NEW YORK, NY.- Though Marian Spore Bush painted the flowers, animals, prophets, and architectures on view in Life Afterlife, Works c. 1919–1945, she insisted that she was but the conduit for spirits telepathically controlling her hand from another realm. In communion with, as she recounted, “the souls of those who have lived here on earth from far-distant times down to the present moment,” Spore Bush worked automatically around the same time that the European Surrealists were popularizing automatic drawing and the New Mexican Transcendental Painting Group was representing spiritual concerns through abstraction. However, she did so without any knowledge of then-current avant-garde movements. Life Afterlife is the first exhibition of her work in nearly eighty years.

New York was the locus of Spore Bush’s painting practice, but it took her until her early forties to find her way to both the city and her art. Born Flora Marian Spore in 1878 in Bay City, Michigan, she was the state’s first female dentist. Her mother’s death in 1919 catalyzed Spore Bush’s introduction to visual art: consumed by grief, she purchased a Ouija board and communicated with her mother’s spirit. Continued use resulted in messages from another mysterious source, advising Spore Bush to forgo the board and pick up a pencil. She would come to refer to the entities sending her these missives as alternately “They,” “these People,” or “the People.” In They, her posthumously published autobiography, Spore Bush recounts how the People instructed her to purchase oils and substrates, specified which colors to mix, and guided her hand in the making of her canvases to spread their central message: “there is no Death.” Inspired by their guidance, Spore Bush moved to New York, rented a studio in Greenwich Village, and began painting.

Untrained in oils (or any other artistic discipline), she first worked directly on paper as if drawing. The flattened perspective of House and Garden (c. 1919–22), especially in Spore Bush’s depiction of flowerbeds, evinces her autodidactic approach to the medium. This freed her from the strictures of traditional representation in a manner not unlike that of Forrest Bess, Morris Hirshfield, and other self-taught artists. Early compositions like Japanese Plums (c. 1920s), Water Lilies (c. 1919–22), Purple Flowers (c. 1919–22), and Asian Inspired House (c. 1919–22) feature florals that, in their sinuous forms and lack of both narrative and adherence to traditional genre, evoke Art Nouveau’s break from the academic strictures of the nineteenth century. The appearance of a purple-robed sage in zoological works like Swans and Man with Camel (both c. 1919–22) suggests that Spore Bush’s paintings, while attentive to the nonhuman creatures of the Earth, are not depictions of the world as we know it. Of these early works, Snake and Strange Creature and Mountain Pinetree (both c. 1919–22) extend furthest into the surreal and supernatural, defamiliarizing Edenic scenes with an unearthly beast in the former and a sky aglow in nonnaturalistic hues in the latter. A few years later, in the curling tail of The Green Bird (c. 1925–30), one begins to see the impasto, sometimes half-an-inch thick, that would characterize her mature work.

In black-and-white paintings made in the long lead up to and during World War II, which Spore Bush claims to have been warned about by the People at the beginning of the 1930s, the enchanted menagerie is replaced by allegories of the horrors of armed conflict. The Gaunt Bird of Famine (1933) sets the white body of a willow-necked avian against an ominous black sky, warning of post-war starvation; the similarly black-and-white Factories (c. 1930s) represents wartime industry, however productive, as monotonous and threatening; The Pawn Broker (Three Vultures) (c. 1933–34) depicts two stylized birds, flat and black against a sky swirling with brushstrokes, as they fly down torture a man chained underwater. In 1943, the year of Seascape and The Avenger—paintings of oversized fowl swooping down to rescue or retaliate—TIME magazine called Spore Bush a “prophetess” for her prediction of the World War that the United States had finally joined. Seven decades later, a return to her work reveals a prescient vision of unnecessary violence and unprovoked suffering on Earth, tempered with the dream of another, gentler world. Spore Bush embodied this vision not just in art but also in life: known as the “Angel of the Bowery,” she singlehandedly ran and funded a breadline that stretched from the Bowery to Second Avenue, just a few blocks away from where her work now hangs.

—Canada Choate