Peabody Essex Museum September 14, 2024–February 2, 2025 by Angelina Diamante
Figure 1. Left: Kirby & Company, New York, Kirby’s Planchette (1868). Wood and metal. 1.8 x 7.5 x 6.9 in. (4.5 x 19.1 x 17.5 cm). Peabody Essex Museum, 1925.117946.1. Right: Ralph S. Jennings. Little Wonder; or Planchette Improved (1868). Wood and metal. 2.5 x 8.1 x 7 in. (6.4 x 20.6 x 17.8 cm). Peabody Essex Museum, 1925.117946.2. Digital image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.
A sincere recognition of the ephemera spanning nearly a century that defines Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums—a five-month-long survey of Spiritualism at the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts—requires a deliberate surrender to nonnormative faculty: in essence, a sixth sense. Composed of an array of posters, projections, photographs, paintings, illusions, film fragments, sculptures, advertisements, and apparatuses, the exhibition’s artifacts incite an active engagement of all the senses, diminishing the boundaries between them and prompting a reconsideration of the very nature of perception.
Figure 2. Artist in the United States. Cassadaga Cabinet (ca. 1930). Wood, brass, and fabric. 40 x 27.9 x 14 in. (101.6 x 70.8 x 35.6 cm). Peabody Essex Museum, 2022.29.1. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.
Figure 3. “Spiritual Photography — [Specimens Furnished by Mumler and Rockwood].” Harper’s Weekly. May 8, 1869.Fundamentally, the exhibition’s presentation of objects that appear familiar yet unorthodox offers modern viewers a critical inquiry into a distant past that in itself seems illusive. By the twentieth century, the Spiritualism movement had reached an apex, its tenets firmly embedded in Western cultural consciousness, yet now obscured by the secularity and rationality of the present day. Central to Spiritualism was the belief that while death constituted an end to corporality, existence yet persisted in a transcendental form—one that could be measured and even accessed, providing apprehension of the requisite abilities and tools. As such, the spectacles of mediums and magicians flourished, their audiences eager to procure a heightened consciousness to commingle with what lies beyond the veil. Thus, many of the works displayed in Conjuring the Spirit World are united in the necessity for dynamic and intuitive viewership. Primary examples are Kirby’s Planchette and Little Wonder (fig. 1)—recognizable predecessors to the later nineteenth-century Ouija—small, heart-shaped, wooden dictation devices that use just the energy from one’s touch to produce a written response to their inquiry. Likewise, magician Karl Germain’s Cassadaga Cabinet (fig. 2) produces an audible symphony, featuring various instruments that animate when placed inside the inconspicuous armoire. Further, early experimentations with daguerreotype offer visual evidence of the departed—as advertised in a May 1869 issue of Harper’s Weekly (fig. 3)—by fabricating the form of an apparition in a sitter’s domain through the insertion of spectral layers. Unified in their viscerality, these objects share a tangible quality that destabilizes conventional boundaries between material rationalism and the spectral unknown.
Left: Figure 4. The Strobridge Lithographing Company, Cincinnati & New York. Thurston the Great Magician — Do the Spirits Live? (1911). Lithograph. 81.1 x 38.1 in. (206 x 96.8 cm). McCord Stewart Museum, M2014.128.908. Digital image courtesy of the McCord Stewart Museum. | Right: Figure 5. Calhoun Print Company, Hartford. Miss Baldwin, a Modern Witch of Endor (ca. 1890). Lithograph. 81.4 x 41.2 in. (206.8 x 104.6 cm). McCord Stewart Museum, M2014.128.29. Digital image courtesy of the McCord Stewart Museum.
In addition to evoking clairvoyance in its most fundamental form, this new sense possesses a duality; through the inciting of a historical prescience of sorts, transportation to a past world that engaged magicians and mediums alike is viable. Thus, viewers become vessels for transmuting the sensuous perceptions of visual culture of the nineteenth-and-twentieth-century Spiritualism movement in the modern day. Integral to this effect is the exhibition’s reliance on an array of bold, large-scale magician advertisement broadsides; what were once instrumental in destabilizing the periphery between the spectral realm and the early-twentieth-century psyche now grant contemporary viewers insight into a world where belief was fundamental. The vibrant Do Spirits Live? (fig. 4), promoting the spirit paintings of magician Howard Thurston, and the striking Miss Baldwin, a Modern Witch of Endor (fig. 5), featuring female clairvoyant Kitty Baldwin, epitomize the visual and textual iconography of Spiritualism in popular consciousness. Perhaps all the more imploring are those advertisements that offer a contrary perspective; while the exhibition’s 1929 centerpiece—a poster of Thurston clutching a skull (fig. 6)—boldly asks, “DO THE SPIRITS COME BACK?”, a 1909 print featuring a smirking Harry Houdini presents a stern rebuttal: “HOUDINI SAYS NO – AND PROVES IT” (fig. 7). This juxtaposition underscores the intricacies and partitions within a culture often retroactively regarded as one-dimensional, thereby challenging modern assumptions by revealing the ways in which reality and spectacle harmonized with the senses, achieving resolution with audiences of the present.
Left: Figure 6. The Otis Lithograph Company, Cleveland. Thurston the Great Magician — The Wonder Show of the Earth — Do the Spirits Come Back? (1929). Lithograph. 79.5 x 39.5 in. (201.9 x 100.3 cm). Peabody Essex Museum, 2023.14.1. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum. | Right: Figure 7. Do Spirits Return? Houdini Says No — and Proves It (1926). Lithograph. 41.8 x 27.8 in. (106.1 x 70.5 cm). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, POS-MAG-.H68, no. 4.
As George H. Schwartz, the PEM’s Curator-at-Large, states, “belief is at the core of [the exhibition],” affirming the psychic sentiment behind Conjuring the Spirit World. By interrogating the complex mechanics of perception and identity, this exhibition implores viewers to strive beyond a passive observation: not only through a sensorial engagement with the enchanting objects at hand or a retrospective regard for the Spiritualism movement, but, more crucially, through a critical reexamination of the broader implications of belief in understanding the modern world.
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Angelina Diamante is an MA candidate at Sotheby’s Institute of Art (Valedictorian, with distinction) and a specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque European painting and sculpture. Recently, her research has considered art and its intersection with the esoteric and occult, evincing motifs such as classical paganism and the Gothic.
