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Elise-Catherine Müller, known as Hélène
Smith |
BRETON (André). "Le Message automatique, étude sur l'œuvre plastique des médiums." dans Minotaure, no.3-4, December 1933. 2nd edition Albert Skira.
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| Hélène Smith, baptized by Jacques Lacan "the clairvoyant with a wonderful name", becomes initiated to spiritualism when she is thirty. She seems to have exceptional mediumistic abilities. In April 1982, Victor Hugo becomes her spiritual guide and protector. Another spirit, "Leopold" or Joseph Balsamo, a.k.a. Alessandro di Cagliostro, soon replaces him. Under his influence, Hélène writes and paints three "cycles": a Hindu cycle, in which she communicates messages in Sanskrit and reincarnates the Indian princess Sinandini, who lived in the 15th century. In the second cycle she "reincarnates" Marie-Antoinette. In the third one, she becomes a "cosmic traveler", who tells us about her trip to Mars. To relate her adventure, she invents a new language and paints Martian landscapes filled with human looking figures. | ||
| In 1895, the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy looks into Hélène's states of trance and writes a book about them, entitled Des Indes à la planète Mars (From India to the Mars planet), which is published in 1899 (in the same year Sigmund Freud publishes his Interpretation of Dreams). Flournoy confirms that the spirits should be searched for in the subconscious of the medium. | ||
| André Breton illustrates his article "Le message automatique" in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1934 with paintings by Hélène Smith. He writes: "The wondrous Elise Müller, better known under the pseudonym of Hélène Smith, presents successively automatic phenomena of verbal-auditive nature (she notes as best she can fragments of fictive conversation that reach her), of vocal nature (when in trance, she says words in an unknown language), of verbal-visual nature (she copies exotic symbols that appear to her) and of artistic nature (when in trance, she writes taking the place of one of her Martians)." | ||
| After the year 1900, Hélène Smith takes classes to learn how to draw and paint, which opens up a second artistic period in her work, a mystical and fascinating body of work. | ||
| SEE ALSO: FLOURNOY (Théodore). Des Indes
à la planète Mars, Le Seuil, Paris, 1983. BRETON (André). "Le Message automatique, étude sur l'œuvre plastique des médiums." dans Minotaure, no.3-4, December 1933. 2nd edition Albert Skira. |
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