Jennifer Higgie traces the impact of the spirit world on modernism through a female artist whose work predates what is commonly hailed as the beginning of abstraction in western art.

In 2018, an exhibition of deliriously strange and beautiful paintings by a little-known theosophist and spiritualist, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It became the most popular show in the institution's 60-year history. Included in the exhibition was af Klint’s The Ten Largest, which she claimed was painted directly through her by a spirit guide. “I remember standing in front of The Ten Largest and realising I had never encountered a suite of paintings that was so baffling and so exhilarating,” Higgie says. “Wandering from picture to picture was like travelling through the exalted corridors of someone’s mind.”

Why did these works remain obscure for so long, and then go on to capture the imagination of so many?

Across this series of essays, Higgie re-evaluates the influence of spiritualism on the art of the past 150 years: how it helped shape movements such as modernism and surrealism, but was largely ignored by art critics and historians until recently. Why were women written out of the story? And why are so many artists turning to mysticism now?

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie is the writer and presenter of a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

Written and presented by Jennifer Higgie
Produced by Chris Elcombe
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