Elmar R. Gruber, Munich - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part Forty Six
Part forty-six of my ‘Meet the Collector’ series focuses on mediumistic art and the collection and research of Elmar R. Gruber. It was Raw Vision Magazine that highlighted this incredible collection to me, so read on to find out more about what still drives Elmar and where it all began.
Elmar Gruber in his library in Baden-Baden before he moved to Munich, with a work by Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz and a marble work by Amedeo Boldrini
1. When did your interest in the field of mediumistic art begin?
It started during my early years of study in the mid 1970s. Before I decided to study psychology because of my interest in paranormal phenomena, I had considered going to art school. Eventually I decided against pursuing a career in art, but nonetheless was able to finance my studies partly with my own art. So, I had a natural interest in mediumistic art, since here two of my big fields of interest came together: art and the paranormal. In the course of my research and investigations I came to know a number of mediumistic artists whose peculiar kind of creative expression immediately fascinated me deeply. A lifelong friendship connected or still connects me with some of them.
2. When did you become a collector of this art? How many pieces do you think are in your collection now? And do you exhibit any of it on the walls of your home or elsewhere?
Becoming a collector of this art was an imperceptible process. Mediumistic artists are very particular about the relationship to their productions. Often, they don't want to part with any of them because they don't feel themselves to be their creators, or because they believe that the secret meaning underlying them is only conveyed in its entirety and therefore individual pieces should not be separated. They also rarely want to sell, especially since they do not feel themselves to ‘own’ the works, or to be artists at all. Many among them think they would be betraying the spiritual content by making a profit out of this talent imposed upon them by some mysterious external force. But through my friendships, I was given works as a gift early on. At some point, so many had accumulated that to my own surprise, a small collection was born. Actually, I had always avidly collected old and rare books on occultism, magic and hermeticism. But then, imperceptibly, a completely different collection had been created next to it.
There are about 850 works in my collection. A number of them are exhibited on the walls in my home. Most of them are, for conservational reasons, kept in graphic cabinets, while some are almost constantly on the road at international exhibitions.
Elmar Gruber with (L-R): Margarethe Held and two works by Heinrich Nüsslein
3. Can you tell us a bit about your background and what you do today?
I myself am a research psychologist and was active for many years in academic parapsychological research. Eventually laboratory research could not satisfy me. It was also sobering to see that no real progress could be achieved in the study of paranormal phenomena by rigidly applying traditional scientific method. Therefore, I parted from this path of research and devoted myself as an independent scholar to the exploration of psychic phenomena and transpersonal experiences and related phenomena outside the tight corset of an academic setting, since I felt, by the way, very much like Jean Dubuffet, largely at the mercy of an ‘asphyxiating culture’ that all too often suffocates the seeds of creative freedom.
I have written numerous articles for scholarly journals as well as more than 20 books on topics of transpersonal, spiritual and paranormal experiences and their import in cultural history, which have been translated into 25 languages. I served as a scientific consultant for television productions and for many years I intensively studied Tibetan Buddhism, both practically and theoretically. I wrote a book through my research called From the Heart of Tibet. On the executive board of a major foundation, I was profoundly involved in establishing meditation centres, Tibetan Buddhist training programmes, an international translation project for original Buddhist texts, and a publishing house that puts forth these works. During those years collecting and researching mediumistic art was completely eclipsed. It is only in recent years that I have retired from this activity at the Foundation and can now finally devote myself almost entirely to my great passion: mediumistic art. Currently I am investigating the life and work of selected mediumistic artists, about whom almost nothing is known and I am working on a comprehensive history of mediumistic art.
View from the study with work by Werner Schön, Fernand Desmoulin and Nina Karasek
4. Your collection has a very specific focus on mediumistic art – how would you define this if you were telling someone new about it?
The peculiar and irreducible aspect of mediumistic artistic production is the authors feeling of being pressed by an impulse they cannot escape and which they describe as an external force to which they are passively at the mercy of. These works of art are created under the influence or in collaboration with unseen entities. The works are considered to be the direct result of an interaction between the material and the spiritual world. The authorship is often disputed by the artists themselves, who either attribute the responsibility for the works to disembodied entities or consider their drawings and paintings to be the result of visualizing or automatically being guided by subtle energies and spiritual vibrations.
Mediumism was originally only understood in a spiritualistic context, but today a medium is generally understood to be a subject that produces or helps to produce paranormal phenomena. Creative expressions related to a mediumistic talent include the spontaneous occurrence of a gradation of a variety of altered states of consciousness from reverie to deep trance. In these mental states, unusual events can occur to the subjects which may range from simple automatisms to highly creative states. A specific feature occurring in all mediumistic artists is an explosion of creativity that is closely linked to an aspect of mystical contact, a contact with transcendence that is completely surprising by its constancy and immediacy.
5. What are the qualities or characteristics that you look for in works that you continue to add to your collection today?
A work must appeal to me immediately. It must evoke a resonance in me that conveys something new, surprising and mysterious. It should have the quality to communicate something about the hidden reality from which it claims to derive. At best, the work irritates me because there is something about it that I do not understand, that I cannot classify in my own preformed categories and that challenges me to think in new, different and unusual ways. There are isolated mediumistic works that put me in a kind of mystical state myself, because they touch me directly and very deeply. It is then as if it is not me who wants to find out something about the work, but the work itself seems to turn to me and ask me questions.
Works by Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz (top), Käthe Fischer, Agatha Wojciechowsky, Nina Karasek, and Ernst Josephson
6. You often lend works out to other shows, is there any plan for you to ever do an exhibition just of your collection?
These plans exist. I have already received inquiries to explore such a possibility, but I will only consider such an exhibition if the curatorial idea behind it is suitable and coherent. I am firmly convinced that works of mediumistic art are mysteriously connected across cultural boundaries and different eras. There are identical symbolic figures and peculiar graphic elements that appear in the works of the most diverse artists who knew nothing about each other. Juxtaposing them, these correspondences reach a particular strength of expression. It became visible in some important recent exhibitions, where different mediumistic artists were shown. In such synchronistic correspondences, these invisible connections, which, like the complex networked systems of mycelia under the forest floor, spread out as a kind of underground network of information exchange, a hidden spiritual ecosystem becomes visible, as it were. My own curatorial position would emphasise this aspect in a comprehensive exhibition of the works in my collection.
7. I know much of your collection does not fall under the banner of outsider art but I wondered if you would offer your opinion on this. A conflicted term at present, but can you tell us about your opinion of the term outsider art, how you feel about it and if there are any other words that you think we should be using instead?
I am of the opinion that existing terms do not necessarily have to be replaced by others, because they might provide a more precise description. I try to understand terms like Art Brut and Outsider Art from the perspective of their historical and sociological conditions and the factors underlying the authors discourses. Naturally, discourses are constructed; they reveal as much as they conceal.
For the term ‘mediumistic art’, if you will, the problem lies in the fact that it has never been considered by art historians as an art form in its own right or even as a noteworthy one. It had only existed insofar as it was included in new categories in the context of certain art historical discourses without forming an independent category itself. I find it difficult to look for an alternative suitable term that comprehensively encompasses the essence of mediumistic art. Of course, the label ‘outsider artist’ applies to certain mediumistic artists, and there are also those who fall into the category of Art Brut in the narrower sense, as Dubuffet positioned it ideologically and, incidentally, redefined it in the course of his life. But I think it is wrong to subsume mediumistic art under one of these terms as a whole.
The problem arises, on the one hand, from the fact that a category – a label, so to speak – is needed at all in order to give recognition to those artists who find no place within the sanctioned categories or the canon in art history. In the end, one cannot escape the necessity of taxonomy. There is no way to avoid designations in order to communicate, although this seems absurd, especially with regard to art and conceptualizing art. I always think of Joseph Beuys’ statement ‘I hereby resign from art’, exposing the art establishment in its stuffiness, as if we were dealing with an association with membership and treasurer. Ultimately, we have no choice but to look for boundaries and designations, even where nothing can be labelled or the boundaries are as fluid as in the area of mediumistic artistic expression.
Black light examination of an oil painting by Gertrude Honzatko-Mediz
8. What style of work, if any, is of particular interest to you within mediumistic art? (for example is it embroidery, drawing, sculpture, and so on)
The style, the nature of a work does not matter to me. All kinds of works are interesting for me as long as they challenge me and convey that quality of the numinous, I had intimated. In the field of mediumistic art, where often, but by no means always, an automatism is at work, there are hardly any creators who ‘experiment’ with unusual materials or, for example, create sculptures. In rare cases, however, they do exist, and for reasons of rareness I find such works appealing, like for example the peculiar marble sculptures of Amedeo Boldrini.
9. Would you say you had a favourite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why?
Yes, of course, but that changes all the time! It is always the work or the artist that I am most intensively involved with at the moment. Some discoveries trigger powerful emotions. Recently I came across the largely unknown and almost untraceable visionary works of Werner Schön (1893–1970). Schön was a conventional artist who periodically experienced mystical states in which he felt himself transported into a visionary reality. In these episodes his style changed dramatically and he produced fantastic visionary, poetic fairy-tale landscapes, densely populated with strange ‘mushroom folks’. A true masterpiece from 1918, reminiscent of Richard Dadd, shows him himself in this visionary world, attending a bizarre religious ceremony of fairy-like supernatural beings.
10. Where would you say you buy most of your work from: a studio, art fairs, exhibitions, auctions, or direct from artists?
Most of the works I received directly from the artists. Of course, I also buy from galleries and from other collectors and at auctions. Often mediumistic works disappear into oblivion in attics, boxes, cellars for a long time, because they are often not even perceived as art or at least not as art worth collecting. Many have not been rediscovered yet or are not recognised for what they are. Hence something like an ‘occult market’ exists that has nothing to do with the established channels of trading art and that fits well with the essence of this type of art that flourishes out of the public eye. To collect mediumistic art does not mean to participate exclusively in the available, but to be a detective, a hunter, an archaeologist. My historical studies are at the same time detective investigations. Thus, I succeed again and again in making surprising new discoveries or finding works that were thought to be lost. Sometimes I can acquire them from the present owners who did not even know what they possessed.
Werner Schön work from 1918. It depicts himself in his visionary wonderland, with the ‘mushroom folks’. It’s gouache on paper.
11. I read that you had a lot of correspondence with several artists in your collection; do you have an archive of these conversations as well as the art works too?
Yes, conversations with the artists are crucial to me whenever that is possible. It is very difficult to fathom the mechanisms at work in mediumistic art without being able to rely on the introspective insights into the experiences of the creators. In this field, the insights into one's own experiences are indispensable. The works cannot be viewed separately from the transpersonal, spiritual experiences of their creators without losing much of their import. At the same time, the study of creative expressions allows us to understand transpersonal areas of human experience in depth. Only a few mediumistic artists have left useful information about their experiences and visions. Many are not able to name the sources and psychological factors involved in their creative process, simply because they do not know what is happening to them. I try to approach these processes as sensitively as possible and encourage the artists to reflect about the circumstances of their work and their inner experiences. Such reflections on one's own actions that happen largely without conscious involvement are an integral part of the creations themselves and help to gain an understanding of the intentions and dimensions underlying mediumistic works. Hopefully, they will also help to better classify this particular type of creative expression in general within an explanatory framework.
12. Is there an exhibition in this field of art that you have felt has been particularly important? And why?
For me personally the 1977 exhibition Mediumistic Art at the Petersen Gallery in Berlin was an eye-opener and ground-breaking. The exhibition Art spirite in the Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris in 1999 was important for a presentation of the range of mediumistic creations and its historical context. Generally speaking, there were a number of important exhibitions that paved the way for the recognition of works emerging from spiritualist practices by placing them in context with various art forms related to what Christopher Partridge had termed ‘occulture’. I think primarily of The Spiritual in Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986-87, Occultism and Avant-Garde at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt 1995, The Message: Art and Occultism at the Museum of Art in Bochum 2007 and of course the Encyclopaedic Palace at the Venice Biennale 2013 curated by Massimiliano Gioni, that showed how powerfully and enigmatically fascinating mediumistic creations in the cultural context can endure alongside accepted forms of art.
Recently the role of mediumistic art as a source of ideas of modernism, quasi as a leading figure in abstraction is being celebrated primarily in the major exhibitions of the works of Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Georgiana Houghton, as besides solo-exhibitions of these creators in the significant World Receivers exhibition in the Lenbachhaus in Munich 2018-19. This approach though, is not without problems, because, like Dubuffet in his concept of Art Brut, it ignores or excludes a considerable part of the mediumistic productions.
Three works by Käthe Fischer at the exhibition Floral Fantasies between Symbolism and Outsider Art at Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, 2019
13. Are there any people within this field that you feel have been particularly important to pave the way for where the field is at now?
Unfortunately, some significant contributions have gone almost unnoticed and have not led to further in-depth studies. I am thinking in particular of the first treatise on mediumistic art by Hans Freimark in Germany from 1914. Starting from an analysis based on psychoanalytic theory, Freimark was able to provide insights into the functioning of mediumistic processes. He lacked an adequate method and an unbiased approach for a further classification of the phenomenon within the framework of an aesthetic theory or in art historical categories. Nonetheless, Freimark's study has drawn attention to this particular art and brought many unknown works and authors to the fore.
Recently, Laurent Danchin, Maggie Atkinson and Rachel Oberter have made important contributions. The symposium ‘World Receivers: Mediumistic Art in Theory and Practice 1850-1950’ in the Lenbachhaus in Munich on the occasion of the World Receivers exhibition has shown how the topic is slowly finding its way into the art historical discourse. But at the same time it became very clear that art historians still lack adequate criteria for giving mediumistic art an appropriate and comprehensive appreciation.
Two works by Canadian mediumistic artist Alma Rumball at the exhibition Flying High: Women Artist of Art Brut, Vienna, 2019