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the Spiritual in Art
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Piet Mondrian |
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Mark Rothko |
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Agnes Martin |
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click on an image to enlarge and for more info about the artist
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Jackson Pollock |
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 The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985By demonstrating the huge impact of mysticism and the occult on 20th-century artists from Gauguin to Pollack, Mondrian to O'Keefe, this work effectively refutes the popular fallacy that modernism is concerned solely with line, form, and color. Further, as it examines modernism's complex philosophical origins, it demonstrates that without such impact, abstract art as we know it would not have emerged at all. Seventeen essays, all by distinguished scholars, treat topics as diverse as synesthesia, theosophy, alchemy, hermeticism, Yoga, and Zen, and several overlooked or forgotten artists are given serious consideration. This work, the catalog for an exhibit mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, belongs in every serious art library. From the 1890s through the present day, various forms of spirituality have influenced artists and inspired many important transitions from representational art to abstraction. Mystical and speculative philosophies with origins in both eastern and western cultures, as well as other utopian ideas, have been at the heart of the groundbreaking work of Paul Gauguin, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Beuys. With 523 illustrations, 122 of which are in full color. Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art Pioneering work by the great modernist painter, considered by many to be the father of abstract art and a leader in the movement to free art from traditional bonds. Kandinsky's provocative thoughts on color theory and the nature of art. Analysis of Picasso, Matisse, and earlier masters. 12 illustrations. Writing that "music is the ultimate teacher," Kandinsky embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions. The first three survive only in black-and-white photographs taken by fellow artist and friend, Gabriele Münter. While studies, sketches, and improvisations exist (particularly of Composition II), a Nazi raid on the Bauhaus in the 1930s resulted in the confiscation of Kandinsky's first three Compositions. They were displayed in the State-sponsored exhibit "Degenerate Art" then destroyed along with works by Paul Klee, Franz Marc and other modern artists. Influenced by Theosophy and the perception of a coming New Age, a common theme among Kandinsky's first seven Compositions is the Apocalypse, or the end of the world as we know it. Writing of the "artist as prophet" in his book, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky created paintings in the years immediately preceding World War I showing a coming cataclysm which would alter individual and social reality. Raised an Orthodox Christian, Kandinsky drew upon the Jewish and Christian stories of Noah's Ark, Jonah and the whale, Christ's Anastasis and Resurrection, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Revelation, various Russian folk tales, and the common mythological experiences of death and rebirth. Never attempting to picture any one of these stories as a narrative, he used their veiled imagery as symbols of the archetypes of death / rebirth and destruction / creation he felt were imminent to the pre-World War I world. As he stated in Concerning the Spiritual In Art (see below), Kandinsky felt that an authentic artist creating art from "an internal necessity" inhabits the tip of an upward moving triangle. This progressing triangle is penetrating and proceeding into tomorrow. Accordingly, what was odd or inconceivable yesterday is commonplace today; what is avant garde (and only understood by the few) today is standard tomorrow. The modern artist/prophet stands lonely at the tip of this triangle making new discoveries and ushering in tomorrow's reality. Kandinsky had become aware of recent developments in sciences, as well as the advances of modern artists who had contributed to radically new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Composition IV and subsequent paintings are primarily concerned with evoking a spiritual resonance in viewer and artist. As in his painting of the apocalypse by water (Composition VI), Kandinsky puts the viewer in the situation of experiencing these epic myths by translating them into contemporary terms along with requisite senses of desperation, flurry, urgency, and confusion. This spiritual communion of viewer-painting-artist/prophet is ineffable but may be described to the limits of words and images. |
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