The Art of the Self: The “Blue Book” of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

by Riccardo Bernardini

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) is known for being the pioneering founder of the Eranos Conferences, which since the early 1930s have attracted to Ascona (Switzerland) some of the most influential scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, making an extraordinary contribution to world intellectual history.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was one of the main sources of inspiration for the Eranos project. The publication of the Liber Novus or the Red Book and, more recently, The Art of C.G. Jung and his Black Books has further highlighted the conjunction between his personal life path, his imaginative world, and the construction of his scientific thought. In Fröbe-Kapteyn’s case, on the other hand, the link between existence, imagination, and creativity was not entirely clear. Some of her allusions on the subject were, in fact, rather difficult to understand. For example, she wrote, “You must pardon me for speaking in images! It is the way my mind works.” And again: “The story of Eranos can be found in an unwritten book, which I often leaf through, read, examine, and compare – I also look at the pictures, since there are many of them in this book – and search for the connections that form the whole in a meaningful and unifying way. The overall figure, the pattern that becomes visible, is so twisted and intertwined with the pattern of my life that it is indeed difficult to separate them.”

Only today do Fröbe-Kapteyn’s words become clearer, thanks to the unpublished anthology of her works, which we might consider classifying under the name “Blue Book.” The title refers to the chromatic motif of her iconographic corpus, traceable to two distinct styles and moments: the “Meditation Plates” phase (c. 1926–1934) and the “Visions” period (1934–1938).

The reflections presented in the recently published The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (2025), beyond the author’s personal findings, have benefited – in the last decade in particular – from a growing number of discoveries and insights related to two perspectives of study. On the one hand, master’s, doctoral, and post-doctoral dissertation works and independent research attest to an increasing interest in the life of Fröbe-Kapteyn – a creative and visionary woman who has not yet been given a proper biography, despite being one of the most important and independent female figures in the development and dissemination of Jungian psychology.

On the other hand, an astonishing series of exhibitions, staged in some of the world’s most important museums, have gradually introduced her graphic works to the general public. After the first exhibition conceived by Harald Szeemann (1933–2005) in 1978, dedicated to the history of the Ascona “Mountain of Truth” community (“Monte Verità. The Breasts of Truth,”) the most relevant event was the exhibition “La Grande Madre” [“The Great Mother,”] organized by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation on the occasion of the Milan Expo 2015. That exhibition was followed by others, promoted by the New Museum in New York in 2016 (“The Keeper”), the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021 (“Elles font l’abstraction”) [“Women in Abstraction”], the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2021–2022 (“Mujeres de la abstracción”) [“Women in Abstraction”], the Kunsthalle in Mainz in 2023 (“Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn. Tiefes Wissen”) [“Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn: Deep Knowledge”], the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle in 2024 (“La scia del Monte ou les utopistes magnétiques” [“The Trail of the Mount or the Magnetic Utopians”), the Casa Rusca Museum in Locarno in 2024–2025 (“Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn: Artist – Researcher”), the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht in 2025 (“Tussen hemel en oorlog. Kunst en religie in het interbellum”) [“Between Heaven and War. Art and Religion in the Interwar Period”], again the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in 2025–2026 (“Fata Morgana. Memorie dall’invisibile”) [“Morgan le Fay. Memories from the invisible”], and the Labanque in Béthune in 2026 (“Les Mondes Invisibles : d’Augustin Lesage à aujourd’hui – Déplier les mondes”) [“The Invisible Worlds: From Augustin Lesage to Today – Unfolding Worlds”]. The exhibition set up in 2025–2026 at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, “Landscapes of the Soul: C.G. Jung and the Exploration of the Human Psyche in Switzerland,” organized to mark the 150th anniversary of Jung’s birth and whose catalogue was presented in August 2025 at the XXIII Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), also included a series of works by Fröbe-Kapteyn. Moreover, further exhibitions also displayed images collected by Fröbe-Kapteyn for the Eranos Archive for Research in Symbolism (now at the Warburg Institute): “The Woman Question 1550–2025,” set up in 2025–2026 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and “Uqbaroxy,” on view at the Geneva Library (Espace Ami Lullin) in 2026.

The significant press coverage is documented by a series of articles that appeared in globally renowned newspapers: in 2026 specifically, the Financial Times (“Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn – the artist who built an archive to decode dreams”) and Art in America (“Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, a painter, collector, and collaborator of Carl Jung, mined the archive and her subconscious”). The New York Times highlighted the significance of Fröbe-Kapteyn’s works being featured at some of the world’s most important art fairs (“At TEFAF New York, Lesser-Known Artists Delight”), such as Charles Ede’s “Masters of Drawing” and TEFAF in New York in 2026.

Biographical investigation and artistic rediscovery, in short, seem to have gone hand in hand in patching together the scattered pieces of the story of a scholar who devoted the second half of her life to her own cultural enterprise, Eranos, and whose primary concern in the last decades of her existence was that it would survive her. On the other hand, we do not know if she had imagined that her pictorial works, besides enduring, would also have elicited such widespread interest today, nearly a hundred years later, becoming for some even a therapeutic tool to heal – as she did with herself – deep, sometimes unspeakable wounds. Her works had to wait forty years before the visionary genius of Szeemann dreamed of reviving them, just as he did with the scattered and often forgotten testimonies of the many utopias conceived, lived, and suffered at Monte Verità and in that “Bermuda Triangle of the spirit” which, in Ascona and around Lake Maggiore – with their history and utopias, exiles and architectures, nature and magnetism – still holds perhaps the innermost secret of the “Blue Book” too. We should not be surprised if Fröbe-Kapteyn herself, endowed with exceptional insight and an equally rare ability to anticipate the cultural currents of the time, had the idea that, sooner or later, someone would have rediscovered and studied them, and now restored and protected them. The scientific investigation is today proceeding in parallel with the conservation of these materials, through the careful restoration of a substantial iconographic fund, currently awaiting a critical edition in the form of a catalogue raisonné and a final placement in a dedicated museum space in Ascona by the Eranos Foundation.

In terms of content, we should have the courage to look at Fröbe-Kapteyn’s “Blue Book” as an initiatic corpus of our time and perhaps with answers that are still relevant to our moment: an imaginal compendium, received and realized by an artist capable of objectifying through the graphic medium – thanks to a skillful and trained use of tempera, India ink, pastel, and gold leaf – an intimate mystery of feminine transformation; an illuminated manuscript, in which the golden brightness of the Self, one’s transcendent and imperishable nature often stands out against a generative blue background, that is unparalleled to other works of her time (although art historians are rightly pointing out similarities and differences with other spiritual creatives of the last century, such as medium Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884), mystic Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), naturopath Emma Kunz (1892–1963), and journalist, art critic, and scholar of Tibetan Buddhism Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983), who were pioneers of abstraction).

Having settled in Ascona in mid-life, Fröbe-Kapteyn documented in her “Blue Book” the forms of imagination of a creative and independent subjectivity. Because of the care she had taken to paint or draw, collect, and preserve her works, she perhaps hoped that her “Blue Book” would survive her and, also, allow future generations to rediscover and make it their own, as a special testament to that endless search for self, at once personal and universal, that Jung would theorize with the idea of the “individuation process.”

The book The Art of the Self. The Blue Book of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, with a preface by Fabio Merlini, an introduction by Murray Stein, and an afterword by Her Royal Highness Princess Irene of the Netherlands (Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications, 2025), was presented in the context of the 2025 Zurich Lecture Series and published under the auspices of the Eranos Foundation; it represents the first attempt to systematize a collection of paintings and drawings comprising over 450 works – most of which have never been publicly displayed – that are closely linked both to the history of Eranos and to the evolution of Jung’s Analytical Psychology.