Book description
Spiritualism emerged in western New York in 1848 and soon achieved a
wide following due to its claim that the living could commune with the
dead. In Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art,
Charles Colbert focuses on the ways Spiritualism imbued the making and
viewing of art with religious meaning and, in doing so, draws
fascinating connections between art and faith in the Victorian age.
Examining the work of such well-known American artists as James
Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Sydney Mount, and Robert Henri,
Colbert demonstrates that Spiritualism played a critical role in the
evolution of modern attitudes toward creativity. He argues that
Spiritualism made a singular contribution to the sanctification of art
that occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The faith
maintained that spiritual energies could reside in objects, and thus
works of art could be appreciated not only for what they illustrated
but also as vessels of the psychic vibrations their creators impressed
into them. Such beliefs sanctified both the making and collecting of
art in an era when Darwinism and Positivism were increasingly
disenchanting the world and the efforts to represent it. In this
context, Spiritualism endowed the artist's profession with the
prestige of a religious calling; in doing so, it sought not to replace
religion with art, but to make art a site where religion happened.
"Charles Colbert offers a welcome examination of the
nineteenth-century intersections of American art and Spiritualism. An
original and substantial contribution in an area that has long been
ripe for this kind of focused scholarly attention."-Leigh Eric
Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis
Charles Colbert teaches American art history at Portland State
University. He is the author of A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and
the Fine Arts in America.
