus. That means The other side it’s just a first step in the right direction. There is still more work to be done.

Higgie even hints at this when she brings up Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a Dutch artist whom Higgie admits was completely unknown to her. Fröbe-Kapteyn’s abstractions formed from hard-edged shapes on monochromatic backgrounds were intended to open doors to worlds beyond our own. Although the psychologist Carl Jung was among those who praised her work during her lifetime, Fröbe-Kapteyn remains lesser known today. He never had a great retrospective.

“Despite being immersed in thinking about art for the past four decades,” Higgie writes in the section on Fröbe-Kapteyn, “I am constantly surprised by what I don’t know.” Listen, listen