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.

In 1934, the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung commissioned Fröbe-Kapteyn to carry out iconographic research for his study of alchemy and archetypes. She proceeded to amass a collection of over 6,000 works that illustrated Carl Jung’s writings and formed the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS). The thousands of symbolic images were to comprise the Eranos Archive for Research in Symbolism, which was donated to the Warburg Institute in the mid-1950s. This artistic quest for an arcane, sacred and spiritual symbology sparked her desire to create. Her visual output from this moment onwards comprised two distinct, yet interrelated projects: precisely delineated works on paper; and images from her archive.

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.

奥 尔 嘉 · 弗 勒 贝 - 卡 普 泰 因 ( Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn )

是抽象艺术的先驱之一,也是荣格长期的思想伙

伴与合作者。

1933年,她创办Eranos,汇聚荣格、宗教学家伊利亚

德、物理学家薛定谔等深刻影响20世纪思想史与科学

史的人物,推动东西方思想、人文学科与自然科学之

间的对话。她建立的象征图像档案为荣格等人的重要

著作提供了研究基础。

以当代艺术的视野审视,她堪称一位将图像创作、学

术研究与文化组织融为一体的广义艺术实践者:其贡

献超越了作品本身,使她成为20世纪以独特的综合实

践推动人类自我理解与思想交流的女性先驱。