Georgiana Houghton

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Georgiana Houghton (1882)
Georgiana Houghton: Portrait of Jesus Christ

Georgiana Houghton (born April 20, 1814 in Las Palmas , † 1884 in London ) was an English painter and spiritualist .

Life

Georgiana Houghton was the seventh child of an English family of traders on the Canary Island of La Palma , but they returned to England so that Georgiana received her school education there. In 1851 one of her sisters died, with whom she felt very close; she wanted to keep in touch with her, which led her to spiritualism. At the end of the 1850s this brought her to drawing and watercolor painting , which she operated with a high degree of intuitive automatism, since she saw herself less as an artist and more as a medium . In the 1860s and 1870s she painted an extensive series of pictures in which she was spiritually guided by Renaissance artists .

In 1871 she organized and paid for an exhibition of 155 of her work at the New British Gallery , which became both an artistic and a financial failure; nevertheless she continued to paint. After the death of her parents, she continued her communication with the dead and even had photographs taken of alleged ghostly apparitions. She died impoverished in London in 1884.

reception

The artist's work fell into oblivion; however, it was partially preserved after an exhibition in Australia in 1910, so that in 2015 the Monash University Museum of Art in the Australian city of Melbourne was able to organize an exhibition in which 25 of her watercolors could also be seen. In June 2016 a solo exhibition took place at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, so that the European and international art world became aware of Georgiana Houghton. Her work is now regarded as a forerunner of naive , surreal and abstract painting .

style

Georgiana Houghton's style of painting is linear; flat areas are almost completely absent. The flawless, exact lines are remarkable. Red, yellow, green and blue tones predominate, which stand for themselves in some pictures, but in others merely form the background for a play of wafer-thin, curved white lines.

Fonts

  • Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (1882)
  • Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1882)

literature

Web links

Commons : Georgiana Houghton  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files