Across Currents Synthesis in African American Abstract Painting National Center for Art
ART VIEW
Art VIEW; HOW THE SPIRITUAL INFUSED THE ABSTRACT
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December 21, 1986
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''The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985'' surveys a great adventure. At a time when a new generation of abstract artists experiences the grids of Mondrian not as spiritual threshholds but as prison bars, the exhibition reminds us what was at stake when a handful of artists in unlike parts of Europe first painted without reference to the external globe. Information technology helps united states measure the leap they made and sympathise the dubiousness - and balls - that was required to brand it.
The exhibition inaugurates the Robert O. Anderson Edifice of the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art and suggests the path this expanding museum hopes to pursue. It wants to exist inclusive. It is concerned with East and West, with Eastward Coast and West Coast, with modern and anti-modernistic, and it is looking for subjects, like this one, that will make bridges possible.
''The Spiritual in Art'' is besides a direct challenge to the moving-picture show of modernism that has been painted past the Museum of Modernistic Art. This large evidence pays near no attention to the Cezanne-Picasso-Matisse axis around which much of the permanent installation of the Modern now revolves. It has little or no interest in art-historial questions of who came get-go, or who influenced whom.
Its focus is non on the formal breakthrough but on a particular kind of content. Drawing upon a body of enquiry that has been growing steadily during the terminal 25 years, the exhibition sets out to prove, in the words of its curator, Maurice Tuchman, that the ''genesis and development of abstruse fine art were inextricably tied to spiritual ideas electric current in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.'' It wants to demonstrate that these ideas are still current - that an ''astonishingly high proportion of visual artists in the past 100 years have been involved with these ideas and conventionalities systems.''
The spritual sparks that helped inspire the pioneering abstruse fine art of Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich and Frantisek Kupka flew out of spiritualism and the occult. They were generated by such ventures into mysticism every bit Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, Eastern philosophy, and diverse Eastern and Western religions. Spiritual ideas were not peripheral to these artists' lives, not something that happend to pop into their minds as they stood by their sheet. Kupka participated in seances and was a practicing medium. Kandinsky attended private fetes involved with magic, black masses and heathen rituals.
Mondrian was a member of the Dutch Theosophical Society and lived briefly in the quarters of the French Theosophical Society in Paris. He said one time that he ''got everything from the Underground Doctrine'' of Theosophy, which was an attempt past its founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to do zero less than read, assimilate and synthesize all religions. Information technology has been known for some time how much of Mondrian's symbolism - including the ubiquitous vertical and horizontal lines - and how much of his utopianism, was shaped past Theosophical doctrine. In his 1910-11 painting ''Development,'' which is in the show, he defines the ascending stages in a Theosophical journeying through which he later hoped to guide the public in his abstruse art.
The exhibition demonstrates how widespread the belatedly-19th-century reaction was against Realism, Impressionism, materialist philosophy and materialistic values. Positivist and rationalist systems had generated every bit many problems as answers, and many, if not most avant-garde artists began looking elsewhere. In that location was a hunger for a reality that was universal and timeless rather than particular and ephemeral. There was a fascination both with mysticism, which Mr. Tuchman defines as the ''search for the state of oneness with ultimate reality,'' and with the occult.
In his catalogue essay, Robert P. Welsh makes the crucial bespeak that developments such as Theosophy were not aberrations - non hallucinatory episodes in the hyperactive minds of bizarre cultists. He states that they should be ''viewed every bit the culmination of studies in comparative faith that began with the Enlightenment and were successively enriched throughout the 19th century.'' Indeed the distrust of reason and exploration of intuitive, nonrational feel seem to accept run parallel to the Enlightenment's religion in scientific and systematic thought. The mystical, transcendental electric current ran through the United states of america as well, animating Walt Whitman and William James.
The exhibition begins with Symbolism, Edvard Munch, Jugendstil (Art Nouveau in Germany) and the Nabis (a group of artists in French republic who took their proper noun from the Hebrew discussion for ''prophet''). In the work of artists similar Munch, the French Nabi painter Paul Ranson and the Dutch Symbolist Jan Toorop, the search for spiritual synthesis and essences led to a pictorial simplification in which lines, shapes and colors are near significant in themselves. After the introductory gallery, in that location is a display of 16th- to 19th-century esoteric books with which artists in the show were familiar.
In this show Symbolism is to abstraction what Cubism is to the generally accepted view of modern art. Information technology had enormous influence on European culture as a whole, in part considering it was identified not simply with painters such as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, but as well with poets like Stephane Mallarme and Paul Verlaine and composers similar Claude Debussy. Indeed Symbolism believed in the unity of the arts. It was fascinated with the notion of synesthesia, which Mr. Tuchman describes as the ''overlap between the senses.'' Many artists were attracted to the idea that human beings tin hear painting and see music, and they believed that the more senses art engages, the more than total the experience information technology offers can exist.
There are, in issue, five solo shows: on Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, Mondrian and Hilma af Klint, a previously unknown Swedish artist whose somewhat mechanical abstruse paintings and drawings of organic, geometrical forms were marked by Theosophy and Anthroposophy. Kandinsky, similar other artists at the cease of the 19th century, saw art as a new faith. In his 1912 essay ''Concerning the Spiritual in Fine art'' - on which the title of the testify is based - he equated representational art with materialism. He saw abstraction as a language that was not only capable of expressing deeper truths simply too of communicating them to all 5 senses.
The exhibition sketches Kandinsky's development from figuration to brainchild. It also suggests the cardinal issue of Kandinsky'due south hidden imagery. In her book on ''Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style,'' Rose Carol Washton-Long discusses the seriousness with which Kandinsky considered the question of intelligibility. In early on abstruse paintings, he dissolved imagery, merely left traces of information technology, allowing just enough for the viewer to hold onto. The theme of the Apocalypse - inspired past the Theosophical and Anthroposophical writings of Rudolf Steiner - was crucial to Kandinsky's prophetic ambition. In a great early abstract painting, such every bit the 1913 ''Picture With White Border,'' there is an apocalyptic sense of both destruction and creation, disintegration and commemoration.
Kandinsky's 1912 ''Lady in Moscow'' is a show stopper. A woman stands in the foreground with her hand effectually a dog similar a medium effectually a crystal ball. Floating to her left is a pink sphere. Above her is a flat blackness coffinlike shape that recurs in several of Kandinsky's works at this time. If it is sinister in its colour and in the way it seems to suck in the lord's day, it also seems to belong to the sun as a body to a head. The piece of work was apparently inspired by Steiner'due south discussion of clairvoyance.
Dissimilar Kandinsky, Kupka and Mondrian, there is no evidence that Malevich studied mysticism or occultism, but in the Symbolist environment of tardily-19th-century Moscow, mystical and occult ideas were everywhere. His earliest painting in the show, the 1908 ''Nymphs,'' with its choreography of petallike nymphs, is Symbolist in inspiration. Similar Kandinsky, Malevich was touched past Russian folk fine art and the feeling for Russian soil. He also believed in ''zaum'' - meaning ''beyond reason'' or ''across the listen'' - a suprarational procedure by which connections could exist fabricated that transcended the laws and limits of the everyday globe. Malevich's Suprematist abstractions, with their geometric forms hovering and embedded in dumbo monochromatic fields, are in part expressions of prevailing ideas virtually cosmology and nothingness.
The 2d and far less successful part of the show is broken into what Mr. Tuchman calls the ''v underlying impulses within the spiritual-abstract nexus'' -Cosmic Imagery, Dualities, Synesthesia, Spiritual Geometry and Vibrations (co-ordinate to Mr. Tuchman, Kandinsky believed that ''human emotions consist of vibrations of the soul, and that the soul is set into vibrations past nature''); each impulse was defined in Symbolist art and literature. Each department presents a range of artists that, whenever possible, extends into the present. Involving and so many artists - the listing of contemporary painters includes Brice Marden, Bill Jensen, Jasper Johns, Dorothea Rockburne, Bruce Nauman, Bruno Ceccobelli, Robert Irwin and Sigmar Polke -makes the indicate that spiritualism continues to play a role in art, but it does so at the expense of the exhibition's intensity and focus.
The impact of the testify has a expert deal to exercise with its timing. This is the offset museum show to suggest not only how widespread the artistic dissatisfaction with all institutional forms of thinking has been, but how widespread information technology is now. The current artistic interest in the more intutitive, holistic aspects of Eastern thinking is one reflection of it. Earlier this year P.S. one in Queens and the New Museum of Contemporary Fine art in SoHo organized exhibitions that revealed mystical and occult pockets inside gimmicky art. While ''Art and Abracadabra,'' the central exhibition at the 1986 Venice Biennale, was a self-serving mess, it went even further in suggesting the degree to which 20th-century artists have been attracted by esoteric concerns.
The importance of the show is besides due, to a considerable caste, to the catalogue. Information technology is massive, more 400 pages, and it contains essays by 19 scholars. The level of intelligence and passion is generally high, and it provides a larger forum to art historians such as Sixten Ringbom, a medieval scholar teaching in Finland.
But the catalogue besides exposes the exhibition'due south weaknesses. If it is going to make a point about how concerned abstract artists similar Kandinsky and Mondrian were to invent a universal language, and then the evidence itself should have been more imaginative near its presentation. The installation is dry out and methodical. For anyone not already familiar with the material, the impact of spiritualism, and the abstract artist's struggle with content, are likely to exist inaccessible.
It is also clear from the catalogue that Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich believed that art had to create an experience. They wanted to pause down the distance between themselves and the globe, and they wanted their paintings to exercise the same for u.s.. They made contemplative paintings in which information technology is necessary, beginning of all, to effort and lose ourselves. This cannot exist done when galleries in which the paintings are shown are constricted, when there is no place to sit, and when, in the second half of the show, works past so many dissimilar artists are hung adjacent as in a salon.
The exhibition does suggest both the possibilities and the political and artistic dangers for artists inspired by mystical and esoteric thinking. At the beginning of the catalogue, Mr. Tuchman writes that the ''Nazi theory of Aryan supremacy'' was ''indebted to various versions of Theosophy.'' One artistic danger lies in literally taking a spiritual symbol, epitome or sacred geometric class then trying to illuminate it. The result tin can be facile and inert. What distinguishes Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and the Abstract Expressionists is the critical importance of procedure. Their best work was a discovery in which artistic and spiritual journeying merged.
In the second part of the show, Pollock stands out. He was interested in mysticism and in Jung. In his paintings, he knew that attaining the psychological and mythical level he was afterwards could non be done without ritual and sacrifice. His abstract paintings became that ritual, sacrificial procedure. Pollock is i of the few artists after the abstruse pioneers who understood that entry into a more cosmic realm has a cost. His paintings remain so substantial because they are at the same time the record of his journey, his destination and the toll he paid for getting at that place.
Later endmost at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on March 8, the exhibition will exist at the Museum of Gimmicky Art, Chicago, from April 17 to July xix, and so at the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague from Sept. one to Nov. 22. It was financed in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Atlantic Richfield Foundation.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/21/arts/art-view-how-the-spiritual-infused-the-abstract.html
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