Staff Reviews

A thoughtfully conceived and finely presented clothbound reprint of a strange but seminal book that first appeared in 1905. Conceived by theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigations is a deep-dive exploration of the visual forms created by sounds, thoughts, and emotions—and the notion that these exist as objects. Besant and Leadbeater conveyed their clairvoyant observations of the unseen world to a group of visual artists & friends, who translated these "second-sight trance states" of "auras, vortices, etheric matter, astral projections, and energy forms" into fifty-eight striking watercolor paintings. Thought Forms quickly reached beyond its original readership and exerted a foundational (if at times unacknowledged) influence over some of the early luminaries of abstract art—including Kandinsky, Klee, Malevich, and Mondrian. But it perhaps most deeply inspired abstract art’s earliest yet erstwhile unseen light, the Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint. Although largely ignored by modern art historians and institutions—due to a time-honored aversion to arcane knowledge in artistic manifestations—these investigations into the "art of seeing the invisible" have continued to inspire countless areas of artistic creation.