Who were these amazing women? We make history on a new one because of them

Stories Jennifer Higgie The artists and how inspiring the spiritual world for contemporary art was, they have enchanted me last month. Not only because I heard about many painters for the first time, but also because it is a story about a new history of art. In recent years, the largest galleries around the world have been opening exhibitions of forgotten artists, whose works are impressed by viewers. Years ago, more than 600,000 people watched the exhibition of Swedish painter Hilme AF Klint in New York. Who were these amazing women?

It seems to me that every time art begins to look for new ideas, it returns to mystics, spiritualism … Why were these movements in the late 19th and early 20th century so strong?

In 1848, in America, sister Maggie and Kate Fox claimed that they communicate with the soul of a dead man who died in the basement of their house through knocking. They were the main news in the newspapers, although they were girls, ten and fourteen years old. People have become obsessed with calling ghosts. They were very controversial personalities. They later gave up the spirituality and then returned to it again. Both were excellent liars and fraudsters and died of alcoholism, but nevertheless aroused interest in where the soul goes after death and whether everything disappears or maybe there is a other side.

It is no coincidence that it was also a time of great scientific discoveries – atoms, X -rays, a telegraph… It seemed that many things could be – to see inside a man, to communicate across the ocean … Artists interested in spirituality also studied science, and scientists were interested in spirituality. Albert Einstein and Marie Curie enthusiastically read theosophical texts, and Thomas Edison was seriously involved in the idea of ​​creating a phone through which they could talk to the dead. Hilma AF Klint and her colleagues – her painting community was called five because five painters participated in it – used a special device to call ghosts.

Spirituality has experienced a great boom after World War I, when more than twenty million mainly young boys fell. Parents, wives and friends who mourned behind them wanted to find out desperately to find out how it was, so they visited the media and called the dead at the sessions. Spiritualism was so powerful in the UK that it even threatened the Anglican Church.

The society began to change very quickly, industrialization came, people were lost. In their works, artists responded to war and killing, interested in emotions, pain, horror, chaos, no longer wanted to copy reality. They studied what is in man, which is hidden.