Channeled art is art created in trance or mediumship – often abstract, geometric or symbolic, and believed to be guided by spirits, archetypes, or intuitive forces. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mediums and visionary artists in Europe and America produced strikingly modern works that they attributed to spiritual guidance. Common themes include automatic drawing, cosmic or organic patterns, and a felt sense of “higher” meaning. For example, artists often describe working with tools like pendulums or entering trance states to let images emerge[1][2]. Some key traits of this work are:
- Abstract geometry and patterning: Works use circles, spirals, grids or symbols to depict cosmic or psychic structures[3][4].
- Spirit communication: Many artists said a spirit guide or collective unconscious told them what to paint. Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, for instance, described “High Masters” and angelic tutors giving them messages that they expressed in color and form[1][5].
- Mystical intent: The art is often meant as a bridge to unseen realities. Emma Kunz’s drawings were literally “visions of energy fields” used in healing[6], and Agnes Martin spoke of her grids as glimpses of inner joy and innocence[7][8].
These features tie channeled art to the broader currents of abstraction and esotericism in modern art. While Kandinsky, Mondrian and others drew on Theosophy or mystical ideas for their abstract language, the channeled artists literally viewed their work as spiritual transmission. Their art is now often grouped under the rubric of visionary or outsider art. For example, a 2018 exhibition catalog notes that Hilma af Klint, Houghton, and Kunz each “found their artistic language within the context of the spiritual movements of their times: Houghton in spiritism, af Klint in theosophy, and Kunz in naturopathy,” and that their work bears witness to a “mediumistic praxis”[3].
Hilma af Klint: Abstraction through Spirit Guides
Hilma af Klint, “Altarpiece” (1915) – a colorful geometric abstraction from her “Paintings for the Temple” series. Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is now recognized as a pioneer of abstraction, largely because her visionary approach predated Kandinsky’s. Af Klint believed strongly that her paintings were guided by spirits. As a young woman she joined a spiritualist group of women called “The Five”, who held séances and used a device (a psychograph) to produce automatic drawings from trance. This practice sparked her move from landscapes into abstract symbolism[1]. The group believed they were communicating with “High Masters” – spiritual beings who imparted wisdom. Af Klint wrote in her journal that one Master, Amaliel, gave her a commission to create what became her great cycle “Paintings for the Temple”[9]. In her own words, she “immediately replied: yes,” and spent years executing the plan.
Af Klint’s style is rich in swirling shapes and spiritual symbolism. Her “Ten Largest” series (1907) uses floral and cell-like forms to represent stages of life, while her later Temple paintings are deliberately nonrepresentational. She famously hid these works from the public, believing that “the world wasn’t ready” to understand them[10][11]. Only after her death were they discovered and shown. Today we know that af Klint was steeped in Theosophy, which taught about brotherhood of humanity and communication with higher planes. (She even joined the Swedish Theosophical Society and studied occult texts[12].) Her use of color and geometry was meant to make invisible spiritual laws visible, and she called herself a “medium” whose brush was a tool of higher minds.
Af Klint’s story also illuminates how art history has changed. For decades she was virtually unknown: even MoMA’s 2012 show Inventing Abstraction omitted her[13]. But recent exhibitions (e.g. Guggenheim Museum 2018–19) and scholarship celebrate her as the proto-abstract painter. Scholars now place her alongside Jung and other mystic thinkers: one recent article titles her and Jung “the first Abstract Expressionists,” united by a mystical impulse to use abstraction to probe the psyche[10][11].
Emma Kunz: Pendulum Geometry from Universal Energy
Emma Kunz (1892–1963) was a Swiss healer and spiritual researcher whose geometric drawings were directly instrumented by a divining pendulum. Kunz discovered as a teenager that she had strong extrasensory and healing gifts. At 18 she began drawing in notebooks without formal training – and by her forties she was making large-scale “radiesthesia” drawings on graph paper[6]. Her method: she held a pendulum over the page and allowed it to swing, plotting out lines and shapes that she later refined with colored pencil. The Serpentine Gallery’s 2019 retrospective described these as visions of energy: her hundreds of intricate drawings “simultaneously contain micro and macro perspectives of nature,” blending science and mysticism[14][6].
Kunz never titled her drawings or explained them in the conventional sense; instead she used them diagnostically in her naturopathic healing practice. The critic and curator Harald Szeemann said of Kunz’s work: “Her gift was an awareness of connections that contradicted both normal experience and scientific interpretations of the laws of Nature… These drawings are attempts to find a universal connection”[15]. In other words, Kunz’s geometric abstraction was consciously metaphysical. (A rock she discovered, AION A, became associated with her practice and even names a Swiss research center, reflecting her holistic worldview[16].) Today her art is often shown alongside Hilma af Klint and others; indeed, the Serpentine noted that Kunz has been exhibited in the same context as af Klint, Georgiana Houghton and Agnes Martin – all of whom shared a preoccupation with spirituality and abstraction[17].
Georgiana Houghton and Victorian Spirit Art
Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) was a British medium who produced striking abstract watercolors in the 1860s and 70s. After attending her first séance in 1859, she developed mediumistic drawing skills and by 1861 was painting spirit messages under guidance from a spirit named Lenny and “70 Archangels”[18]. Houghton described filling each sheet “with woven swirls of vibrant colours forming an abstract and harmonious layering of hues and tints”[19]. Unlike anything seen in Victorian England, her work had no figure subjects – only dynamic overlapping spirals, petals, and symbols rendered in watercolour and gouache. One contemporary wrote that petals were seen through one another in a “richness and brilliancy” that astonished onlookers[19].
In 1871 Houghton even held a solo exhibition in London – virtually the first abstract art show ever. But the reception was mixed; many visitors were “shocked by the previously unseen abstract forms,” and only one painting sold, perhaps because the public found it “too modern”[20]. (Her catalogue claimed each work was “an offering to God,” underscoring the spiritual intent behind the imagery.) After her death Houghton was largely forgotten. However, recent scholarship has resurrected her reputation: analysts now credit her with anticipating Kandinsky’s abstraction by 50 years[21]. In 2018–19 her work was shown at London’s Courtauld Gallery in Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings, and she was featured alongside af Klint and Kunz in Munich’s World Receivers exhibition[3]. Today Georgiana Houghton is celebrated as both a pioneer of “spirit art” and an early abstract artist in her own right.
Augustin Lesage: A Miner Channels Egypt
On the other side of the Channel, in northern France, coal miner Augustin Lesage (1876–1954) also turned to the canvas under spiritual instruction. In 1911, at age 35, he claimed to hear a voice in a mine telling him, “One day you will be a painter.”[22]. Until then Lesage had no formal art experience – the only art he’d ever seen was a museum visit. Soon the voice (which he believed was his deceased sister’s spirit) guided him step by step: it told him what to paint and which materials to use[23]. Lesage said he never planned a composition in advance; instead “powerful spirits came and revealed themselves to me, ordering me to draw and paint”[24]. He remembered them saying, “We are the ones working through your hands.”[24].
Augustin Lesage, Untitled (1947) – an oil painting filled with mandalas, pattern and symmetry. Lesage claimed that spirit voices directed every detail of his composition[25][4]. Following this first experience, Lesage spent the rest of his life painting. He produced some 800 works, many on large canvases. The imagery is densely patterned and often symmetric – sometimes openly Egyptian or architectural in style. Birds, lions and profile faces recur amid concentric circles and colonnades of glyph-like forms[4]. Observers have noted that these structured, tunnel-like spaces may echo the geometry of the coal mines where Lesage once toiled. His colorful canvases even attracted Jean Dubuffet, who later bought Lesage’s paintings for his Art Brut collection. Lesage was also known to demonstrate his method publicly in the 1920s under scientific observation, earning a reputation for truly “automatic” or “spiritualist” art[26].
Madge Gill: Enchanted Portraits of “the Beyond”
Madge Gill (1882–1961) was a working-class Englishwoman whose spirit portraits rank among the 20th century’s most haunting automatic drawings. After years of hardship (including losing two young children), Gill turned to Spiritualism. By age 38 she became a noted trance medium working with a guide she called “Myrninnerest”[27]. Through this spirit, Gill produced thousands of drawings. She worked in a trance state, often blindfolded, and poured out ink and pencil onto postcards and rolls of cloth.
Gil’s hallmark style is a dense, black-and-white labyrinth of cross-hatching and checkerboards that seem to twist and recede. At the center often floats Myrninnerest’s ghostly face. One researcher notes that this odd perspective – which looks neither truly frontal nor realistic – should not be seen as error but as “a rare glimpse into a realm [André] Breton called ‘the Beyond’”[28]. (In other words, it’s as if we’re seeing a vision, not a painting of a person.) Gill’s work is purely automatic in feeling: she seldom titled or numbered pieces. After her death, Gill’s drawings have been widely exhibited (for example, Madge Gill: Medium and Visionary in London 2013[29]) and acquired by major folk art museums. Today she is remembered as a quintessential medium-artist: one who literally painted the otherworld.
Agnes Martin: Transcendent Minimalism
Though not a medium, American abstract artist Agnes Martin (1912–2004) is often discussed in this context because her work was similarly spiritual and automatic-seeming. Martin’s famously austere grids and stripes were actually born of mystical inspiration. She once said she painted only from visions that came to her in stillness. “I paint with my back to the world,” she explained – her aim was not to depict things but to “catch” intangible states of being[7]. For years Martin labored on large square canvases of faint pencil lines and subtle washes of color. She waited sometimes for weeks for a vision of the next line to draw[30].
Martin explicitly linked her work to Asian spirituality. She cited Lao Tzu and Zen Buddhism as deep influences, adopting daily meditation and an ethos of emptiness. In a 1979 essay she wrote of her 1973 On a Clear Day prints: “These prints express innocence of mind… If you can go with them and hold your mind as empty and tranquil as they are… you will realize your full response to this work.”[8]. To Martin, the precise lines and pastel fields signified inner joy and beauty – titles like Little Children Loving Love and I Love the Whole World underline the intent. In her later years she insisted the art was not about her ego; she even refused awards, saying “I don’t really think I’m responsible” for them[31]. Martin’s meditative art thus parallels the channeling approach of others: it’s an attempt to externalize a higher, universal consciousness through careful form.
Jung and the Visionary Unconscious
The psychologist Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) is not an art medium, but his ideas help explain what these artists were doing. Jung grew up in a family steeped in Spiritualism (his mother was a medium), and he studied occult phenomena in his thesis. He concluded that ghost-seeing, automatic writing and visions were “manifestations of the unconscious,” projections of hidden parts of the self[32]. In other words, he saw no fundamental difference between a medium channeling spirits and an artist accessing archetypal images in the mind.
Jung’s own imagery-making (in the famous Red Book) was strikingly like channeling. He entered an inner dialogue through dreamlike drawings and paintings of spirals, mandalas and strange figures – indeed, an outsider might not distinguish Jung’s Red Book art from, say, af Klint’s work. A recent essay notes that “from an outsider’s point of view, the activities of Hilma af Klint and Carl Jung would have seemed strikingly similar”[33]. In Jung’s view, art could tap into the collective unconscious of humanity. This theory gave a sort of legitimacy to mediumistic art: these artists were not crazy eccentrics but explorers of the psyche. It’s no accident that Jung was enthusiastic about some modern artists (he discussed Picasso and explored symbolism in art) even as he was deeply interested in spiritualists and mediums. He helped bridge the gap between esoteric belief and mainstream culture for mid-20th-century artists.
Beyond Paint: Other Mediums and Channelers
While our focus has been on painters and drawings, it’s worth noting that mediumship spanned creative domains. For example, Rosemary Brown (1916–2001) was a British housewife and spiritualist who claimed to channel music. In the 1960s and 70s she published over 300 new compositions she said were dictated to her by deceased composers (from Bach to Debussy and even John Lennon)[34]. As with the painters, Brown had only modest musical training, but described how an apparition of Franz Liszt told her, “When you grow up, I will come back and give you music.”[35][36]. While not visual art, her case is another example of “channeling” in creative work.
Similarly, other artists and writers throughout history have reported visionary inspiration. Some outsider artists like Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli painted complex visionary worlds from their imaginations or trance. In each case, whether one credits spirits or the subconscious, the work shares an intuitive, unfiltered quality and an aim to express a larger reality.
Context: Abstraction, Esotericism and Modern Art
Channeled artists were part of a wider occult modernism. From the late 1800s on, many avant-garde artists were fascinated by Theosophy, spiritualism, and Eastern mysticism. Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910) urged painting the “inner necessity” of color; Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society and saw his grids as cosmic harmony. In this cultural milieu, it’s unsurprising that some practitioners adopted overt mediumship.
Art historians note that the chanellers’ geometry places them alongside mainstream abstraction. The 2018 catalogue World Receivers (Munich) argues that Houghton, af Klint and Kunz all developed abstract vocabularies before Kandinsky – drawn by a common desire “to make visible the laws of nature, the intellect and the supernatural”[3]. Yet for a long time, museums largely ignored these women and mediums. Only in recent decades have major shows revisited them. Besides the examples already mentioned, Hilma af Klint’s work has been featured at Tate Modern (2020) and the Guggenheim; Madge Gill’s drawings appear in outsider art exhibits and the Museum of Modern Art’s collection; Kunz’s drawings have been published in The Museum of Everything catalogue (2010) and more. Agnes Martin received a full retrospectives at Tate Modern (2023) and LACMA, often noting her spiritual leanings.
Exhibitions and Publications
Key recent publications and shows have drawn attention to channeled artists. For example, the eponymous book World Receivers (ed. Karin Althaus et al., 2019) emerged from the Lenbachhaus exhibition, highlighting parallels among Houghton, af Klint and Kunz[3]. Georgiana Houghton’s work was re-discovered in a 2018 Courtauld Gallery show and catalogue. The Serpentine’s 2019 Emma Kunz: Visionary Drawings (curated by Christodoulos Panayiotou) included essays by Dawn Ades and others[37]. Historical explorations appear in journals like Raw Vision (on Gill, Lesage, etc.) and books like Art Brut Sourcebook (on Lesage) and biographies (such as Nancy Princenthal’s Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art).
Several museum exhibitions have explicitly linked spiritualism and modern art. Dubuffet’s shows in the 1960s–70s (Parallel Visions, Outsiders) included mediumistic art alongside Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. A recent traveling show, Accidental Genius, paired outsider visionaries with contemporary abstract artists (including Martin and af Klint). Even general surveys of abstraction now often mention spirit art. In short, the legacy of channeled art is finally gaining recognition as an important strand of 20th-century art history.
In sum, channeled art occupies a unique crossroads of spirituality and abstraction. These artists tapped into intuitive or otherworldly sources—be it spirit guides, archetypes, or cosmic energy—to create visionary geometric images. Their work challenges us to ask whether art must always be conscious invention, or if it can also be a kind of inspired transmission. For further reading, the sources cited here (museum catalogs, scholarly articles and biographies) provide deeper context on each artist and their spiritual frameworks.
Sources: Detailed information on each artist and channeling practice is drawn from exhibition catalogs and articles. Key references include Guggenheim and Serpentine institutional texts[17][38], scholarly essays[3][39], and publications like Raw Vision and Oxford Art Journal. Wherever possible specific facts (dates, quotes, exhibition titles) are cited in the text above to original sources for further study.
[1] [9] [12] [13] [38] Why Hilma af Klint’s Occult Spirituality Makes Her the Perfect Artist for Our Technologically Disrupted Time
[2] [6] [14] [15] [16] [17] [37] Emma Kunz – Visionary Drawings: An exhibition conceived with Christodoulos Panayiotou – Serpentine Galleries
[3] [5] Record World receivers : Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and John Whitney, James Whitney, Harry Smith / edited by Karin Althaus, Matthias Mühling, Sebastian Schneider, Lenbachhaus Munich | Collections Search Center, Smithsonian Institution
https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/edanmdm:siris_sil_1103067
[4] [23] [24] [25] [26] Augustin Lesage – Artists – Outsider Art Fair
https://www.outsiderartfair.com/artists/augustin-lesage
[7] [30] Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert | Art and design | The Guardian
[8] [31] Finding Inner Peace between Thin Black Lines | Getty Iris
https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/finding-inner-peace-between-thin-black-lines/
[10] [11] [32] [33] [39] The First Abstract Expressionists: Carl Jung and Hilma af Klint | DailyArt Magazine
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/the-first-abstract-expressionists-carl-jung-and-hilma-af-klint/
[18] [19] [20] [21] welcome – Georgiana Houghton
https://georgianahoughton.com/
[22] Augustin Lesage – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin_Lesage
[27] [28] [29] Madge Gill – Artists – Outsider Art Fair
https://www.outsiderartfair.com/artists/madge-gill
[34] [35] [36] 1960s housewife Rosemary Brown claimed she was a medium for the music of long dead composers – ABC News
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