Master Drawings New York

This is one of around 127 'Meditation Plates' produced by Fröbe-Kapteyn between 1926 and 1934, composed of meticulously drawn experiments in geometric abstraction. This, her first phase of works, was displayed in the Lecture Hall of Casa Eranos. However they were removed from display after a visit from Carl Gustav Jung, who was disparaging of the use of black.

The basic colour contrast of black (nocturnal, unconscious and a destructive energy; the Yin principle), and gold (diurnal, conscious and a constructive energy; the Yang principle), with the constant presence of red and blue, runs throughout the series.

Rudolf Otto, Historian of religions, had several of the Meditation Plates on display in his own home. Theosophist Alice Ann Bailey believed that the series depicted "the path of evolution from the dawn of the great creative process to the consummation of the age".

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Fröbe-Kapteyn was born in London in 1881 to Albertus Kapteyn, a Dutch engineer, and his wife, Truus Muysken, a player in women’s emancipation and social renewal movements.

In 1900 Fröbe-Kapteyn moved to Zurich where she attended the School of Applied Arts, excelling in tailoring, embroidery and jewellery making. She continued her education at the University of Zurich, majoring in art history. Whilst in Zurich she met and later married Iwan Fröbe, a Croatian flutist and orchestra conductor. After her husband’s unexpected death in a plane crash in 1915, Fröbe-Kapteyn and her father travelled to the ‘Mountain of Truth’ in the Swiss village of Ascona – “an anarchist’s utopia, guided by laws of vegetarianism and nudism”. Greatly inspired by the area, from 1920 onwards, Ascona would become Fröbe-Kapteyn’s home.

It was here that Fröbe-Kapteyn created the informal research centre that she called Eranos – a title suggested to her by the eminent historian of religion, Rudolf Otto. The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung proposed that she use Eranos as a meeting place between East and West, with symposia thematically poised to inspire interdisciplinary conversation. Fröbe-Kapteyn was devoted to finding images and symbols that illuminated each theosophical topic: ‘Yoga and Meditation in East and West’ (1933), ‘The Gestalt and Cult of the Great Mother’ (1938) , ‘The Hermetic Principle in Mythology, Gnosis, and Alchemy’ (1942), ‘The Mysteries’ (1944), ‘Spirit and Nature’ (1946) and ‘Man and Time’ (1951). Her 1938 conference at Eranos titled ‘The Great Mother’ included images of important goddesses that appear in statues from Aztec, Minoan and Babylonian civilisations.

Visually her artworks seem to combine the accelerated energy of futurism with a cryptic semiotics. Her works were directly influenced by the English Theosophist Alice Bailey (1880-1949), who she met on a visit to Long Island in the late 1920s. Bailey utilised art as a tool in psychotherapy, raising subconscious messages onto the canvas (or paper). The works include diagrams of interlacing circles, which serve both as an impetus for meditation and as a visualisation of the conceptual structure of Eranos. The cryptic symbolic and mystic meanings are enhanced by the inclusion of gold-leaf and obscure figuration. With the golden ratio often guiding her hand, Fröbe-Kapteyn referred to these angular images as “meditation drawings”. In a similar vein to Jung, she became convinced that these symbols opened a window into the psyche.