Vogler thinks she got her passion for photography from her father Kurt who, at the age of 10, made his first camera from a cigar box. Her maternal grandfather Otto had been a keen amateur painter, and when she was 3 he dandled her on his knee and read her art books featuring the Hermitage and the Prado. She loved the paintings of Goya in particular. Otto played the cello, her father the violin and she herself the piano. Her mother Herta sang. “There was always culture around me. I took it for granted. It was only later I realised how privileged I had been.”
When Vogler was 9, something astounding happened. She relates it matter-of-factly. “I was a very sickly child. I had bronchial asthma. I was in bed for months. One day a light figure took me somewhere.”
Hang on. What?
“It was an angel,” she says. And she says it so normally, so crisply, that you take her seriously. Where was she “taken”? “To a beautiful garden kind of place. I immediately got relief from my breathing difficulties.” Her parents thought she must have imagined it, but she is sure she was taken to “another dimension. I was not scared. It was a lovely feeling”. And that was only the beginning.
As her childhood continued, she became interested in Eastern philosophy, psychology and astrology, which wasn’t so engrained in popular culture as it is today. She was open about her beliefs, despite friends’ cynicism. “It did not matter. I had inner convictions. My thoughts have always been open.”
She also claims to have had “some kind of cosmic experience”, literally travelling among the stars. In her twenties, the family rent asunder by war, she was in Munich and her mother, in Berlin, employed an astrologer to try to ascertain whether Volger was still alive. The astrologer captured her character “perfectly” and reassured Vogler’s mother that her daughter was safe.
Vogler studied philosophy, literature and psychology at universities in Berlin, Vienna and Munich, where she obtained her doctorate. Later she wrote essays on these subjects, and began to photograph everyday objects: vases, flowers and the like. Continuing her research into astrology, she met Jung, who told her he had an astrological chart created for each client he analysed. “He was very spiritual,” she says.
Each deceased member of her family has visited her after death. “When my father died, it was about 10pm. At that moment, the door to my bedroom opened. He came in and embraced me. He ‘stayed’ with me for four weeks, though I didn’t see him again. He was just a presence.”
In 1957 she came to the UK to research a script for Bavarian radio about English landscape and heard about the artists’ colony at St Ives. There, the painter Peter Lanyon introduced her to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, Nicholson’s second wife (the couple had divorced). “She was ambitious, very keen for publicity,” says Vogler spikily. “Have you met Ben?” Hepworth asked Vogler. “I think you’d get on.” Hepworth called him to arrange a meeting. He shouted down the phone at her: “She isn’t some kind of journalist is she? Oh for heaven’s sake, all right then. Half an hour on Friday.” Unwittingly, the ex-Mrs Nicholson had just played matchmaker between her former husband and his future wife.
That lunch lasted five hours. “‘How do you propose seeing the landscape,’ Ben asked me. ‘Buses? No. I’ll take you out.’ ” In the car the next day, “We didn’t say much. There was this wonderful, easy silence between us. He asked me to stay at the end of that day but I was visiting friends in Wales and I didn’t want to fall in love. I was planning to go to an ashram in India.”
He sent her a postcard while she was in Wales, saying he wanted to see her in London. The friend she was staying with told her: “He sounds desperate. I bet your destiny is here. Let him come.” So Vogler relented. “He swept me off my feet,” she says, laughing. “Six weeks later, in a register office in Hampstead, we married.”
Moving back to St Ives as Nicholson’s wife, and 30 years his junior, was not easy. “Barbara was jealous, difficult. In her own way she tried to make trouble. She called me ‘that little girl’. There were people gossiping.” The age difference didn’t bother her. “Ben was so fantastically alive. He was never easy, but I had a feeling for genius and he never intimidated me. He liked that I was somebody in my own right.”
Of their peer group, Peter Lanyon “wanted to be number one but of course wasn’t, though he prided himself on being a real Cornishman at least”. Patrick Heron was a friend, “though his paintings were a bit too coloured for my liking”. Was St Ives a hotbed of sex and fun? She lets out a dismissive snort. “People make up stories. Isn’t everything sexy looking back? Artists are always freer, aren’t they, rejecting tradition?” The couple moved to Switzerland in 1958, she says, partly because Nichol- son was frustrated because he couldn’t read her writing and wanted to learn German. She wasn’t loving St Ives either. “It was cold, dark. I said to Ben, ‘I don’t see myself growing old here.’ ” After the move, she became more dedicated to photography. They travelled (her favourite places were Tuscany, Greece and Prague). She beetled up and down mountains; he remained stationary with his easel. They were both immersed in their work. Was there artistic rivalry between her and Nicholson? “No. He had a great respect for me. He always wanted to know about my ideas. He always encouraged me to take photographs. ‘You should do more,’ he would say. ‘Do a book’.” He said her pictures “put colour photography on to a new level”.
She hopes her pictures show “something metaphysical, something more than you actually see”, and talks of the “spiritual peace” she found in Tibet, Prague (“famous for its alchemy and astrology”) and a Zen monastery in Japan. She met the Dalai Lama a couple of times (“he has a lovely sense of humour”) and Laurens van der Post, who informed the Prince of Wales’s spiritual beliefs. In 1969, a book on her work, The Quiet Eye, brought critical acclaim. The same year she had her first show in Zurich.
Nothing cataclysmic led to Nicholson and Vogler’s separation in 1971 (they divorced six years later). The age difference had shown more as they grew older and “Ben became more difficult”. Nicholson returned to England, Vogler stayed in Switzerland. They remained good friends.
Vogler told Nicholson not to be scared of death. “It is just a transition, I told Ben, ‘Never have fear’.” The night he died, February 6, 1982, the room she was in “lit up. I saw him. He said: ‘I’m so happy. You were right.’ ”
Does she miss him? “Death is not an end,” she says. “We will be together in another lifetime.” How can she be so sure? “Because I am in touch with Ben through a medium,” she says quietly. Vogler lives independently (she never remarried) beside Lake Geneva. Still “young in spirit” she plans to write her and Nicholson’s life story. She has never missed having children (“I have had a very rich life”) and, despite a slightly impaired knee, still devours travel: Peru, Morocco and St Petersburg are remaining dream destinations.
A critic once said that Vogler made the familiar seem unfamiliar, and when she first exhibited in 1973 at the ICA she watched people stay a long time in front of her photographs. “I could see they were genuinely, deeply moved.” This means everything to her. Her work and character are rooted in deep spiritual beliefs. While you may find it preposterous, Vogler would say it was all down to being touched by an angel.
Felicitas Vogler: World of Light, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh (www.natgalscot.ac.uk 0131-624 6200), May 6-July 9, free
