Laure Pigeon

1882-1965 · Paris, France

After her marriage collapsed she took up spiritualism and filled notebook after notebook with swirling blue ink. She showed the drawings to no one. More than five hundred were found when she died.

The life

Born in Brittany, Pigeon was left by her husband in 1933 and moved through Paris boarding houses, where a friend introduced her to spiritualism. From 1935 the drawing sessions began, guided, she believed, by spirits who also delivered messages and predictions she noted in the margins. For thirty years the work stayed entirely private. On her death in 1965 the notebooks and sheets passed almost directly into Jean Dubuffet’s hands, and from him to Lausanne.

The work

Ribbons of blue fountain-pen ink looping into veils, faces and winged forms, later interwoven with names and dates, the line unbroken for minutes at a time. The blue deepens over the decades as if the séance were descending. A textbook case of mediumistic drawing, and one of its most elegant.

Why we love them

Thirty years of work with zero audience and zero doubt. Privacy that pure is its own kind of confidence.

Go deeper

• Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne
• 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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