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The German artist Freda Köhler produced a body of compelling visionary paintings and drawings.
Only a fraction appear to have survived. She signed her works, ‘Sieg-bert’, which in old German
means ‘bright victory’; a sign of the revelatory messages in her art and, perhaps, the name of her
spirit guide. It is tempting to read her untitled portrait drawing of a woman (fig.1) as either a self-
portrait or a visionary likeness of Sieg-bert. The titles written on the front of many of the works, and
the hand-written ‘explanatory’ text on the verso of some of them, certainly strongly suggests a
mediumistic source. Botanical forms dominate (figs.2-5). They metamorphose and reveal cosmic
messages. They are similar in many ways to much work from 20th Century Central European
spiritualist circles, by artists like Anna Häckel, Anna Zemánková and Cecilie Marková.
    It is clear from her work that Köhler also shared a characteristic early-twentieth century fascination
for those scientific discoveries and technological advances that revealed reality as mutable and in
constant motion, from splitting the atom and X-rays, to electric streetlights and moving pictures. She
shared this in common with other artists based in Germany who were also interested in cosmological
themes, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. In one image, for example, titled Disturbed
‘Cosmic’ Calm (fig.6), she wrote on the verso: “No comment required. Unlawful Application of atomic
research against the laws of nature will shake the cosmos to great misery.” 
    We know very little about Freda Köhler beyond what is contained in a short, typed label pinned to
the back of one of her works. She was born Freda Spokl in Leipzig in 1912, began painting around
1932, and worked as a scene painter in Berlin. In 1945 she was bombed out of her Berlin home. After 
The Art of Freda Köhler

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