Jennifer Higgie on her new e-book about spiritualism and its significance to early Modernist girls artists

In The Different Facet, Jennifer Higgie, the previous editor of Frieze journal, explores the life and work of a rare group of usually neglected girls artists in addition to confirming the essential position performed by spiritualism all through artwork historical past. It is usually a private memoir and a clarion name for us to embrace the religious in all its incarnations.

The Artwork Newspaper: How did the e-book come about?

Jennifer Higgie: I’ve lengthy been excited about histories of exclusions—of ladies from artwork historical past after which all the opposite exclusions round class or race or sexuality. I began realising how attention-grabbing the historical past of spiritualism was by way of its relationship to girls’s creativity and in addition to early Modernism. It appeared to sum up so many alternative issues round histories of exclusion and about prescriptive methods of pondering round artwork.

You present how girls comparable to Georgiana Houghton and Hilma af Klint had been pioneers of summary artwork lengthy earlier than the likes of Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich.

We had been all taught that abstraction started with Kandinsky in 1911. And it’s a misreading. Kandinsky is a good artist, however the concept he invented abstraction is simply plain foolish. As a result of, aside from First Nations artwork that’s been utilizing this sort of language for tens of hundreds of years, there have been all of those girls making work round this within the nineteenth century, who had been by no means recognised.

You additionally make some extent of emphasising the important thing position of the religious in artwork normally.

You’ll be able to’t consider the Renaissance with out its demons and saints and transformations, or ignore First Nations origin tales, or Greek myths—all of those have enriched our tradition. Spirituality is in some ways a mirrored image of what artwork is: an alchemical course of, turning one factor into one other. However once I was at artwork faculty phrases like spirituality or instinct or creativeness had been frowned upon; everybody was in thrall to French idea and this was a dying knell to other ways of desirous about artwork. Spiritualism knowledgeable all artwork till the late nineteenth century, however then instantly it was determined that it wasn’t cool anymore.

Why did this occur?

Alfred Barr, the primary director of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York, did an infinite quantity of hurt together with his prescriptive method of claiming what Modernism was, and [the art critic Clement] Greenberg, too. This concept that modernity needed to be rational, cool and atheist, and that it was in regards to the form of issues somewhat than their which means, was a horrible misreading that filtered by means of Western artwork and dismissed so many alternative approaches to artwork making.

It’s a extremely private e-book. Why did you embody autobiographical data and anecdotes?

I felt that this was a really private, heartfelt exploration that’s additionally emblematic of one thing larger. One more reason was as a result of I’m actually conscious of who I haven’t included. Artwork historical past is a captivating work in progress that’s an ongoing historical past of exclusions as nicely.

• The Different Facet: A Journey into Ladies, Artwork and the Spirit World, Jennifer Higgie, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 320pp, £22 (hb)