Monday 19 June 2017

spirit drawings



From an exquisite and eccentric exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London: 'Spirit Drawings', largely abstract images drawn free-hand by the little known, long-forgotten Victorian spiritualist medium Georgiana Houghton, her hand purportedly guided through these spiraling, dynamic vortices of energy by spirits, the dead, angels, Renaissance artists (Titian, Correggio) ...

Images, from the top: 'The Glory of the Lord', 'The Love of God', 'Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ' (detail), 'Eye of the Lord', the books Chronicles of Spirit Photography and Evenings at Home, or Spiritual Seance, welded together by a species of autobiography (both by Miss Houghton), 'The Eye of the Lord', Houghton's text on the reverse of 'Eye of the Lord', and the eye-like stairwell in the Courtauld ...

For a Guardian review by Jonathan Jones, see here

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