Charles Colbert sets Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art against the backdrop of industrialization. His book addresses a range of artists and critics who worked between the 1840s and 1910s—a period of time that saw the rise of the transcontinental railroad, the factory system, and the modern city. Colbert asserts that within the explosive consumer culture these developments engendered, visual art threatened to become just another object or commodity. But, it did not; rather, he observes over the course of the long nineteenth century a “growing willingness on the part of many Americans to hold the fine arts in high esteem” (1). This admiration manifested itself in the extended viewing time that paintings and sculptures compelled, the metropolitan art museums established to house them, and the morally inflected criticism with which they were met. Haunted Visions seeks to probe this paradox and understand how and why the fine arts confronted and overcame the economic challenge to their cultural significance.

Through extensive biographical and historical research, Colbert attributes the continued significance of the fine arts to the hitherto underappreciated influence of Spiritualism on American artists and critics. Spiritualism was a religious philosophy rooted in the belief that the soul transcended space and time. A variety of practices—from séances to psychometric objects—called forth spirits separated by distance or death. Colbert argues that the fine arts served as one such medium and, on this basis, revises their relationship to both Transcendentalism and Greenbergian modernism. Clement Greenberg theorized that modernism was an exercise in self-criticism through which each medium sought to define and exploit the properties unique and inherent to itself, while Transcendentalism provided a philosophical lens to anchor and, thereby, interpret non-narrative art in cultural terms. For Colbert, both of these interpretive models ascribe analytical significance to work that emerged from deeply personal concerns. Haunted Visions seeks to recover the religious interests and intentions of the artists it discusses, and does so by way of fascinating material about their lives, the criticism and period discourse on their work, and a vast array of primary and secondary sources on Spiritualism itself. Thereby, the book masterfully recreates a world in which the soul and spirit were pressing and insistent concerns for visual artists and their audiences and, so, convincingly frames painting and sculpture as a mode of communication between them.

Haunted Visions thus offers a significant contribution to the steadily growing literature on the psyche and American art. The key texts in the field are Kathleen Pyne’s Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) and Sarah Burns’s Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), which offer complementary yet divergent accounts of nineteenth-century art, cultural anxieties, and the relationship between them. Pyne looks at Tonalists and Impressionists and the ways in which their ethereal works were in line with Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of human progress and its challenge to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolutionary struggle. Burns looks at contemporaneous works with a darker edge, addressing artists like Thomas Eakins and Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose personal demons produced haunting works that tapped into broader cultural concerns with the environment, race, and illness. Rather than particular bodies of work, Colbert broaches figures with an explicit interest in psychic phenomena, the spirit world, or the occult, if not an avowed belief in Spiritualism itself. Through twelve case studies, Haunted Visions thus details how Spiritualist beliefs, practices, and media like clairvoyance, psychometry, and ether informed the creation and reception of works that span both tonal camps. It thus explores how the cultural became personal became visual.

For Colbert, spiritual significance is located in specific subjects—such as sites replete with “psychic energies,” as depicted by William Sydney Mount and Fitz Henry Lane—but more often it resides in the formal qualities, materiality, and production of the works: from internal lighting conditions to the trance-like states in which certain works were created. Indeed, one of the book’s most striking claims is that a work of art “need not illustrate a spiritual subject to embody paranormal powers” (248). Colbert sees Spiritualist influence and import in surprising, but convincing, places—like the ritual treatment of portrait busts by Hiram Powers, the way the subjects of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “black portraits” disappear into the paintings’ ether-like backgrounds, and in the thick impastos and otherworldly subjects employed by George Fuller and Ryder. Through such diverse motifs and strategies, these artists and critics invested art with agency and enabled it to serve as a medium among souls, including those of the artists, their subjects, and deceased mentors or the works’ patrons and viewers and the loved ones depicted within them.

Colbert’s goal, like that of the figures he addresses, is to “re-enchant” the fine arts—to restore the psychic energies and spiritual agency invested in them when consumerism posed a pervasive moral threat. Yet, Haunted Visions builds such a firm case for Spiritualism that it threatens to turn this amorphous belief system into a religious doctrine, and the artwork itself into a mere instrument of it. That is to say, as it invests the work with religious significance, it threatens to diminish its value as art. The paintings and sculptures become outgrowths of moral quandaries and spiritual imperatives rather than artistic endeavors. To be sure, this shift in scales is part of Colbert’s project; he means to challenge Greenberg’s claim that modern painting and sculpture are self-reflexive practices, divorced from broader social concerns. But one wonders whether there is a middle ground between Greenberg’s autonomy and Colbert’s instrumentalization. Surely the meaning and significance of works of art can extend beyond those intended by the artist. Further, what distinguishes visual art from other psychometric objects and Spiritualist practices? Why was visual art enlisted in the Spiritualist project at all? Haunted Visions also prompts important and productive questions about the individual artists under consideration and thematic studies more broadly. What does it mean to think of these bodies of work as Spiritualist endeavors or enterprises? How does it alter accepted understandings of the artists and their contributions to American art? In emphasizing the commonalities between them, are the important differences between them lost? These are significant questions that Colbert’s book does well to inspire and that future scholars of the individual artists as well as Spiritualism will certainly need and want to address.

To further Colbert’s admirable redefinition of the word “medium” from a noun to a verb—from a material condition to a mode of communication—Haunted Visions might have explored the relationship between the fine arts and visual culture, specifically spirit photography. Colbert mentions spirit photography in the book’s introduction in order to assert the pervasive interest in Spiritualism in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the public controversy around the phenomenon and the personal if not professional interest it would have held for the artists under discussion calls for a more extensive discussion. Spirit photography developed in 1861, when professional photographer William H. Mumler accidentally double-exposed a self-portrait. The practice caught the attention of Spiritualists, and soon photography became a means to “visualize” the deceased. As an explicit depiction of ghosts and spirits, spirit photography would have served Colbert’s cause and further legitimated the claim that painting and sculpture did not need to picture the soul in order to channel it. If photography could “visualize” the dead, perhaps painting and sculpture were forced (or able) to pursue Spiritualist ends by alternate means: namely the motifs and strategies that Colbert discusses—those which exploited the material and formal properties of the fine arts. Such a claim would have offered a necessary cultural explanation for the shift from narrative interests to material concerns over this period as well as a much-needed investigation into the role that visual culture, religion, and perhaps the relationship between them played within it.

The scope of Colbert’s project and the vast historical evidence on which it is premised make a compelling case that Spiritualism was a key cultural concern over the course of the long nineteenth century. It appears to extend, ether-like, into almost every major work, artist, and institution critical to this period. As scholars continue to work on these subjects, Haunted Visions will be an important resource that tests our own willingness to embrace that which cannot be seen and to reimagine that which is.