Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art

by Charles Colbert

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812243253
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	06/07/2011
Series:	The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: The History and Teachings of Spiritualism 1

Chapter 1 Who Speaks for the Dead? 21

Chapter 2 Reenchanting America 61

Chapter 3 Revelations by Daylight 92

Chapter 4 Ghostly Gloamings 122

Chapter 5 Land of Promise 153

Chapter 6 Romantic Conjurations l82

Chapter 7 The Critic as Psychic 210

Chapter 8 Lessons in Clairvoyance 233

Postscript 250

Notes 257

Selected Bibliography 303

Index 315

Acknowledgments 321

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Washington Universityin St. Louis Leigh Eric Schmidt

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.

Washington University in St. Louis Leigh Eric Schmidt

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013

"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

From the Publisher