Beyond the Veil: Spiritualism and the Women Who Shaped Its Aesthetic

A pastel by Hilma af Klint hangs in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Its concentric forms reflect a precision rooted in mystical origins. Af Klint began her ‘Paintings for the Temple’ series in 1906, claiming to be guided by spirits. Her work remained unseen until the late 20th century, echoing the broader reluctance to recognize spiritualist women artists.

Spiritualism and art allowed these women to redefine authorship. Georgiana Houghton, active in the 1860s, used mediumship to transcend societal constraints. Her The Eye of the Lord (c. 1864) resembles an abstract vortex of color, predating formal abstraction. However, her exhibitions in London attracted curiosity rather than acclaim. Art historian Rachel Oberter notes that critics conflated spiritualist art with hysteria, reflecting the gendered skepticism of her era.

Agnes Pelton, part of the early 20th-century Transcendental Painting Group, fused spiritual ideals with nature. Her The Ray Serene (1925) features a luminous orb rising from an arid landscape, suggesting inner vision and external revelation. Pelton’s work connects the isolation of spiritualist art with the Modernist quest for universality.

The links between spiritualism and feminism are noteworthy. Theosophy, founded in 1875, allowed women to explore spiritual and intellectual freedom. Annie Besant, a leading theosophist, co-authored Thought-Forms (1905) with C.W. Leadbeater, influencing artists like af Klint and Kandinsky. Besant’s diagrams of emotions visualized as auras reclaimed intellectual credibility for women in a patriarchal art world.

Swedish artist Anna Cassel, a collaborator of af Klint, also deserves recognition. Her works, such as Group IX/SUW, The Swan No. 1 (1915), explore duality and transformation with an organic vocabulary. Cassel’s contributions often fade behind af Klint’s fame, revealing a collective dynamic overlooked in art history’s focus on singular genius.

In the United States, spiritualism impacted marginalized communities. Harriet Powers, an enslaved African-American woman, created quilts in the late 19th century that encoded Biblical and cosmological narratives. Powers’ Bible Quilt (1886) serves as a spiritual map, reflecting personal faith and cultural resistance. While not directly linked to dominant spiritualist movements of white European salons, Powers’ work highlights how metaphysical concerns transcend geographic and racial boundaries.

Spiritualist art found champions like Kandinsky, who in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) positioned abstraction as visual spirituality but largely omitted the women whose practices predated his theories. Recent exhibitions, such as World Receivers at Lenbachhaus, Munich, in 2018, have begun to address this imbalance. Curator Karin Althaus argues that the gendered dismissal of spiritualist women artists has delayed a fuller understanding of abstraction's origins.

Why does spiritualism provoke both fascination and dismissal? Its refusal to separate the rational from the intuitive mirrors ongoing debates about technology's role in contemporary art, whether in algorithmic painting or AI-generated works. The idea that creativity flows from beyond the self challenges entrenched narratives of individual genius.

Today, galleries and historians are recognizing spiritualist women artists as foundational. In 2019, af Klint’s works featured in a landmark retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, becoming the museum’s most-visited exhibition. Yet, Houghton and Cassel still await similar acknowledgment.

Spiritualism’s aesthetic legacy remains unresolved. It is not merely a genre to catalog but a provocation: what does it mean to create art at the threshold of the seen and unseen? For these artists, the canvas serves as a portal, inviting us to look beyond what is visible.