Agatha Wojciechowsky

1896-1986 · New York City, USA

She said the dead drew through her hand. The results hung beside Man Ray and Duchamp, and ended up in the Museum of Modern Art.

The life

Born in Steinach in Germany in 1896, she emigrated to America in 1923 and worked as a maid, seamstress and governess before settling in New York with her husband Leo. She became a respected spiritualist medium and healer, ordained a spiritualist minister in 1961, and claimed she had received her first messages from the hereafter at the age of four. In 1951, in her small New York apartment, she began automatic writing, then drawing, saying entities stepped into her body and directed her hand. The surrealists embraced her, and she exhibited alongside Man Ray, Duchamp and Dubuffet.

The work

Watercolour, ink and charcoal sheets teeming with interlocking faces and figures, which she called portraits of ambient souls, plus notebooks of automatic script in a language nobody could read. More than 550 works survive, and her art sits in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Menil Collection.

Why we love them

Believe in her spirits or not, the faces kept arriving for thirty five years. Automatic drawing with a full waiting room.

Go deeper

• Agatha Wojciechowsky at the Outsider Art Fair
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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