Agatha Wojciechowsky

Agatha Wojciechowsky (1896 -1986) was a self-taught artist, medium, spiritualist, and a healer. Agatha Wehner was born in Steinach de Salle, Germany. She emigrated to the United States in 1923, where she worked in a German Baron’s family home in New Jersey as a household servant. Later Agatha worked in hotel kitchens as a seamstress and laundress. She married Leo Wojciechowsky, moved to New York City,  and had two children in 1927 and 1928. Leo passed away in 1961.

After WWII, she had heard about a psychic medium through a friend. It was her introduction to and the guidance of psychic Bertha Marks that opened up the world which Agatha had been looking for her entire life. Agatha recalled in an interview that her first ‘vision’ occurred when Agatha was only four years old. However, it was Bertha’s ‘spirit guide’ Mona, a little Indian girl who encouraged Agatha to begin drawing when Agatha was in her mid 50’s. Agatha asked the spirit why she was unable to keep her hands ‘quiet’. According to Agatha, the spirit Mona laughed, and explained that a spirit ‘wants to work through your fingers, work through your hands’. Mona then instructed Agatha to start drawing, ‘take a small pencil and then fasten it to your hand with a rubber band, and place it on a piece of paper and see what happens.’ Agatha’s first marks or ‘automatic drawings’ were scribbles, then letters. She wrote the letter L over and over, pages of them.

Months later, Agatha would sit at her table, looking out of the kitchen window of her large apartment on Lexington Avenue, and just stare in a ‘trance’ like state at the building wall across from her. The building was also large. On one Sunday, while staring at the same building wall, unknowingly she created her first abstract drawing. When she looked down at her drawing paper, the abstract drawing there. She continued to sit at her kitchen table regularly, where she made hundreds of  drawings, all of them in pencil. (1)

On Agatha’s way home one day, she noticed an art store, and was drawn towards its window display.‘Ten times she stopped by and ten times she walked away’. Finally a voice over her shoulder said to her, ‘Go in and buy some watercolors’. It was her first time in an art store, and Agatha had to ask the ‘shopkeeper’ in the art store to help her identify art supplies. At first, the ‘shopkeeper’ was annoyed that she didn’t know exactly know how to identify what she wanted. When Agatha insisted she wanted watercolors, he made a selection for her, choosing some brushes and a small pad of paper. Back in her apartment, the art supplies sat for three days until she heard a voice from the ‘Spirit Guides’, giving her instructions on how to use them. ‘She began to paint, her hands moving freely, rapidly, dipping into pure un-mixed color.’ The first paintings to emerge from her hand and notebooks were images of Native Americans. (2)

(inset): aw0511, watercolor on paper, 13 3/4 x 11 in. 1952

After some time Agatha’s ‘spirit writing’ also resumed. The spirit guides moved both of her hands simultaneously and independently. She developed the ability to write with her right hand in English, and with her left in German. Agatha also filled notebooks with ‘ancient writings’ which she believed could be understood in the future. (3) Agatha did not consider herself to be an artist. She viewed herself as ‘only the channel’, or ‘the instrument’. Agatha’s art spirit guide was the Italian Paul Veronese. (4) After visiting the Metropolitan to view Veronese’s paintings there, she was shocked by the idea that such a skilled and classically trained artist could possibly be the inspiration behind her strange and incomprehensible works. She became so frustrated and depressed that she destroyed over 500 of her drawings, all stored at the time in shopping bags. After a long break, Agatha began to draw and paint again. These included pastel drawings, works in ink, charcoal, crayon, mixed-media, and a few in oil.

Agatha became more accepting to her process and developments, less critical of her often Incomprehensible works. ‘Everything starts from below and is drawn upwards.’ (5)  She would also wait three days before starting with a new art material, and then apply it like she was already familiar with it.(6)

Agatha’s first solo exhibition ‘The Spirits’ was at Cordier-Ekstrom Gallery in New York City in 1963. She was introduced to the gallery by the German born American painter Richard Lindner. Agatha had solo exhibitions in New York, Cologne, Berlin, and Hamburg. Group exhibitions included shows with Romare Bearden, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Lindner, Isamu Noguchi, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray. Her artwork can be found in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Prado, the Menil Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum. (7)

In 1966, in an interview with the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, Agatha said, ‘with her earnings from art sales and her spiritualist ministry (8) , I pay my own expenses when I travel on missionary work, or go to another country for an exhibition’. The interview also reveals, ‘She has several philanthropic projects: one is the care and feeding of some 13 deprived Sioux Indian families in South Dakota’. (9)

Although unaware of the contemporary art scene, her worked combined the openness, sentiment, and spiritual quest of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism of the 1950’s. With her restless energy and mediumistic approach, she created a unique, evolving, mature body of work into the 1970’s.

Steven Day

1. Gallery Text from ‘Agatha Wojciechowsky May 7 through May 24, 1978 Ramapo College Gallery’.  Thomas Fountain. pg 2-3. 

2. ‘SPIRIT PAINTING’ Agatha Wojciechowsky, J Walter Thompson World Gallery, 1972. pg 3, paragraph 2,

3. ‘SPIRIT PAINTING’ Agatha Wojciechowsky, J Walter Thompson World Gallery, 1972. pg 3, paragraph 4.

4. Gallery Text from ‘Agatha Wojciechowsky May 7 through May 24, 1978 Ramapo College Gallery’. Thomas Fountain. pg 4.

5. Gallery Text from ‘Agatha Wojciechowsky May 7 through May 24, 1978 Ramapo College Gallery’. Thomas Fountain. pg 3, paragraph 2.

6. ‘SPIRIT PAINTING’ Agatha Wojciechowsky, J Walter Thompson World Gallery, 1972. pg 3, paragraph 3.

7. ‘SPIRIT PAINTING’ Agatha Wojciechowsky, J Walter Thompson World Gallery, 1972. pg 3, paragraph 5.

8. Agatha was a Spiritual Minister, ordained in the Universal Spiritualist Assoc. Church in 1958. She would travel the world as a medium, a missionary, a paster. Agatha Wehner Wojciechowsky, April 9, 2005. Bill Russell. She also taught Trance-Clairvoyance, perform Group Seances –Healing, and Paintings of the Hands, Auric Painting at Camp Silverbelle (1932-1991) in Ephrata, PA. during the summers from the late 1960’s, and early 1970’s. Camp Silverbelle. ‘Silver  Belle Association Presents an Outstanding Array of Internationally Known Lecturers – Teachers – World Famous Psychics. 1971.

9. The Virginian – Pilot  ‘A Blithe Spirit Guides Her Brush, by Cammy Sessa, Virginian-Pilot Staff Writer. October 10, 1966.

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