When I first saw Georgiana Houghton’s spirit drawings, I felt an instant, almost bodily recognition: Oh, she was listening to the same hum. Houghton, a Victorian gentlewoman (1814-1884), claimed that spirit guides—Titian, Correggio, and dead relatives, moved her hand. The result was a web of translucent strands, loops, and knots so intricate that even now they look as if they’ve been plotted by software. No horizon, no figure: just thread-like energy fields curling across the page.

Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, two influential artists of the early 20th century, shared a profound interest in the spiritual and abstract realms of art. While their paths diverged in many ways, their work was deeply intertwined by their explorations of spirituality, physics, and music.