Mediumistic Art: Spirit-Guided Drawings and Paintings

What is mediumistic art?

Mediumistic art is drawing, painting, embroidery or writing made by people who believed they were acting as a medium: a channel for spirits, voices or an outside intelligence. Many of them refused to take credit for the work, signed it with the spirit's name, or would not sell it. Jean Dubuffet included mediums in his definition of art brut, and some of the best-known outsider artists belong to this tradition.

How did Spiritualism lead to art?

Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, became a mass movement from the 1850s. Séances were held in ordinary homes, and "automatic" writing and drawing, letting the hand move without conscious control, were common practices. For some people, especially women with few other outlets, this became a lifelong creative practice. Later, the Surrealists borrowed automatic drawing as a technique, which is partly why they were drawn to mediumistic art.

Who was Georgiana Houghton?

Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) was a Spiritualist medium in London who had some training as an artist. In the 1860s and 1870s she made intricate watercolours of swirling lines and colours that she called "spirit drawings". Inscriptions on the back claim that spirits, including Renaissance artists, guided her hand. They look strikingly like abstract art made decades later.

In 1871 she rented a gallery in Bond Street and showed 155 of them. One critic called it the most astonishing exhibition in London, but the show lost money and nearly ruined her. Fewer than 50 of her works are known today. They were rediscovered by a wider public at the Courtauld Gallery's exhibition Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings in 2016. Because she had some artistic training, she sits on the edge of the outsider category.

Who was Augustin Lesage?

Augustin Lesage (1876–1954) was a coal miner in the Pas-de-Calais in northern France. In 1911, aged 35, he said he heard a voice in the mine telling him that one day he would be a painter. He began painting under what he believed was spirit guidance, producing huge, symmetrical canvases packed with architectural and ornamental detail that recall temples and Egyptian decoration.

Lesage became well known in Spiritualist circles and left about 800 paintings. Jean Dubuffet added his work to the art brut collection in 1948. Most of his paintings are now at the LaM museum near Lille, with others in Lausanne.

Who was Madge Gill?

Madge Gill (1882–1961) is Britain's best-known outsider artist and its best-known mediumistic artist. After a life of loss, including the death of a daughter at birth in 1919 and a serious illness that cost her the sight of one eye, she said that on 3 March 1920 a spirit guide she called Myrninerest took over her hand. For the next four decades she produced thousands of pen-and-ink drawings, from postcards to rolls of calico many metres long, filled with women's faces and chequerboard patterns.

She signed many works "Myrninerest" and generally refused to sell them, saying they belonged to her spirit guide. Read our full profile of Madge Gill.

What do mediumistic artworks have in common?

• Fast, continuous making, often in long sessions or a trance-like state.
• Dense, all-over patterns that fill the whole surface.
• Symmetry and repetition, especially in Lesage's work.
• Attribution to someone else: a spirit name, signature or inscription.
• Reluctance to sell, because the work was felt not to belong to the maker.

How should we understand it today?

You do not have to believe in spirits to take this work seriously. Psychologists and art historians have explained mediumship as a way of working that lets the conscious mind step aside, and as a socially acceptable route to creativity for people, especially women and working-class people, who had few others. What matters most is the work itself, and the lives and beliefs of the people who made it. We present those beliefs as theirs, without endorsing or mocking them.

Where to go next

Read our profile of Madge Gill, explore British outsider artists, or see the collections that hold mediumistic art in museums in Europe and the US.