Thomas Jefferson’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandson Poses for a Presidential Portrait

in Art, Current Affairs, History, Museums, Photography | July 6th, 2020

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness… —Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States of America

He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he didn’t practice it. He owned people. And now I’m here because of it. —Shannon LaNier, co-author of Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family

Many of the American participants in photographer Drew Gardner’s ongoing Descendants project agreed to temporarily alter their usual appearance to heighten the historic resemblance to their famous ancestors, adopting Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s lace cap and sausage curls or Frederick Douglass’ swept back mane.

Actor and television presenter Shannon LaNier submitted to an uncomfortable, period-appropriate neckwrap, tugged into place with the help of some discreetly placed paperclips, but skipped the wig that would have brought him into closer visible alignment with an 1800 portrait of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson.

“I didn’t want to become Jefferson,” states LaNier, whose great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Sally Hemings, was written out of the narrative for most of our country’s history.

An enslaved half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha, Hemings was around sixteen when she bore Jefferson’s first child, as per the memoir of her son, Madison, from whom LaNier is also directly descended.

She has been portrayed onscreen by actors Carmen Ejogo and Thandie Newton (and Maya Rudolph in an icky Saturday Night Live skit.)

But there are no photographs or painted portraits of her, nor any surviving letters or diary entries. Just two accounts in which she is described as attractive and light-skinned, and some political cartoons that paint an unflattering picture.

The mystery of her appearance might make for an interesting composite portrait should the Smithsonian, who commissioned Gardner’s series, seek to entice all of LaNier’s female and female-identifying cousins from the Hemings line to pose.

While LaNier was aware of his connection to Jefferson from earliest childhood, his peers scoffed and his mother had to take the matter up with the principal after a teacher told him to sit down and stop lying. As he recalled in an interview:

When they didn’t believe me, it became one of those things you stop sharing because, you know, people would make fun of you and then they’d say, “Yeah, and I’m related to Abraham Lincoln.”

His family pool expanded when Jefferson’s great-great-great-great-grandson, journalist Lucian King Truscott IV—whose fifth great-grandmother was Martha Jefferson—issued an open invitation to Hemings’ descendants to be his guests at a 1999 family reunion at Monticello.

It would be another 20 years before the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Monticello tour guides stopped framing Hemings’ intimate connection to Jefferson as mere tattle.

Now visitors can find an exhibit dedicated to her life, both online and in the recently reopened house-museum.

Truscott lauded the move in an essay on Salon, published the same week that a yearbook photo of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam in blackface posing next to a figure in KKK robes began to circulate:

Monticello is committing an act of equality by telling the story of slave life there, and by extension, slave life in America. When my cousins in the Hemings family stand up and proudly say, we are descendants of Thomas Jefferson, they are committing an act of equality…. The photograph you see here is a picture of who we are as Americans. One day, a photograph of two cousins, one black and one white, will not be seen as unusual. One day, acts of equality will outweigh acts of racism. Until that day, however, Shannon and I will keep fighting for what’s right. And one day, we will win.

Watch a video of Jefferson descendant Shannon Lanier’s session with photographer Drew Gardner here.

See more photos from Gardner’s Descendents project here.

Read historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s New York Times op-ed on the complicated Hemings-Jefferson connection here.

via Petapixel

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

An Immaculate Copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper Digitized by Google: View It in High Resolution Online

in Art | June 30th, 2020

Romantic poets told us that great art is eternal and transcendent. They also told us everything made by human hands is bound to end in ruin and decay. Both themes were inspired by the rediscovery and renewed fascination for the arts of antiquity in Europe and Egypt. It was a time of renewed appreciation for monumental works of art, which happened to coincide with a period when they came under considerable threat from looters, vandals, and invading armies.

One work of art that appeared on the itinerary of every Grand Touring aristocrat, Leonardo’s da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper in Milan, was made especially vulnerable when the refectory in which it was painted became an armory and stable for Napoleon’s troops in 1796. The soldiers scratched out the apostles’ eyes and lobbed rocks at the painting. Later, in 1800, Goethe wrote of the room flooding with two feet of water, and the building was also used as a prison.

As every curator and conservationist knows well, grand ideas about art gloss over important details. Art is bound to particular cultures, histories and materials. One of Leonardo’s most influential frescoes during the Renaissance, for example, almost completely melted right after he finished it, due to his insistence on using oils, which he also mixed with tempera in The Last Supper. Just a few decades after that painting’s completion, one Italian writer would describe it as “blurred and colorless compared with what I remember of it when I saw it as a boy.”

Historical decay is one thing. Recent fires at Brazil’s National Museum and Notre Dame served as stark reminders that accidents and poor planning can rob the world of cherished cultural treasures all at once. Institutions have been digitizing their collections with as much detail and precision as possible. For their part, England’s Royal Academy of Arts has partnered with Google Arts & Culture to render several of their most prized works online, including a copy of The Last Supper on canvas, made by Leonardo’s students from his original work.

More than any other contemporary description of the painting, this faithful copy, probably made by artists who worked on the fresco itself, provides art historians “key insights into the long-faded masterwork in Milan,” and lets us see the vivid shades that awed its first viewers. Presented in “Gigapixel clarity,” notes Artnet, the huge digital image with its “ultra high resolution” was “made possible by a proprietary Google camera.” As you zoom in to the tiniest details, facts appear about the painting and its larger, more battered original in Milan.

It is either a “miracle” that The Last Supper has survived, as Áine Cain writes at Business Insider, or the result of an “unending fight” to preserve the work, as Kevin Wong details at Endgadget. Or maybe some mysterious mixture of chance and near-heroic effort. But what has survived is not what Leonardo painted, but rather the best reconstruction to emerge from centuries of destruction and restoration. Get closer than anyone ever could to a facsimile of the original and see details from Leonardo’s work that have left no other trace in history. Explore it here.

via Smithsonian

Leonardo da Vinci’s Visionary Notebooks Now Online: Browse 570 Digitized Pages

Leonardo da Vinci’s Inventions Come to Life as Museum-Quality, Workable Models: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Chariot, Perpetual Motion Machine & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

How Georgia O’Keeffe Became Georgia O’Keeffe: An Animated Video Tells the Story

in Art | June 24th, 2020

When Georgia O’Keeffe first saw the home in Abiquiú, in Northern New Mexico that she would purchase from the Catholic Church in 1945 “the 5,000-square-foot compound was in ruins,” writes the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The artist immediately seized on its potential: “As I climbed and walked about in the ruin,” she remembers, “I found a patio with a very pretty well house and bucket to draw up water. It was a good-sized patio with a long wall with a door on one side. That wall with a door in it was something I had to have.”

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998, the “pueblo-style adobe (mud brick) hacienda” became one of the most renowned of artists’ houses, associated as closely with O’Keeffe as Frida Kahlo’s Blue House is with her work. O’Keeffe moved to the Southwest for good in 1949, three years after her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s death. Her spiritual connection to the region began with a visit to Taos in 1929, and she continued to visit and paint the area throughout the 30s and 40s.

The story about her discovery of the famous house—photographed hundreds of times by her and dozens of others—seems emblematic of the decades of decisive, mature painting and photography. Her vision seems supremely confident and entirely sui generis—a passionate way of seeing as distinctive as van Gogh’s. But like van Gogh, and every other famous artist, O’Keeffe served an apprentice period, which at the turn of the 20th century meant learning classical techniques. Once in New York, she became known for experimental paintings of skyscrapers and her stunning abstract flowers.

In the TED-Ed lesson above by Iseult Gillespie, we learn how O’Keeffe turned her early formal training into her first series of abstract drawings, in charcoal. These works “defy easy classification, suggesting, but never quite matching, any specific natural reference.” O’Keeffe mailed the drawings to a friend in New York, who showed them to Stieglitz, who “became entranced.” Soon after, he arranged her first exhibit. Her student days at an end, she moved to New York in 1918 and quickly became associated with a circle of American Modernists.

She married Stieglitz, but O’Keeffe’s path would take her away from her husband, and from the metropolitan centers most associated with early 20th century Modernism, and into the hermetic desert solitude for which she became known—a path the painter Agnes Martin would follow decades later. O’Keeffe’s process was that of a desert ascetic—“based on ritual and close observation. She paid meticulous attention to small details, and spent hours mixing paints to find exactly the right colors.” She kept track of her blazing palette with handmade color cards.

O’Keeffe’s work has often been reduced to prurient speculation about the resemblance of her flowers to female genitalia, a Freudian lens she categorically dismissed: “She resented the male gaze that dominated the art world and demanded her work be respected for its emotional evocation of the natural world.” See high-resolution scans of O’Keeffe’s body of work, from the 1900s to the 1980s, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Collections Online and learn more about her at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Library and Archive.

Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Documentary on the Painter Narrated by Gene Hackman

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

John Trumbull’s Famous 1818 Painting Declaration of Independence Virtually Defaced to Show Which Founding Fathers Owned Slaves

in Art, History, Philosophy, Politics | June 23rd, 2020

Statues of slaveholders and their defenders are falling all over the U.S., and a lot of people are distraught. What’s next? Mount Rushmore? Well… maybe no one’s likely to blow it up, but some honesty about the “extremely racist” history of Mount Rushmore might make one think twice about using it as a limit case.

On the other hand, a sandblasting of the enormous Klan monument in Stone Mountain, Georgia—created earlier by Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum—seems long overdue.

We are learning a lot about the history of these monuments and the people they represent, more than any of us Americans learned in our early education. But we still hear the usual defense that slaveholders were only men of their time—many were good, pious, and gentle and knew no better (or they agonized over the question but, you know, everyone was doing it….) People subjected to the violence and horror of slavery mostly tended to disagree.

Before the Haitian Revolution terrified the slaveholding South, many prominent slaveholders, Jefferson and Washington included, expressed intellectual and moral disgust with slavery. They could not consider abolition, however (though Washington freed his slaves in his will). There was too much profit in the enterprise. As Jefferson himself wrote, “It [would] never do to destroy the goose.”

What we see when we look at the Revolutionary period is the fatal irony of a republic based on ideals of liberty, founded mostly by men who kept millions of people enslaved. The point is made vividly above in a virtual defacement of Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull’s famous 1818 painting which hangs in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. All of the founders’ faces blotted out by red dots were slaveowners. Only the few in yellow in the corresponding image freed the the people they enslaved.

These images were not made in this current summer of national uprisings but in August of 2019, “a bloody month that saw 53 people die in mass shootings in the US,” notes Hyperallergic. Their creator, Arlen Parsa sought to make a different point about the Second Amendment, but wrote forcefully about the founders’ enslaving of others. “There were no gentle slaveholders,” writes Parsa. “Countless children were born into slavery and died after a relatively short lifespan never knowing freedom for even a minute.” Many of those children were fathered by their owners.

Some founding fathers paid lip service to the idea of slavery as a blight because it was obvious that kidnapping and enslaving people contradicted democratic principles. Slavery happened to be the primary metaphor used by Enlightenment philosophers and their colonial readers to characterize the tyrannical monarchism they opposed. The philosopher John Locke wrote slavery into the constitution of the Carolina colony, and profited from it through owning stock in the Royal African Company. Yet by his later, hugely influential Two Treatises, he had come to see hereditary slavery as “so vile and miserable an estate of man… that ‘tis hardly to be conceived” that anyone could uphold it.

There were, of course, slaveholding founders who resisted such talk and felt no compunction about how they made their money. But lofty principles or no, the U.S. founders were often on the defensive against non-slaveholding colleagues, who scolded and attacked them, sometimes with frank references to the rapes of enslaved women and girls. These criticisms were so common that Thomas Paine could write the case for slavery had been “sufficiently disproved” when he published a 1775 tract denouncing it and calling for its immediate end:

The managers of [the slave trade] testify that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors… By such wicked and inhuman ways, the English are said to enslave towards 100,000 yearly, of which 30,000 are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year…

So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all… and the many evils attending the practice, [such] as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty masters must answer to the final judge…

The chief design of this paper is not to disprove [slavery], which many have sufficiently done, but to entreat Americans to consider:

With that consistency… they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority or claim upon them.

Jefferson squared his theory of liberty with his practice of slavery by picking up the fad of scientific racism sweeping Europe at the time, in which philosophers who profited, or whose patrons and nations profited, from the slave trade began to coincidentally discover evidence that enslaving Africans was only natural. We should know by now what happens when racism guides science.…

Maybe turning those who willfully perpetuated the country’s most intractable, damning crime against humanity into civic saints no longer serves the U.S., if it ever did. Maybe elevating the founders to the status of religious figures has produced a widespread historical ignorance and a very specific kind of nationalism that are no longer tenable. Younger and future generations will settle these questions their own way, as they sort through the mess their elders have left them. As Locke also argued, in a paraphrase from American History professor Holly Brewer, “people do not have to obey a government that no longer protects them, and the consent of an ancestor does not bind the descendants: each generation must consent for itself.”

via Hyperallergic

The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

The “Slave Bible” Removed Key Biblical Passages In Order to Legitimize Slavery & Discourage a Slave Rebellion (1807)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

Construct Your Own Bayeux Tapestry with This Free Online App

in Art, Design, History, K-12 | June 19th, 2020

A wise woman once quoth that one man’s adult coloring book is another’s Medieval Tapestry Edit.

If taking crayons to empty outlines of mandalas, floral patterns, and forest and ocean scenes has failed to calm your mind, the Historic Tale Construction Kit may cure what ails you.

Programmers Leonard Allain-Launay and Mathieu Thoretton and software engineer Maria Cosmina Etegan created the online kit as a tribute to a late, great, early 21st-century application designed by Academy of Media Arts Cologne students Björn Karnebogen and Gerd Jungbluth.

They separated out various elements of the Bayeux Tapestry, allowing you to freely mess around with 1000-year-old images of warriors, commoners, beasts, and buildings:

Craft thy own Bayeux Tapestry

Slay mischievous beasts

Rule the kingdom

Rotate, resize, clone…

Choose a background, add some text in your choice of Bayeux or Augusta font and you’ll have done your bit to revive the fading art of the Medieval Macro (or meme.)

The original tapestry used some 224 feet of wool-embroidered linen to recount the Battle of Hastings and the events leading up to it.

You need not have such lofty aims.

Perhaps test the waters with a Father’s Day greeting, resizing and rotating until you feel ready to export as a PNG.

The interface is extremely user friendly, kind of like a tech-savvy 11th-century cousin of the online drag-and-drop graphic design tool, Canva.

The Historic Tale Construction Kit’s most impressive bells and whistles reside in the paintbrush tool in the lower left corner, which allows you to lay down great swaths of folks, birds, or corpses in a single sweep.

Your palette will be limited to the shades deployed by the Bayeux embroiderers, who obtained their colors from plants—dyer’s woad, madder, and dyer’s rocket (or weld).

The text, of course, is entirely up to you.

It pleased us to go with the eminently quotable David Bowie, and only after we groped our way into the three fledgling efforts you see above did we discover that we’re not the only ones.

Presenting Early Pre-Bowie References to “Space Oddity”

Throw on some Bardcore and begin reworking the Bayeux Tapestry with the Historic Tale Construction Kit here.

If you are interested in something a bit more technical, the designers have put the opensource code on GitHub for your customizing pleasure.

The Bayeux Tapestry has also been recently digitized. Explore it here: The Bayeux Tapestry Gets Digitized: View the Medieval Tapestry in High Resolution, Down to the Individual Thread

160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7 Famous Paintings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

in Art, Creativity, Software, Technology | June 17th, 2020

Denis Shiryaev is an AI wizard who has liberally applied his magic to old film—upscaling, colorizing, and otherwise modernizing scenes from Victorian England, late Tsarist Russia, and Belle Époque Paris. He trained machines to restore the earliest known motion picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene and one of the most mythologized works of early cinema, the Lumière Brothers 50-second Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.

Shiryaev’s casual distribution of these efforts on YouTube can make us take for granted just how extraordinary they are. Such recreations would have been impossible just a decade or so ago. But we should not see these as historic restorations. The software Shiryaev uses fills in gaps between the frames, allowing him to upscale the frame rate and make more naturistic-looking images. This often comes at a cost. As Ted Mills wrote in an earlier Open Culture post on Shiryaev’s methods, “there are a lot of artifacts, squooshy, morphing moments where the neural network can’t figure things out.”

But it’s an evolving technology. Unlike wizards of old, Shiryaev happily reveals his trade secrets so enterprising coders can give it a try themselves, if they’ve got the budget. In his latest video, above, he plugs the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000, a $4,000 graphics card (and does some griping about rights issues), before getting to the fun stuff. Rather than make old film look new, he’s “applied a bunch of different neural networks in an attempt to generate realistic faces of people from famous paintings.”

These are, Shiryaev emphasizes, “estimations,” not historical recreations of the faces behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Lady with an Ermine, Botticelli’s model for The Birth of Venus, Vermeer’s for Girl with a Pearl Earring, or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. In the case of American Gothic, we have a photo of the model, artist Grant Wood’s sister, to compare to the AI’s version. Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird gets the treatment. She left perhaps a few hundred photographs and some films that probably look more like her than the AI version.

The GIF-like “transformations,” as they might be called, may remind us of a less fun use of such technology: AI’s ability to create realistic faces of people who don’t exist for devious purposes and to make “deep fake” videos of those who do. But that needn’t take away from the fact that it’s pretty cool to see Botticelli’s Venus, or a simulation of her anyway, smile and blink at us from a distance of over 500 years.

Watch AI-Restored Film of Laborers Going Through Life in Victorian England (1901)

Iconic Film from 1896 Restored with Artificial Intelligence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Version of the Lumière Brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station

The Earliest Known Motion Picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene, Restored with Artificial Intelligence

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Can Reality TV Save the Fine Arts? Body Painter Robin Slonina (Skin Wars) on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #47

in Art, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | June 17th, 2020

Fine art and reality TV are typically rated our highest and lowest forms of entertainment, yet creative competition shows combine the two. Robin Slonina graduated from Chicago’s Art Institute and lived in the gallery world doing sculptures, paintings and installations for several years before discovering body painting and opening Skin City Body Painting in Las Vegas, perhaps the foremost institution of its type in the world. Robin then served as a judge (along with RuPaul!) on the show Skin Wars for its three seasons (2014–2017) before The Game Show Network decided that the whole thing was too expensive to produce. She joins Mark, Erica, and Brian to figure out the degree to which the competition reality show format lets the art shine through. To learn more, scan these relevant articles:

“The Best Creative Skill Reality Series Ever” at Ranker
“The Good, The Bad and the OMFG: Art’s Complicated Relationship with Reality Television” by Shannon Lee
“10 Years Later, a Look Back at Art’s First Reality Show” by Kat Herriman
“Skill-Based Contests Are the Best Kind of Reality TV” by Margaret Lions
“25 Bonkers Reality Competition Shows You Forgot Existed” by Reid Nakamura
“Weekly Q&A: Robin Slonina on Emphemeral Art, Dirty Charades and ‘Skin Wars’ ” by Leslie Ventura

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion with Robin about public art and the protests that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network. Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Introduction to Thought Forms, the Pioneering 1905 Theosophist Book That Inspired Abstract Art: It Has Returned to Print

in Art, Books, Religion | June 15th, 2020

“It is sometimes difficult to appreciate the impact that the late-nineteenth century (and ongoing) occult movement called Theosophy had on global culture,” Mitch Horowitz writes in his introduction to the newly republished 1905 Theosophical book, Thought Forms. That impact manifested “spiritually, politically, and artistically” in the work of literary figures like James Joyce and William Butler Yeats and religious figures like Jiddu Krishnamurti, handpicked as a teenager by Theosophist leader Charles W. Leadbeater to become the group’s messianic World Teacher.

The Theosophical Society helped re-introduce Buddhism, or a newly Westernized version, to Western Europe and the U.S., publishing the 1881 “Buddhist Catechism” by Henry Steel Olcott, a former Colonel for the Union Army. Olcott co-founded the society in New York City in 1875 with Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky. Soon afterward, the group of spiritual seekers relocated to India. “Nearly a century before the Beatles’ trek to Rishikesh,” writes Horwitz, “Blavatsky and Olcott laid the template for the Westerner seeking wisdom in the East.”

Theosophy also had a significant influence on modern art, including the work of Wassily Kandinsky, until recently considered the first Abstract painter—that is until the paintings of Hilma af Klint came to be widely known. The reclusive Swedish artist, whom we’ve covered here a few times before, came first, though no one knew it at the time. After showing her revolutionary abstract work to philosopher and onetime German and Austrian Theosophical Society leader Rudolf Steiner, she was told to hide it for another fifty years.

Theosophy gained many prominent converts in the UK, Europe, and around the world. Af Klint joined the Swedish society and remained a member until 1915. The symbolism in her mysterious abstractions, which she attributed to clairvoyant communication with “an entity named Amaliel,” may also have been suggested by the drawings in Thought Forms, an illustrated book created by Theosophical Society leaders Leadbeater and Annie Besant, who was “an early suffragist and political activist,” notes Sacred Bones Books. The small press will release a new edition of the book online and in stores on November 6. (See their Kickstarter page here and video trailer below.)

Besant was “far ahead of her time as an artist and thinker. Theosophy was the first occult group to open its doors to women and Thought Forms offers a reminder that the history of modernist abstraction and women’s contribution to it is still being written.” Although that unfolding history centrally includes af Klint and Besant, the latter did not actually make all of the illustrations we find in this strange book. She and Leadbeater claimed to have received, through clairvoyant means, “forms caused by definite thoughts thrown out by one of them, and also watched the forms projected by other persons under the influence of various emotions.”

So Besant would write in 1896 in the Theosophical journal Lucifer. After these “experiments,” the two then described going into trances and viewing “auras, vortices, etheric matter, astral projections, energy forms, and other expressions from the unseen world.” The two described these visions to a collection of visual artists, who rendered them into the paintings in the 1905 book.

Among those who do study the Theosophical Society’s impact, its first generation of publications—especially Olcott’s “Buddhist Catechism” and Blavatsky’s 1888 The Secret Doctrine—are especially well-known texts. But Thought Forms may prove “the most widely read, lasting, and directly influential book to emerge from the revolution that Theosophy ignited,” Horowitz argues.

“By many estimates, Thought Forms marks the germination of abstract art”—originated through several artists’ best guess at what visions of psychic phenomena might look like. You can follow Sacred Bones’ Kickstarter campaign here.

Discover Hilma af Klint: Pioneering Mystical Painter and Perhaps the First Abstract Artist

New Hilma af Klint Documentary Explores the Life & Art of the Trailblazing Abstract Artist

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Thomas Jefferson’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandson Poses for a Presidential Portrait

An Immaculate Copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper Digitized by Google: View It in High Resolution Online

How Georgia O’Keeffe Became Georgia O’Keeffe: An Animated Video Tells the Story

John Trumbull’s Famous 1818 Painting Declaration of Independence Virtually Defaced to Show Which Founding Fathers Owned Slaves

Construct Your Own Bayeux Tapestry with This Free Online App

Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7 Famous Paintings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Can Reality TV Save the Fine Arts? Body Painter Robin Slonina (Skin Wars) on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #47

An Introduction to Thought Forms, the Pioneering 1905 Theosophist Book That Inspired Abstract Art: It Has Returned to Print

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