Exhibition Traces Du Sacrãƒâ© Spirituality in Modern and Contemporary Art

What to exercise when, in the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "All that is solid melts into air?" Times of upheaval inspire a search for alternative understandings of reality. This was as true a century ago as information technology is today. In a prefiguring of our ain troubled moment, the ascent of modern capitalism undermined long established social systems while new scientific discoveries challenged long accustomed religious beliefs. Then, as now, those dissatisfied with mechanistic explanations of life and society had two choices: retreat back to now discredited philosophies or seek other ways of agreement the forces reshaping man life.

In the tardily 19th century, 2 phenomena emerged from this confusion. Many of the era's leading thinkers embraced the new scientific discipline while rejecting a purely materialist vision of human being. At the same time, artists moved beyond conventional representational strategies toward a radical new approach to art. In 1986, a now legendary exhibition at the Los Angeles Canton Museum of Art proposed a link betwixt these two developments. "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985" challenged prevailing formalist histories of modernism past tracing the origins of Western brainchild to a confluence of ideas about spirituality current at the turn of the last century.

Maurice Tuchman, the exhibition curator, threw down the gauntlet in the first line of his catalogue essay. He alleged, "Abstract art remains misunderstood by the majority of the viewing public." In a sprawling exhibition of works by more than 100 artists, he presented both canonical figures and little known practitioners, early on modernist masters and contemporary artists, in each instance revealing deep connections to spiritual, utopian, or metaphysical beliefs.

At the time, his radical reconceptualization of the history of modernism landed like a thud. In 1998, author Charlene Spretnak interviewed him about the show's effect on art-world attitudes. He responded: "None, whatsoever." But that assessment is no longer authentic. Where in one case it was, in the words of Rosalind Krauss, "embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence," today information technology could not be more au courant.

Massimiliano Gioni's 2013 Venice Biennale, titled "The Encyclopedic Palace," was dedicated to spiritualist cosmologies of all kinds. Since that time, a steady drip of rediscoveries of fine art with occult themes has been felt. In 2014 and 2015, Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995), aka Cameron, had her occult fine art showcased at LA MoCA's Pacific Design Eye ("Songs for the Witch Woman") and Jeffrey Deitch in New York ("Cinderella of the Wastelands"). A 2016 exhibition of British artist Georgiana Houghton'due south "spirit drawings" at the Courtauld in London drew huge crowds, the same year that "Linguistic communication of the Birds" at New York University's 80WSE Gallery presented a cross-historical exploration of art inspired past Kabbalah, alchemy, hermeticism, and Tarot. Self-taught painter and telepathic healer Emma Kunz was featured at the Serpentine just last jump. And, of course, the Guggenheim's Hilma af Klint show broke records for attendance last twelvemonth—mayhap the moment it became clear to all that the new interest was truly a juggernaut.

Installation view of Hilma af Klint's "The X Largest." Paradigm courtesy of Ben Davis.

Spiritual Science

This build-upward of exhibitions has shed a low-cal on an of import aspect of the modernist embrace of spirituality, a phenomenon that has to exist views in a wider context. In the early on modern era, the boundary betwixt science and religion was far more porous than it is today. Charles Darwin, who did and so much to shake the foundations of 19th-century religion, was adamantly opposed to the supernatural. Yet Alfred Russel Wallace, who simultaneously and independently conceived of the theory of evolution and was originally listed equally its co-discoverer, was a true laic. His embrace of spiritualism may account for the degree to which he has been erased from the history of science.

Arthur Conan Doyle, at present mostly associated with his creation of Sherlock Holmes, was a fervent Spiritualist and in fact devoted many more books to spiritualism than to his hyper-rational detective. Thomas Edison was keenly interested in occult motion and invented the telephone to talk to the dead. William James, i of the fathers of mod psychology, conducted experiments to confirm the existence of life after death and the persistence of spirit.

The receptivity of these and other 19th-century intellectuals to spiritual concerns was no doubt encouraged by new technologies and discoveries. The telegraph, x-rays, radioactivity, and the possibility of non-Euclidan geometry and a fourth dimension (afterward Einstein this came to be defined as spacetime) all seemed to ostend the existence of an invisible, non-fabric realm.

Conversely, even the wonkier proponents of the spiritualist view couched their ideas in scientific terms. Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, a doctrine influential on many artists of the age, situated her synthesis of Hinduism and Buddhism within the scientific world, applying the new concept of evolution to the spiritual evolution of humanity. Rudolf Steiner'due south anthroposophy, an outgrowth of and reaction against theosophy, was also concerned with psychic and cosmic evolution to be achieved by the awarding of what he called "spiritual science."

Agnes Pelton, Sand Tempest (1932). Photograph by Edward C. Robison III, courtesy of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.

Modernism and Mediums

What has until now been underappreciated is merely how pervasive such ideas were, particularly among the artists who formed the modernist advanced.

In her 2014 book, The Spiritual Dynamic in Mod Fine art, Charlene Spretnak expands on the ideas in Tuchman'due south "The Spiritual in Fine art" exhibition, taking it across abstraction to suggest the spiritual underpinnings of a wide swath of modern and contemporary artists. Her book, based on painstaking research into the motivations of artists from 1800 to the present, proposes a radical revision of our understanding of the history of modernism.  Spretnak argues that spirituality is at the heart of the established canon and that mystical and occult ideas run through the works of artists equally diverse as Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Beckman, Miró, Dove, and Klee.

Spretnak builds her statement around broadly recognized artists. The exhibitions cited higher up, by contrast, focus on figures who accept been more marginal to art history. As a upshot, there has been some debate about their legitimacy as artists.

Hilma af Klint, for case, was an established and recognized fellow member of the Swedish art community. However, the works for which she is now being celebrated were done privately, equally part of her interest with a group of four other spiritually inclined women, created at the management of a spirit guide. These paintings, which the spirits decreed should be displayed in a particularly designed temple, would provide cognition necessary for the coming New Age. Anticipating disquisitional hostility, af Klint decreed that her works of visionary geometry were not to exist unveiled to the public until 20 years after her death. In fact, information technology took more 40 posthumous years for these works to enter the art discourse through Tuchman's 1986 exhibition.

The paintings were different anything being washed at the time. Their spirals, circles, calligraphic notations, and esoteric symbols were deeply indebted to af Klint's study of theosophy. As a result, fifty-fifty today the curators of the Guggenheim show seem uncertain how to situate this work. In a circular-table give-and-take published in the exhibition catalogue, a group of eminent writers, artists, and curators fence questions nigh af Klint's intentionality, the authorship of works produced under the influence of a spirit guide, and whether a painting that is a diagram of a college reality qualifies as an abstraction. In the New York Review of Books, Susan Tallman raised like issues, asking, "To what degree does celebrating these things as works of art, and jubilant af Klint as their creator, invalidate everything she was hoping to achieve?"

However, the notion of the artist every bit channel for otherworldly forces is hardly unique to Hilma af Klint. Artists as comfortably approved every bit Whistler, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich were also inspired past theosophy and anthroposophy. None of them created the kind of "pure abstraction" extolled by mid-century critics. Kandinsky, for one, produced controlled explosions of color that bear a striking resemblance to images that appear in Idea-Forms, a standard theosophical text. Mondrian'due south geometric compositions were meant to limited the "dynamic equilibrium" of the immaterial realm. And, of grade, the Surrealists were entranced past automatic drawing as a way to connect with the unconscious.

Hyman Bloom, Cadaver. Courtesy of Getty Images.

The Inner Realm

Agnes Pelton, whose piece of work volition be showcased at the Whitney Museum starting in March, has a clearer claim to conventional fine art history. Some other follower of theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky, she was included in the 1913 Arsenal show before moving out w.

There, she joined a customs of like-minded artists who shared not merely her interest in spiritualism, just too her more liberal views on gender and sexual practice. Visitors to her Whitney exhibition will see dreamlike semi-abstractions that mingle evocations of desert landscapes with ethereal and vaguely representational forms.

Pelton was concerned with the metaphysical properties of color and their power to bring the viewer into a state of enlightenment. InEnchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts, and the American Westward, a new book on Spiritualist movements, she is quoted equally proverb, "These pictures are like trivial windows opening to the view of a region not nevertheless much visited consciously or by intention—an inner realm, rather than an outer landscape."

While Pelton has been little known outside the western US, Hyman Bloom was one time prominent plenty to be dubbed the "first Abstract Expressionist creative person" by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The creative person, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew, fell out of the limelight for a variety of reasons. Not least of these was his involvement with spiritual concerns.

His paintings nowadays gem-like surfaces that are engulfed by a struggle between low-cal and darkness. The work is indebted to a moment of mystical illumination he experienced as a swain during a menses of extreme isolation and financial hardship. Every bit he described information technology, "I had a conviction of immortality, of existence part of something permanent and ever-irresolute, of metamorphosis every bit the nature of existence."

His recent show at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, "Matters of Life and Death," is centered on his paintings of cadavers, which, along with lushly painted near abstruse representations of synagogues, rabbis, chandeliers, seances, and archaeological digs, were part of his exploration of the astral plane. This concept posits a state of being that exists between life and decease and is informed by Flower's deep reading of theosophical texts, also as his interest in mysticism, kabbalah, and other esoteric religions.

Installation view of "Emma Kunz – Visionary Drawings: An exhibition conceived with Christodoulos Panayiotou" at the Serpentine Galleries. Courtesy of the Serpentine.

A New Historic period for Spiritualism in Art

Why are these figures, one time quite marginal, moving into spotlight?

One explanation may be the breakdown of the catechism under pressure from feminism and multiculturalism. Indeed, information technology is noteworthy how many of these artists are women or, like Bloom, members of marginalized groups. (While many Jews participated in the mid-century advanced, Flower was unusual in his overt reference to his devotional practice.)

Another factor in the surge of interest may be a revulsion against today'southward over-the-top commodification of fine art. There is something very appealing about art that resists the marketplace through its appeal to underground knowledge.

But the new receptivity to spirituality also reflects our current state of upheaval. Once over again, nosotros confront destabilizing forces, among them a yawning inequality that attests to the failures of neoliberal fantasies about the rationality of the market place. New technologies like AI and always more sophisticated corporate and government surveillance threaten our very sense of self and social club. And there is widespread recognition that materialism has produced a climate crisis that may spell the finish of life as we know it.

In one case again, a search for alternatives has manifested itself in a surge of involvement in spiritual and spiritualist concerns. Star divination, the New Yorker notes, is hot right now. The New York Times reports that millennials are very into witches and "witch parties." But along with astrology, the occult, magic, and alchemy, the new spirituality also manifests itself in a longing for restorative politics, and human-centered social attitudes.

Who are the contemporary equivalents to af Klint, Pelton, or Flower? Today enough of artists are willing to cop to spiritual influences on their piece of work. Some get further, attempting to channel unconscious or even supernatural energies through drugs, hypnosis, or seances. Yet others seek portals through technology. In place of the spiritual progress promised by esoteric philosophies like theosophy and anthroposophy, they grapple with the Singularity and its assertion that artificial intelligence is the next country in (non)man evolution. Though none of this has nonetheless gelatinous into a recognizable motion, it would seem that gimmicky art and the spirit have once again made a tentative peace.

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Source: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/spirituality-and-art-resurgence-1737117

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