Really, the precise formulation should be divination producing geometric art used in faith healing – too clunky a title of course. But that is exactly what Emma Kunz is about. The woman who lived in Switzerland until her death in 1963 considered herself a researcher, but is described by seemingly everyone else as a telepath, prophet and healer, whose powers of intuition (according to the website of the Emma Kunz Zentrum) “achieved successes through her advice and treatments that often edged on the limits of miracles.“

Add to that: artist. Kunz produced close to 500 large – astonishing – drawings across her lifetime, which are finally receiving the recognition they deserve – as long as crankily rational people like me blot out the knowledge of how they were conceived: by means of a divining pendulum. She had retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and was part of the the Kunsthaus Zurich’ 1999 show “Richtkräfte für das 21. Jahrhundert”, which was dedicated to her, Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner. From March 2005 to April 2006, she could be seen at the Drawing Center New York, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and finishing at the Irish Museum of Art in Dublin. In 2012, her art was displayed at the Paul Klee Centre in Bern, followed by exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, at the “La Caixa” Foundation in Barcelona and in 2013 at the Biennale in Venice.

This year, 40 of her drawings were exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery at Kew Gardens, London. You can see a video of that show and experts talking about her work here. Benches made of a special material were placed in front of her drawings and described by participating sculptor Christodoulos Panayiotou as “interrupted sculptures.” The material came from a “mystic grotto”, the place near Zürich where Kunz once found a healing powder she dubbed Aion-A in the stones, and where the current center devoted to her memory (and selling her products, including said powder) is situated. The gallery’s assumption was that seated visitors would absorb some of the healing properties of the rock (claimed to affect rheumatism and inflammation if consumed) while looking at the art.

From what I learned (a wonderfully informativeinand beautifully written essay on her life and work, Emma Kunz: Art in the Spiritual Realm, can be found here) she asked her pendulum, hung over graph paper, a specific question and then would mark the points it swung to as co-ordinates, use the next extended swings as energy lines, and eventually fill in the rest with geometric forms and fields of color in a process that sometimes took up to 48 hours non-stop, with sleep and food rejected. She was convinced that these works would be fully interpretable in their cosmological depth for people in the 21st century.

No interpretation from this here 21st century writer ignorant of transcendentalism. Admiration, though, for the beauty the drawings convey, and the passion obvious in their execution which must have involved incredible patience, acuity and steady hands. A mathematical power really seems to emanate from these geometric forms.

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As to alternative healing practices, it is interesting to follow current debates in Germany, Switzerland’s neighbor. Homeopathy, invented by Samuel Hahnemann in Germany 200 years ago, for example, was boosted by Nazis like Hess and Himmler. Industry, media and politicians all promote it to this day, you find it in any pharmacy and health insurance pays for it and the public is wildly embracing it – despite the fact that “homeopathy is neither biologically plausible nor scientifically proven to produce more than placebo effects – and therefore an expensive, potentially harmful waste of money that makes a mockery of evidence based medicine.”

So strong is the public belief in it that the German government decided not to follow the example of the French, who will cease to support payments for this treatment in 2021, so as not to create an uproar. This is even true for Germany’s Green Party, which is having a screaming debate over the nature of homeopathy (and the belief in scientific research in general, as linked to genetically altered food sources etc.) They decided to avoid having the controversial topic overshadow their national convention next week, and parked it in some expert committee. Magic (or political pragmatism) beats science. Again.

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Photographs today are from New Mexico. A group of artists there, calling themselves the Transcendental Painting Group and active at the same period as Kunz was in Europe, tried to move art into something more metaphysical, using abstraction and borrowing a bit from everywhere – the Cubist down to Kandinsky. They ignored landscape in favor of documenting their inner experiences. You get instead my own more quotidian lines.

With fitting Swiss music, alpenhorns absent.