Mediumistic artists Agatha Wojciechowsky, Raphaël Lonné, and Madge Gill attributed their own art making to unseen forces beyond themselves. While all refused authorship of their own work, transferring credit to guiding ethereal forces, each took a different path to communing with the spirit world. At the age of 37, after a devastating period that included the death of her child, severe illness, and loss of an eye, English housewife Madge Gill went into a sudden trance, described by her son as overwhelming and frightening. This was the first of many times that Gill would be consumed by Myrninerest, her personal spirit guide, who spurred Gill’s artistic awakening and guided her frantic drawing sessions. Like Wojciechowsky and Lonné, Gill filled every millimeter of her chosen picture plane with small and intricate details. It is unknown if the various ghostly silhouettes that fill Gill’s work depict Myrninerest, or the face of her lost child. Agatha Wojciechowsky established herself as a spiritualist medium and healer in New York. At 55, after exhibiting seemingly no interest in making art, she heard mediumistic voices that instructed her to expand her spiritual practice into visual arts. Under a light trance, Wojciechowsky began creating automatic writings and paintings, a process where she clears her mind and frees her hands to follow celestial instructions. Wojciechowsky’s swirling watercolors form landscape like abstractions or reveal colorful faces. Postman Raphaël Lonné made his first mediumistic drawings at age 40, while attending a Spiritualist gathering in France. Entering a trance-like state, Lonné felt energized and began recording messages from beyond. This encounter inspired Lonné to devote free evenings to drawing and reconnecting with the spirits. Like Gill and Wojciechowsky, Lonné’s drawings grew increasingly complex, expanding beyond simply using pencil into other materials. Lonné’s detailed and layered paintings and drawings appear to collapse a picture’s foreground and background, creating an elaborate and sometimes colorful haze.

Although these artists were active in different geographic locations, many of the visual qualities present in all of their works are surprisingly similar. Ethereal, elaborate and tightly packed, each work acts as a glimpse into another world or unknown consciousness. This commonality has led some viewers to posit the existence of a spiritual, universal, and otherworldly visual language. Yet, others have questioned the personal motivations behind such mediumistic artists’ spiritual claims. Is a mediumistic artist guided by a celestial voice, or following his or her own inner creativity and tapping images from the subconscious? Could it all be an elaborate alibi to free oneself from societal constraints and simply create? Indeed, later in his career, working-class artist Raphaël Lonné admitted that his mediumistic abilities were nothing but a convenient pretext for freely continuing his artistic practice.

Steffi Ibis Duarte and Valérie Rousseau, exhibition label for Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.

Raphaël Lonné was born in the Landes region of France, the child of poor farm laborers. In 1937 he left for Bordeaux, where he worked at a variety of jobs while pursuing creative activities such as writing poetry and acting. In 1946 Lonné found a job as an auxiliary postman, which occupation he pursued for the next twenty years. In 1950 he attended a séance that was to have a profound effect on his life. During the séance, Lonné began to write on paper in a mediumistic state, inscribing strange animals, humans, and other forms. He discovered that in this semi-dream state, he could tap directly into his creativity, and he learned to provoke this receptivity through relaxing by his fireplace with his artmaking tools nearby and ready. Beginning from one corner of a paper, he would make contact and then allow his hand to meander in an unscripted manner, producing the organic imagery. 

Over the next thirty-six years Lonné came to think of himself as a “poet in pictures.” In 1963 his work came to the attention of Jean Dubuffet, who acquired 450 drawings and arranged exhibitions in Bordeaux, Dax, Biarritz, and Paris. But Lonné retreated from the commercialism of these public displays and retired with his wife to a home along the coast.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Untitled," exhibition label for Jubilation|Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2012.

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