Augustin Lesage made palaces of paint. His intricate works have detail upon detail of patterns, architectural flourishes, and motifs borrowed from ancient Egypt. Although he planned his monumental canvases with segmenting lines, he worked automatically, beginning at the top right corner and moving downward, carefully filling the surface symmetrically with dazzling color.
Lesage was born into a family of coal miners in 1876 in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. Only in his mid-thirties did he deviate from his expected path of being the third generation to labor underground. One day in the tunnels he heard a voice declaring that he would be a painter. Although the details changed over the years as newspapers retold his story, he recounted consulting mediums who affirmed the message that he would be an artist. As he related in a 1925 article, “A hidden force made me rise and go to a nearby city, where—knowing nothing of such things—I bought pencils, brushes, paints, and canvases.” Each day after leaving the mines, he immersed himself in creating hypnotic designs, sometimes spending months on a single canvas. This routine was interrupted by his service in World War I, and he continued to draw in the trenches on postcards and other small surfaces.
Early on, he claimed to channel the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, signing his name on one side of the canvas and da Vinci’s on the other. “I am only the hand that executes a command,” he said. Over time, he took more ownership of his art and stopped working in the mines. As his work coincided with the popular Spiritualism movement, the use of Egyptian iconography in art deco, and the interest in automatism in surrealism, Lesage gained international recognition for his mystical compositions. His art was exhibited regularly in Paris starting in the 1920s, at galleries as well as gatherings such as the 1925 Spiritualist Congress in Paris. In 1927, his mediumistic process was studied at the Institut Métapsychique International in Paris. André Breton discussed his work in the 1933 essay “Le message automatique” published in Minotaure. By the time Lesage died, in 1954, he had painted around eight hundred works.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
