‘Mirages and visions in the air’

Around the year 1900, European discourse on art was becoming increasingly ‘eso­ tericized’. The 1890s saw esoteric art salons create a sensation in Paris, and art critics and theorists painted a picture of the true artist and the esotericist as overlapping figures. There was also at the time a conflict regarding medium­ istic art, a phenomenon initially made popular through Spiritualist mediums. This debate, as we shall see, had interesting gendered dimensions. In what follows, I will discuss how the Swedish female esotericist and artist Tyra Kleen (1874– 1951) attempted to situate herself in connection to the concept of the artist as a magus, and the tensions between the positive view of medium­ ism in Spiritualism and the more negative or cau­ tious approach to it in Theosophy, as well as in relation to the attendant gender issues.