Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Spirit-Generated Art, 1871: Far-outside Outsider Art

ITEM:  Houghton, Georgiana. Catalogue of the Spirit Drawings in Water Colours, Exhibited at the New British Gallery, Old Bond Street. London: 1871.  32pp.  Bound in flexible cloth boards, with blind stamped decoration and a gilt stamped title on the front cover.  RARE.  No copies located in the OCLC.  This is the copy of the very eminent chemist and physicist William Crookes¹ (vacuum tube pioneer, "Crookes tube"), with "Miss Houghton's" presentation in her manuscript to him on the title page,dated 3 October 1871.     $500.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1402

 This slim booklet,  Catalogue of the Spirit Drawings in Water Colours, Exhibited at the New British Gallery, Old Bond Street (London: 1871), offered descriptions of the work of  Georgiana Houghton (b. 1814), an artist who in some way communicated with the spirit world, and allowed her art to be guided by it. She writes in the very first paragraph of her catalog's introduction, "the execution of the Drawings my hand has been entirely guided by Spirits, no idea being formed in my own mind as to what was going to be produced..."  She explains that the spirits were definitely those of dead people, and after having heard of such possibilities of communication as early as 1859 set out to "obtain mediumship"  by holding hands with her mother at a small table for some months on end waiting for contact--which of course she says happened.  Sundays worked best, "as we should then be less disturbed by evil influences".   The spirits would communicate at first by table movement, then tapping,  and then through the alphabet by the use of a planchette. So it seems to me that given that she had abandoned her own input in the creative process (even though she had a history of formal art education or instruction), and that the inspiration she received seemed not to be her own, that Miss Houghton was an outsider-Outsider artist, pursuing the spoken artistic needs of others, and then providing her own interpretations of the forms and colors. (We offer the original copy of this catalog at our blog bookstore.)

It seemed that Miss Houghton was inspired by the spirit drawings of a Miss Wilkinson--it was then that she sought the artistic guidance of a dead artistic sister though without success, and then from a dead brother.  It was the brother who brought her into contact with dead Henry Lenny ("a deaf and dumb artist") who then guided her hands at first with the planchette, then with a pencil, and finally to watercolors. 

After ten years of her own spirit drawings, Miss Houghton produced for herself a four-month show at the New British Gallery on Old Bond Street, exhibiting 155 of her works, all exhibited in rented frames for the occasion.  Her reviews seem to have been very-light and  mixed at best,  and for all of her effort and trouble, she sold only one painting,  She did however produce a catalog of the exhibition, which was a great aid to the viewer as the interpretations of the meanings of the forms and colors that Miss Houghton used were written on the backs of the artworks, which were hidden from view by the frames--many of the paintings' meanings were annotated in the catalog.

Miss Stoughton was hardly alone in this field of representing what seems to have been a very actice after-life of the dearly departed, though it seems that not as many participated in her own brand of automatic representation than other methods of spirit communication.  She did appear at the beginning of what would become a significant culture of spiritualism, with spiritual manifestation, telepathic communication from one person to another and then to the dead, thought transference and  magnetisation.  The evidence of spiritual contact was produced on high levels, not the least of which were seances in which the dead appeared as floating ghosts filled with quiet or phantasmal groans and noises, sometimes luminous, sometimes leaving the medium's body as colored smoke, sometimes appearing as an electric spark, or an imprint on a photographic plate, or an aural shadow produced in iron filings, or an impression made in clay or other accepting materials².  They offered possibilities for hope and belief that are no less vigorous than our own today, save for their technological limitations.  (An interesting article, "Proof Positive, the Photomatic Body in fin-de-siecle Science, by Alessandro Violi, can be seen here.)

There is a very interesting article on Houghton and the exhibition by Rachel Oberter called  "Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye:  the Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton" which was published in Victorian Studies 48.2 (2005) 221-232.  About the pre-Abstract abstract and proto-impressionist work, Oberter says:

"Given the lack of abstraction within Victorian visual culture, watercolors such as those painted by the artist Georgiana Houghton in the 1860s and 1870s seem shockingly out of place. In her work The Eye of God from 1862, we see a tangle of transparent straight, wavy, and spiraling lines flowing out of the left corner of the paper and up from the bottom edge of the page as white filaments float across the surface. No recognizable forms appear; all that is visible are lines and colors—yellow, sepia, and blue. There is an organic quality to the undulations, a sense of microscopic detail, and a feeling of being in a deep-sea world or otherwise mysterious place. The vagueness of the imagery contrasts with the specificity of the title, which evokes a dense underlying symbolism. Houghton attributed meaning to particular shapes, colors, and directions in her paintings. While her works were abstract, they remained representational."

"The most important tools for decoding these works are the explanations that Houghton wrote on the backs of the drawings [above] . These elaborate descriptions provide a key to the symbolism in the drawing, clarify the message of each work, and name the spirit who acted as Houghton's guide in the creative process. Houghton believed that these explanations were written by the spirits through her hands; they are automatic writings that complement her automatic drawings. The same spirit who inspired the drawing provided the interpretation on the back—the explanations, one could say, came directly from the source."

The catalog does give Biblical references for every one of the works, giving at least a location in the Bible for every artwork.  There are occasional (though sparse) longer descriptions of the work, though the great majority give Biblical citations for what each of the paintings represents. 

Also of interest is Ms. Oberter's description of the gallery event:

"...in 1871 she exhibited her works in a more formal venue: she organized an exhibition at the New British Gallery in Old Bond Street in London. The exhibition, entitled "Spirit Drawings in Water Colours," lasted for four months and consisted of 155 of Houghton's watercolors. She rented frames for the occasion and hung the watercolors against the walls of the gallery. This arrangement meant that the backs with the explanations would not have been visible. Yet it was still critical for Houghton that she convey this hidden information to her viewers. In her autobiography Houghton recalled: "The chief object aimed at in this Exhibition, was not so much to display the wondrous powers of the unseen intelligences, as to manifest unflinchingly to the world that true Spiritualism is inextricably bound up with the religion of the Sacred Scriptures" (Houghton, Evenings 2: 53). It was not enough for Houghton that the drawings serve as proof of communication between spirits and humans; it was also important that they convey the relationship between Spiritualism and Christian theology, particularly the insights that the spirits give about God and the Trinity."

 The artwork of Miss Houghton is an interesting blip in the history of Victorian art, and I'm not exactly sure what to say about it.  It certainly occurs during the first wave of Impressionism, and is wholly different from that new art form as well as the high Victorian fashion of the time; it also is entirely non-representational, an abstract art that precedes that revolutionary phase by about forty years.  Its a little puzzling to me, especially since Miss Houghton seems to have escaped virtually any sort of lasting review or critique.  But again Mrs. Stoughton is not alone in the non-representational art field apart from the automatic spirit manifestations--for example, in addition to an enormous literary output, Victor Hugo produced some 4,000 pieces of art, some of which are exceptional examples (to my mind) of non-representational art that came in a period decades before the Kandinsky and the rest.  Here is Hugo's "Evocation of an Island":

He was certainly outside the mainstream of Victorian art, and even well outside that of Impressionism. 

There was also Hilma of Klint (b. 1862), a woman who like Stoughton also represented the spirit world through her art, and who began painting in non-representational and abstract ways beginning in 1897/8, an example of which is below:

 
 

Miss Houghton went on to improve her representation of the spirit world through photography, a very wide selection of her work being available at the Keith De Lellis Gallery, here.

In the realm of extra-sensical belief, I'm not so sure that these brands of spiritualism would be too much different from any other belief in things that cannot be seen, or heard, or felt in any detectable way, a prayer by any other name.

Notes:

1. Our catalog was the property of William Crookes (with his bookplate, and with a signed inscription to him from "Miss Houghton")  who was an eminent British chemist and physicist and a pioneer in the field of vacuum technology (and remembered now mostly for the Crookes Tubes and his superior approach to experimentation).  He was interested in spiritualism from about the year 1869, pursuing it until his death in 1919.  He was hardly alone in his interests among highly-paced British intellectual elite:  Alfred Russell Wallace, Lord Rayleigh, Oliver Lodge and William James were all extremely interested in the spiritualism phenomenon.  Curious. 

2.

Imprints of ghost hands and faces produced by Eusapia Palladino, from Bozzano, Ipotesi spiritica, 1903, in C. Lombroso Ricerche..., 1909

 

 

 

The Big Lie--Poland as an Aggressor Against the Reich, 1939

ITEM:  Poland's Designs on Germany as expressed since the British guarantee.  [Berlin W 62, Rauchstr. 27]  [Dt. Informationsstelle], (1939), 8x5 inches, 23pp, 7 folding maps.  Good condition.  RARE.  $200

ref: JF Ptak Science Books  Post  1298      (This is the second post written on this pamphlet--it is a stunner to me every time I see it. The earlier post was written in September 2008 and can be found here.)

Here’s an interesting entry from the instrumental librarians' tool WorldCat, a massive 75 million item book database that I use with some frequency, trying to determine whether some obscure-sounding/looking pamphlet or book is actually Not Around, like not in library collections.  (When something just isn't there, not located, it makes the work even more interesting to me.)

Poland’s Designs on Germany has the sound and feel of a piece of propaganda, right from the start, just from the supra-obvious title page and the very feel of the production.  Looking for my proof-in-the-pudding--the printing information and source for the information--I found none.  Another strike for the propagandist.  (And another interesting point: the phrase "Poland's designs on Germany" is a non-starter on Google, not located on the web, or in JSTOR, or in other pay-for web commercial communities.)

Then of course there was the content, which is a simple, serial distribution of The Big Lie, painting Poland as an aggressor, hungry for German land and people. So far as I can tell there is nothing truthful in this work whatsoever, or at least I should say nothing that is assertive to the point of Poland being an "aggressor". There are seven maps illustrating the points.  These are the great hallmarks of The Big Lie--a lie so vast that no one is supposed to think it possible that someone would tell a lie so fantastic, that no broadcast lie could be so incredibly big as to have been invented and told,  and so the lie must be true.  Hitler wrote about this admiringly in Mein Kampf, expressing an idolotry for the idea in print, recognizing it as a powerfull tool of subversion and propaganda, and then went ahead and followed the instructions. 

Then comes the entry in the WorldCat–I found that the year was 1939.  It would be in September of the year that Hitler would attack Poland and the war would begin.  Who would have thought that the Nazis were acting in self defense?

The WorldCat entry:

Poland's Designs on Germany as expressed since the British guarantee.  [Berlin W 62, Rauchstr. 27]  [Dt. Informationsstelle],
1939
23 S. : 7 gez. Kt. ; 8.
Other Titles:     Polnische Ansprüche auf deutsches Reichsgebiet. engl.
Locations    Library    
Germany    BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK     
Germany    BIBLIOTHEK DES HERDER-INSTITUTS     
Germany    DIE DEUTSCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK   
Germany    STAATSBIBLIOTHEK ZU BERLIN

And there it is: "Dt. Infomrationnsstelle" is the Deutsche Informationnsstelle, the German Information Centre.  The  GIC exists today, but during the National Socialist period leading up to the war and during WWII it was an outlet for German propoagandistic works. There are no copies of this particular work, evidently, in libraries in the United States. This is too bad, because this is a tremendously insulting document, an insistent, insinuating, unforgiving document to the ridiculous, perverted manner of thought and logic of the Nazis.

Steampunk Atomic Death Ray, 1930

ITEMS:

(1) Sonos, the Conqueror. (1938) 4-page pamphlet, 1 full page illustration.

(2) Voom, the Unconquerable. (1935) Copyrighted by G.S. Faber, 13pp, four full page illustrations.

Rare.  The pair, $350.00  Neither pamphlet is located in WorldCat.

Sonos the Conqueror and Vooa the Unconquerable were two sorts of a sort, two flits in a fit, the products of the mumbley imagination of Guy Stanleigh.  Actually Stanleigh (not "Stan Lee") was an interesting scifi artist if not a writer. Actually he was nowhere near being a writer, if writing had anything to do with writing and not drawing.  His written word was the sort that vicious litcrit folks wait for in the bushes for on Friday nights sop that they can catch and chew on them over the weekend before Monday deadline. .  I'm surprised that after 72 years the letters on the pages of his work haven't yet slipped off.   His drawings though are an entirely different matter--they are accomplished in a naive way, and are big, and Botero-esque/bulbous, and unusual, and filled with a fair amount of imagination.

My favorites in his novelettes (Sonos the Conqueror and Vooa the Unconquerable, both of which stretch out to 16 pages, combined, which were undoubtedly vehicles for his artwork, if nothing else) were of a machine called the Atronic Ray energizer ("a concentrated collection of teh rays given off by the planets of the universe, a few of which (were) absorbed...circulating over the universe via inductive and repulsed forces....the primary or positive induced force emanating between and from an anode and biode..." Anyway, it was a terminus of fantastically great power that could either engender universal peace or destroy humanity. Life/death aside, its a pretty picture, and figure's long and very sharp shadow relates a visceral feeling of hot energy.  

 

Towering Classics of Lost Logic: the Japanese War Lords, Kaiser Wilhelm, U.S. State and Justice Depts as the "True Kidnappers" of the Lindbergh Baby

ITEM 1: Extra Extra Extra.  11x8 inches, 8pp.  Fine condition. $125

ITEM 2: The Japanese War Department Killers of the Lindbergh Baby. 11x.8 inches.  4pp.  Fine.  $125

Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and then sometimes they're not what they seem not to be, and then there are these things, below.  These small pamphlets are very reaching examples of finding gold or silver or muffins or whatever in a sow's ear, finding a hope for belief where there wasn't room for any, logically speaking.  But there's always room for belief and faith, which takes on myraids of appearances, from believing in paper money to believing in heaven--in these cases, our writers believed in the unbelievable, creating and then believing in "innermost secrets" where there were no secrets and were no insides. 

Both of the examples below relate to the kidnapping of the 20-month-old son of Charles Lindburgh in 1932.  The crime was an extraordinarilyy national event, with seemingly everyone in the country following the case  During the two-month hunt for the baby and the subsequent trial and execution of the man who was seen as responsible for the child's kidnapping and murder, there were fantastic numbers of claims from people who had solutions to the mystery, or had been in contact with the kidnappers, or some other sad, imaginary relationship to the event.  The examples below [both of which are available for purchase at our blog bookstore] claim to have incredible insight into the real nature of the crime, which of course goes blindingly beyond the simple matters of the case and on to include massive colusions between the U.S. State and Justice Departments, "international bankers", F.D.R., Kaiser Wilhelm, and "the Japanese government".  And more.

The first example was published in 1942 by something called "The Mothers and Daughters Committee".  This group used the address of  280 E. 21St Street, Brooklyn, New York, which today is a six storey building with 96 apartments, and I suspect that the MADC back there in '42 was nothing more than a crank in apartment inthis building. The thinking is too confusing and the references too many amnd too busy to actually do this thing justice by de-threading it, but suffice to say it claims that the F.B.I. was shielding "the international criminals"who were truly responsible for the crime--I'm not sure how F.D.R. works his way in there but it has something to do with "international bankers", communist conspirators, traitors in the State Department, and "needy" lawyers, all brought together in a choking confluence to do harm somehow to American society and morality.

Now our second towering example is this four page pamphlet, received by the Library of Congress (and probably nobody else) on 1 October 1943, which divines the origins of World War Two and the kidnapping of the Charles Lindbergh baby to a complex and impossible cabal of Japanese “War Lords”, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the League of Nations, Elihu Root,  “3 cent gallon kerosene”, the South Manchurian Railway, and some sort of “historical documents of posterity countersigned by Tokyo and Berlin” in the possession of Mrs. Renee Valentine (“Secretary”) of Staten Island, New York. 

The entire affair began with “co-tenants of the kidnappers band in small studio building owned by a relative of a former U.S. Senator” under the instigation of “Germany, Japan and certain Arnold Benedicts types” brought about by the end of the “Jap-Russo” War of 1905.

We are told it was an “inside job”.

Somehow Teddy Roosevelt gets involved with Kaiser Wilhelm in arranging for the Russians to pay indemnity to the Japanese in terms of a land agreement of Southern Manchuria, opening the way to exploitation of China by the Japanese.  Something else happens, the South Manchuria Railroad gets thrown in as well as four competing U.S. banks and Elihu Root and a failed League of Nations agreement which upsets a balance of power and brings “the Astors, Canterbury and the Guggenheims” into competition with the Japanese and Kaiser Wilhelm, doing something to the Treaty of Washington.

After this incredible and unconnected and partially non-existent series of events is both untangled and entangled before our eyes, the writer reaches the lonely and very solitary conclusion that “the necessary documents to prove these charges (??) could be secured through the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby”.  I was waiting for the  author to make a case for Lindbergh's real-life (and long held) Nazi sympathies, but that just didn't happen. 

I really have no idea of what the writer is talking about, but the failure of making any connection whatsoever with any of the “facts and circumstances” is magnificently appalling, and has moved itself from the realm of being so bad that it isn’t even “bad” anymore.  It is that singular sort of “badness” that makes the printed words seep into the paper and disappear before your very eyes, and the only thing that you can say is "wow".