Press coverage for Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings Exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery 2016 can be found here including The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph and The Spectator.
The Guardian, 6th May 2016
Spiritualist artist Georgiana Houghton gets UK exhibition
She has been dismissed as an eccentric, amateur artist who claimed to talk to the dead and receive their help with her watercolours. But Georgiana Houghton’s abstract style is beginning to be recognised as being decades ahead of painters in a similar vein such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Now the fascinating story of the overlooked Victorian artist is to be told in the first UK exhibition of Houghton’s work in nearly 150 years. Click on the link for the full article.
The Times, 28th May 2016
The artist who talked to the dead
It is obviously some sort of 1970s psychedelia. What else but a luminous LSD trip, coupled with a hefty dose of idealism, could possibly result in those swirling patterns? Plus, there’s the colours — classic lurid combinations of yellow, blue and red, like that tie your dad inexplicably still has in his wardrobe.
That, approximately, was the thought process of the art historian Barnaby Wright when he received an email from a colleague asking him to hazard a guess at the date of a drawing by an unknown artist. The question, however, was a trap — the work was by a woman called Georgiana Houghton and Wright’s guess was a little more than 100 years out. Click on the link for the full article.
The Telegraph, 6th June 2016
Georgiana Houghton: paintings from the spirit world
The Guardian, 15th June 2016
Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings review – awe-inspiring visions of a Victorian medium
All-seeing eyes and cosmic visions dazzle in the abstract art of a woman who claimed her hand was guided by the dead, from holy saints to famous male artists.
The eye of God stares out of a swirling storm of line and colour, like the eye of a whale seen through turbulent oceanic depths. It is awe-inspiring. The abstract art of Georgiana Houghton summons up strange powers of the imagination that stir deep regions of the soul. Her labyrinths of red and gold, purple and brown can be joyous and ecstatic, oppressive and eerie, but always they are tremulously expressive – and completely out of time. Click on the link to read the rest of the article.
The Spectator, 18th June 2016 written by the exhibition curator, Simon Grant
A pioneering 19th-century abstract artist is brought back to life at the Courtauld
It is London in the summer of 1871. Queen Victoria has just opened the Royal Albert Hall in memory of her beloved husband; Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland has just been published, and French refugees from the Franco-Prussian war continue to arrive in the capital. Among them is Claude Monet, who is having a miserable time in the fog and mist. Not far from the Thames views that he had been painting, a fellow artist has just opened her first exhibition of 155 ‘Spirit Drawings’ in a gallery on Old Bond Street, in the heart of London’s art quarter.
She was Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884), a 57-year-old London-based middle-class artist and celebrated spiritualist who had for the previous ten years been feverishly working behind closed doors on a series of abstract coloured drawings, which had been produced ‘guided’ by the hand of spirits. Now, with the encouragement of both an artist friend and her ‘invisible friends’, she felt ready to show her extraordinary endeavours to the world. Click on the link for the full article.