Published: 30 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
HAVING A CIVILISED CUPPA in one of London’s tea shops with Bessie Sharpe - paternal grandmother of Archibald Prize-winning artist Wendy Sharpe - wasn’t always relaxing in the years before World War II.
Especially for her second husband, David (who had anglicised his surname from Shapavitch to Sharpe) and Bessie’s son, Alan, the late writer and historian who adopted his stepfather’s surname.
“I never met Bessie,” the artist admits. “She died in her 50s in the 1950s, before I was born. But if I could bring people back from the dead to meet, Bessie would be top of my list.”
Bessie, born in 1905, and her sister, Ann Novak (nee Fishman) born ten years earlier, have inspired Ghosts, Sharpe’s major exhibition which explores spiritualism and the occult.
“I’ve always known we had psychics in the family,” Sharpe explains. “My dad and my step grdfather, Dave, told me stories about Bessie.”
Most tales were both embarrassing and mysterious. “Dad and Dave said they’d be having afternoon tea. Bessie would look across at a woman sitting with her family at a neighbouring table.
“My grandmother would say, ‘Excuse me, but I just need to give a message to that lady’.”
Husband and son would beg her not to, foretelling how the scene might progress. “Bessie ignored them and would introduce herself to the strangers,” Sharpe continues.
“She’d say something like, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt but I have a message from your son, Roger’.”
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Clearly, since son Roger was dead, the mourning family felt their elegant afternoon tea had been invaded by a lunatic. Then, Sharpe says - based on what she was told by her father and step-grandfather - Bessie would continue, including facts no-one outside the family could possibly know.
“Something like - and I’m making these names and facts up - ‘Roger wants you to know he is here beside you. He’s so happy Jane is doing well at school. And he loves the blue you’ve repainted his old bedroom’.
“Naturally, they’d freak out,” Sharpe continues. “But at the same time those families were in grief and wanted comfort.
“Bessie never took any money. She told people what they couldn’t see, but she could. And she only ever told them things that would make them feel comforted.”
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Last year Sharpe and her cousin Ruth Fishman flew to the Ukraine on an odyssey to see where their grandmother grew up. Today her place of birth Yampil is a border town on the Dnister river, with Moldovia across the water.
Apart from a rarely visited, overgrown cemetery, there’s little evidence of the vibrant Jewish heritage that had thrived for centuries, when Bessie was born -as part of the Czarist empire.
This year Sharpe had planned to explore themes of lost culture and her family’s 19th century flight across Europe in an exhibition at the Sydney Jewish Museum called Where is the little street? - inspired by a Yiddish song Bessie used to sing about her homeland.
That had to be postponed because of Covid-19 which shut all museums in Australia, though Sharpe and the museum still intend to mount it in 2021.
The pandemic also forced the two cousins to cancel their return trip to eastern Europe in the northern summer, hoping to retrace other aspects of their Jewish family tree.
Fortunately, there was no such problem with Ghosts. As Sharpe explains, both Bessie and Ann Novak were followers of the controversial Russian-born occultist, philosopher and author Helena Blavatsky, who died in London in 1891 - before the Fishman family fled.
Novak became one of the most famous psychics in London, president of the London Jewish Spiritualist Society, and defendant in a 1943 court case brought under the notorious Vagrancy Act.
She was found guilty of reading the fortunes of two undercover policewomen causing (according to the magistrate) “incalculable harm”.
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There is much to be sceptical about about spiritualism, Sharpe admits. “In the early days of photography, the public didn’t understand double exposures. So unscrupulous photographers published images of their subjects surrounded by ghost-like figures.
“To our eyes, those photos are obvious hoaxes. Were they exploiting people in grief? Or giving mourners hope to cling to?”
A self-portrait - “of me in the real world, surrounded by the blurry, fluffy things you get in Victorian ghost images” - forms the centre point of Ghosts, the exhibition.
Years in the making, the exhibition is still not finished. There will be large canvasses; works on paper; Sharpe’s trademark folding books; 19th century photos decorated by the artist; lamps with spirit images.
And, in the two days before the exhibition officially opens, Sharpe herself will be poised on a scissor lift, painting a huge mural (with a slow motion camera recording her progress to feature in the exhibition once she’s completed it).
“I need someone to operate the scissor lift because I’m inept,” Sharpe concedes. “But also because I can’t concentrate on the painting and operate a scissor lift at the same time.
“I count myself lucky I won’t be lying on a piece of wood on dodgy scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel like Michelangelo without a safety harness!”
A slo-mo camera will film the mural’s creation, becoming a feature of the exhibition.
Ghosts harkens back to a period roughly bordered from 1880 to 1930. “This was the golden age of spiritualism and mediums,” Sharpe explains. “It peaked in World War I when such a huge part of the world’s population was in grief.”
Sharpe has a theory. “Around the late 1800s, science was flourishing and inventions were booming. “There were so many incredible technical and financial advances. Take photography. In the middle of that, we were also starting to learn about the human mind.
It could be argued some aspects of ‘New Age’ were a reaction to the ‘hard sciences’ of the late 20th century. Even now, we know we have a small understanding of the human brain.
“Could it reveal more things in our heaven and our earth than we’d dreamed of? I’m not saying this was a reaction to the scientific age, though it might be.
“In the same way, it could be argued some aspects of ‘New Age’ were a reaction to the ‘hard sciences’ of the late 20th century. Even now, we know we have a small understanding of the human brain.”
Sharpe’s exhibition is particularly relevant in these unsettled times we live in - another era of historic global mourning when truth seems far stranger than fiction.
Sharpe herself didn’t inherit “the gift”. Nor did her father, Alan. “Apparently, my great-great-grandmother was psychic too. Perhaps it skips a generation, so I should be psychic too.”
Does she feel cheated not to have inherited “the gift”?
“Is it a blessing or a curse? I still don’t know. But Dad utterly believed Bessie and Ann had the gift because of the things he’d seen. For a while he was a junior reporter on the Psychic News (Britain’s best-selling spiritualist daily newspaper).”
Sharpe credits her father as the main artistic influence in her life. “My mother could draw. She won a scholarship to go to art school in Southampton, though her mother wouldn’t let her go.
“But my mother wasn’t imaginative. She was the kind of person who could do technical botanical illustrations.
“My father wasn’t a visual artist, but he was imaginative. I have always felt I got my artistic talent from him. Art isn’t about technical ability; it is about imagination.
“My mother was much more down to earth than my father. It’s actually quite good to have both within me. As an artist you need to be able to go into fantasy land. But you also need to return to reality.”
Details: Ghosts, Wendy Sharpe, Mosman Art Gallery, Dec 16 - March 7. Live mural painting, Dec 14-15 (bookings essential). See: www.mosmanartgallery.org.au
Photo: Self-portrait by Wendy Sharpe
