Spirit-Medium Artists Pre-Date Kandinsky, Higgie Argues

Jennifer Higgie lands her claim at Turner Contemporary in February: ten women mediums produced the earliest nonrepresentational art, predating Wassily Kandinsky and the usual pioneers of abstraction.

The show, "Natural Magic: Women, Art, Spirit Worlds," is the curator's first British outing since her 2024 book The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World staked the same ground. The book remains the thesis. Margate will provide the proof.

Where did Spiritualism start, and who led it?

Spiritualism began in upstate New York in the 1840s. Sisters Kate and Margaret Fox — mediums (practitioners who claimed to channel the dead) — said they heard rapping noises made by spirits. The pair toured the United States as celebrity mediums, hosting public séances in town halls and parlours. The practice soon crossed the Atlantic.

Why did women gravitate to séance rooms?

The movement offered 19th-century women powers they could not obtain elsewhere in polite society. "I time traveled to the worlds of remarkable women," Higgie writes in her prologue. "Women who found solace in the spiritual realm, because the physical one was too hostile to their seemingly limitless talents."

Exclusion, in short, sent them toward the canvas. Some mediums translated spirit messages into imagery so nonrepresentational that it now reads as abstract — predating Kandinsky by decades, Higgie argues, though the show is the first sustained test of that claim inside a major British gallery.

Where does the Turner show sit in museum history?

Turner Contemporary joins a long curatorial roll call. The 1986 landmark "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985" ran at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 2018 Hilma af Klint blockbuster at the Guggenheim repositioned the Swedish painter as abstraction's trailblazer. The Whitney Museum of American Art's current Minnie Evans retrospective runs through January 10, 2027.

What did Higgie say about her ten artists?

She frames them as conduits rather than originators in the conventional sense. "While the individual work of each artist is unique, the women involved in Spiritualism shared the same goal," Higgie writes, "to use art as a conduit to communicate with, and to learn from, other dimensions."

Their surviving work ranges from automatic drawings (pictures made without conscious control) to fully abstract canvases. Many mediums worked in private. Most have been omitted from standard survey texts until quite recently.

So what changes for the canon?

Few histories of early abstraction name séance-room mediums at all. Higgie's list, drawn from the past two centuries, asks galleries to look past the usual European pioneers and credit women whose canvases spoke back to them first.

"The women surely understood something fundamental," Higgie concludes. "That the way we each make sense of our existence is never straightforward."

Turner Contemporary unveils the result in February. The book that began the argument has sat on shelves since 2024, waiting for a gallery brave enough to test it.

By Daniel Okafor