VICTORIAN SEANCE SERIES

Houghton was considered amateurish in her own time, though did exhibit 155 drawings at a London gallery in 1871. Through all of her spirit drawings Houghton maintained the same style of mesmerizing white swirls against watercolor backgrounds. These spirit guides ranged from her sister Zilla to the Renaissance artist Titian. In others, she attached multiple colored pencils to the end of a planchette in the belief that the spirits would guide it across the paper. In some, she believed it was a spirit who guided her hand. Houghton created her spirit drawings in a variety of methods, and always during a séance. Houghton’s abstract spirit drawings are thus shocking because they produce this very innovation in abstraction 50 years prior. While Kandinsky’s abstract shapes at least offer some guesses at familiar forms such as church steeples and fishing boats, Malevich’s black square completely denies any representation. Malevich took Kandinsky’s total abstraction to new extremes with the painting Black Square, which is exactly as it sounds: a square canvas painted totally black. In his paintings he suppressed recognizable objects, and helped popularize total abstraction.

VICTORIAN SEANCE SERIES

* In 1913-1914 Kandinsky painted a series of Compositions of abstract lines and colors. What is so unique about Houghton’s spirit drawings is that she created them more than half a century before the pioneering Russian artists Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich created some of the modern world’s first abstract paintings. Many, however were entirely abstract, seemingly tracing the spirit world’s invisible rhythms. Some of the drawings included faces - of the dead, of herself, of other sitters in the room. They consisted of large swaths of red, ochres, blues layered with tightly-coiled white lines. I am afraid I shall not be able in return to send you anything so original as to line and colour. The little book that you so kindly sent with it will require much thought before it can be understood aright.

My dear Miss Houghton,- I cannot tell you how much I value the wonderful and beautiful drawings you sent me yesterday: the subtlety and delicacy of both the color and the design are to me quite a study: one is constantly seeing something new in its mysterious depths. After close inspection of the drawings, Mr. According to Houghton, the drawings were not her own creation per se, but guided by the spirits. In 1870, the British spirit medium Georgiana Houghton (1814 – 1884) sent the artist, who she referred to as Mr. Reprinted with Permission from Backbone Flute. Credit: Victorian Spiritualist Union/Courthauld Gallery Georgiana Houghton, Glory be to God, 1868.

Victorian seance