{"id":196329,"date":"2025-09-03T08:15:23","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T08:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/196329\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T08:15:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T08:15:23","slug":"marian-spore-bush-was-nobodys-visionary-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/196329\/","title":{"rendered":"Marian Spore Bush Was Nobody\u2019s \u201cVisionary Artist\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWho was Marian Spore Bush?\u201d The question begins an essay by Bob Nickas, who curated the exhibition Marian Spore Bush: Life Afterlife, Works c. 1919\u20131945<\/a>, currently at Karma. The artist\u2019s first solo exhibition in almost 80 years, it feels extraordinarily modern in both style and content. Vivid, saturated watercolors of flowers and Christian allegories in the back room flirt with na\u00efvet\u00e9 as much as they nod to art history. In the main space are large depictions of grim scenes (e.g., bodies immersed in water or on a raft, coupled with formidable avian creatures) that draw on the surreal and the grotesque.<\/p>\n

So, who was Spore Bush? She was born in 1878 in Bay City, Michigan. She studied dentistry at the University of Michigan and was among the state\u2019s first woman dentists. After her mother died in 1919, she used a Ouija board to contact her, and began receiving messages from deceased artists urging her to take up painting. The next year, she left her dentistry practice and moved to New York to dedicate herself to art and charity work; while organizing a soup kitchen, she met and eventually married millionaire Irving Bush.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of compelling narrative the art world \u2014 or just about any audience \u2014 devours: rags (or middle-class) to riches, spiritualism, obscurity, and rediscovery, all in one fascinating figure. Hilma af Klint\u2019s 2018\u201319 Guggenheim survey resurfaced the narrative of the self-taught, visionary woman artist, often unknown to or forgotten by the art world until her posthumous or late-life \u201cdiscovery,\u201d as a popular trope. It\u2019s easy to read Spore Bush\u2019s story and situate her in this lineage, and the exhibition essay does so \u2014 along with af Klint, it cites Agnes Pelton, Emma Kunz, Paulina Peavy<\/a>, and Gertrude Abercrombie<\/a>, disparate artists whose notable commonalities are their spiritualist leanings and their gender.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tMarian Spore Bush, \u201cThe Pawn Broker (Three Vultures)\u201d (1934), oil on canvas\t\t\t<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no doubt that Spore Bush and her work deserve recognition. But this framing, particularly when little literature on her exists, should raise some questions. Who acts as the discoverer, who tells the story, how do they tell it, and what are its ripple effects?<\/p>\n

Thematically, her late mostly grisaille paintings bring to mind a different set of artists, including Goya, Otto Dix, and K\u00e4the Kollwitz, whose art addresses violence, struggle, and salvation. Stylized birds occupy the bulk of the composition in multiple pieces from 1933 to \u201943. In the United States, those dates span the Great Depression and midway through World War II, a fraught period rich with those same themes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Gaunt Bird of Famine\u201d (1933) \u2014 a stunning painting, but not the show\u2019s most dramatic \u2014 a giant whitish bird, rendered in thin gossamer lines that arc into <\/strong>graceful points, looms large against a solid black sky. Below, in the same dirty white, is what looks like a village. Spore Bush articulates it loosely and thickly, but realistically enough that it feels separate from the sky. The divide suggests a symbolic menace sweeping over the real world.<\/p>\n

\"\"Marian Spore Bush, \u201cThe Avenger\u201d (1943), oil on canvas<\/p>\n

Two similarly striking birds, rendered in black against a cloudy gray sky, nearly meet at the center of \u201cThe Pawn Broker (Three Vultures),\u201d from the following year. Below the rigid horizon line is a body of black water. A face, just above the surface, looks up at the birds, fearfully or dolefully; chains are visible around the person\u2019s neck. The show\u2019s standout is \u201cThe Avengers\u201d (1943). Here, a winged figure flies close to a dead tree, from which three bodies hang. The dark, undulating ground resembles both earth and water, a stark contrast with the oceanic turquoise sky.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Spore Bush herself described her art as prophetic and guided by the spiritual forces she called \u201cThey\u201d or \u201cthe People.\u201d Edward Alden Jewell\u2019s 1943 New York Times<\/a> review, for instance, quotes her as saying: \u201cThey move my hand up and down and onward across and sideways in all directions.\u201d Though this automatic process might echo that of af Klint, Peavy, and others, defaulting to such comparisons defangs the art and erases its cultural context. A more substantive comparison is the oversized vultures that recur in Goya\u2019s Disasters of War print cycle (1810\u201320), in works like \u201cThe Carnivorous Vulture<\/a>\u201d and \u201cThe Consequences<\/a>.\u201d Likewise, her early allegorical painting series, in which a bearded figure in an amethyst cloak communes with animals, reminded me of art books by Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner<\/a>, in which loose, colorful drawings convey Christian or spiritual narratives.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tMarian Spore Bush, \u201cUntitled\u201d (c. 1919\u201322), oil on paper<\/p>\n

Whether Spore Bush\u2019s paintings reflect prophecies of WWII dictated by the People, as she described, or the past and then-present realities WWI and the Depression \u2014 as \u201cFamine\u201d implies \u2014 they belong in the latter lineage at least as much as the former.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Reconsidering the trope of the rediscovered visionary or spiritualist artist is not just a matter of seeking out other affinities. It\u2019s also about refuting hierarchies and stereotypes. Often, conceptual artist categories \u2014 including canonical and outsider \u2014 are gendered. That most artists written into history as great chroniclers of war, violence, and death are men is an issue, but it speaks to who was integrated into official Western art histories in the first place. Goya was never \u201crediscovered\u201d because he never disappeared from museums and galleries. As Alexis Clements wrote in a recent Hyperallergic review<\/a>, \u201cThese places and people were known, just not by everyone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tInstallation view of Marian Spore Bush: Life Afterlife, Works c. 1919\u20131945 at Karma<\/p>\n

More insidious is the gendered grouping of artists according to spiritualism, telepathy, and the like. Aligning women artists on this basis not only neglects other aesthetic and thematic alignments, but also perpetuates the persistent correlation between femininity and irrationality in a culture where these practices are still on the fringe. Though he does acknowledge that her best work is \u201csharp and disturbing,\u201d Jewell wondered whether the work could be fairly reviewed in light of Bush\u2019s otherworldly guidance. This casts doubt on her professional status, even as he compares her process with the automatic writing of celebrated Surrealists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That was more than 80 years ago, and Spore Bush was around to respond. We would do her justice today by not reproducing the same problematic associations. When Nickas writes about the \u201cconnective lines flowing between the visionary work of these women, which also allows us to see them distinctly from one another,\u201d he isn\u2019t really distinguishing them. He\u2019s lumping them together \u2014 \u201cwomen\u201d and \u201cvisionary\u201d being the key words \u2014 and distinguishing them from an unspecified \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Life Afterlife is a revelatory show. Karma and Nickas do a nice job of presenting Spore Bush to what is likely a new audience, and it\u2019s a welcome re-introduction. Now it\u2019s time to connect new lines.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tMarian Spore Bush, \u201cFlowers\u201d (c. 1919\u201322), oil on paper
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tMarian Spore Bush, \u201cThe Green Bird\u201d (1930), oil on canvas
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tMarian Spore Bush, \u201cSwans\u201d (c. 1919\u201322), oil on paper
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tMarian Spore Bush, \u201cSnake and Strange Creature\u201d (c. 1919\u201322), oil on paper \u00a0<\/p>\n

Marian Spore Bush: Life Afterlife, Works c. 1919\u20131945<\/a> continues at Karma (188 East 2nd Street, East Village, Manhattan) through September 6. The exhibition was curated by Bob Nickas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWho was Marian Spore Bush?\u201d The question begins an essay by Bob Nickas, who curated the exhibition Marian…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":196330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,1322,68391,405,67,132,68,109165],"class_list":{"0":"post-196329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-featured","13":"tag-karma","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-women-artists"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115139374385138766","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}