These visionary artists peered beyond the veil, providing us a window to the divine and transcendent.
Hildegard von Bingen, also known as the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner of the Catholic Church during the High Middle Ages. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history. A number of scholars has considered her to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". He produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "human existence itself".
Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered to be among the first major abstract works in Western art history. A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of women inspired by Theosophy who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the "High Masters", often through séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.
Agnes Pelton was a modernist painter who was born in Germany and moved to the United States as a child. She studied art in the United States and Europe. She made portraits of Pueblo Native Americans, desert landscapes and still lifes. Pelton's work evolved through at least three distinct themes: her early "Imaginative Paintings," art of the American Southwest people and landscape, and abstract art that reflected her spiritual beliefs.