Artists’ Haunts: Late Artists Revisiting Their Work Beyond Their Time

This contribution describes the unusual phenomenon of artist-mediums who claim to paint under the influence of the spirit of deceased artists. It discusses a wide range of so-called spirit or mediumistic art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including psychic automatism and precipitated art, attributed to “revenant artists” posthumously revisiting their art and artistic “haunts.” Although hoaxes, hallucinations, mental disorders, and pseudo-perception pass in review, the aim of this contribution is not to assess whether the phenomenon of spirit art is real or pretend, but to identify its origins, different forms and cultural contexts. It establishes that spirit art often follows a pattern of obsessive behavior among unsung, wronged, and failed (self-taught) artists who turn to spirit art in desperation and find their lives overtaken by a supernatural force. Since the revenant artist seems to revive (and revise) himself by draining the life energy of the artist-medium, it is reminiscent of the phenomenon of “aesthetic vampirism,” according to which art is understood as ironically parasitic on life/nature.