Jennifer Higgie highlights the role of spiritualism and women artists at the beginning of western abstraction.

As a teenage art student, Higgie was in thrall to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, commonly hailed as the pioneer of abstraction in Western art. Yet she would only learn years later that “Kandinsky’s brilliance evolved in response to meandering, often heated, conversations that spanned genders, communities, belief systems and centuries”. Challenging the ‘lone genius’ and ‘great male artist’ narratives, Higgie describes how Kandinsky developed his approach in conjunction with notable female artists such as Gabriele Münter, was in thrall to theosophy and published an essay, Towards the Spiritual in Art, in 1911, the same year as he painted Composition V. Yet according to one pre-eminent critic, until recently, the art world found it “indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.”

Across this series of essays, Higgie re-evaluates the influence of spiritualism on the art of the past 150 years. Why were women written out of the story? And why are so many artists turning to mysticism now?

Previously the editor of frieze magazine and a judge of the Turner Prize, Jennifer Higgie presents a podcast about women in art history, Bow Down.

Written and presented by Jennifer Higgie

Produced by Chris Elcombe

A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3