The Influence of Mysticism on Early Abstract Painting: Cezanne and Blavatsky
Abstract painting took off as a new and powerful creative force in the art world in the early twentieth century. The artist and thinker who is known by most as the clearest and most passionate proponent for the argument of abstract painting being driven by a form of spirituality was Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist who is accepted by many as the foremost pioneer of abstract painting.
In 1896 Kandinsky moved to Munich to study and by 1912 published his ground-breaking paper Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In the paper, Kandinsky proposed that art needed to take a new direction, one that reflected the West’s growing distrust for organised religion and the realisation that science wasn’t entirely fit to take its place (Kandinsky, 1912). Kandinsky and other thinkers recognised that despite science’s great discoveries, it lacked the emotional and sensational aspects that religion fulfilled in people’s lives. He wanted to incorporate the new understanding of spirituality that was becoming popular in the West, one that wasn’t tied to one religion or dogma, but embraced a modern relationship with the mysteries of the universe (Kandinsky, 1912).
Kandinsky’s paper arguing for the existence of the “spiritual” in art and the ways in which artists could explore it marked the greeting of this burgeoning phenomenon, but he wasn’t the sole reason for its creation. The spiritual in twentieth-century art was reached via the connection of many influences. The most important of these sources were painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), the art and literature movement of Symbolism, and a great mystic and teacher named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891).
Cezanne was described by the master-painter Matisse as “The Master of us All” (Lipsey, 1988) and is generally understood as one of the most influential and important artists of all time. His influence started with a generation of artists in France studying his work around the time of his death in 1906, two of whom were none other than Matisse and Picasso. Cezanne’s main motive in his practice was to learn to be able to ‘see’ better, “to penetrate the essence of Nature” (Lipsey, 1988). In letters to his son, Cezanne wrote about being able to take in Nature more clearly and realising with dismay that he was unable to capture the intensity and beauty of Nature in all its glory. His major works reflected this struggle to capture the magic of Nature in their formal qualities, they weren’t painted in a naturalist or realist style, there is an honest about the brushwork that showed an admission that the painter wouldn’t be able to recreate his view perfectly and so offered a humble artists approximation instead: a sign that stood for Nature instead of an attempt to embody it.
When we look at the painting, we aren’t made to believe the illusion, we are instead made aware of the presence of the artist, his eye, his questioning of what lay before him. The final work was a visual conversation between source and artist, a diagram of the sensations of the reality around him. There is a spirituality in Cezanne’s approach; his painting contains a sense of the metaphysical: not just the visible surfaces of the objects around him, but an artist’s depiction of the energy and sensations the scenery around him provides. His paintings contain a sense of intense looking, a soul in a body peering out, his presence in the landscape both temporary and infinitely connected to everything around him.
The intense questioning this humble man pursued in his practice has been passed down as legacy to the next generation of masters, “light and colour to Matisse and others, structure and complexity to Picasso and the Cubists, and from these first recipients to the twentieth-century artists of every generation. He was a systematic painter, not a systematic thinker. It was left to other guides in this formative period to construct entire world-views that inscribed the human being in a larger universe, set forth the task of being human, and inspired artists by the sheer scope of their vision” (Lipsey, 1988).
Madame Blavatsky or HPB as she was often known, was the cofounder of The Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and provided the face and a guiding force for the organisation. Blavatsky published many writings in her time, with two of her most important works titled Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (New York, 1877) and The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (London, 1888), two very large volumes that laid out the core teachings of Theosophy. The books were a smorgasbord of topics, including cosmology, philosophy, comparative religion, science, history, magic occult studies and spiritualism. The influence of her teachings reached so many artists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that her work is understood by a few to be a massive contribution to the transformation of painting.
There have been many criticisms of Theosophical doctrine by sceptics of the eagerness to claim many disputed practices as truths, but the point remains that she “grasped the poverty of Western culture in her time no less acutely than Nietzsche and found remarkable resource for its renewal. These resources were, broadly speaking, the “wisdoms of the East” and Western thought not just in its familiar highways but in its occult and heretical byways” (Lipsey, 1988).
Of course, the concept of bringing Eastern ideas to the West wasn’t an entirely new one when HPB appeared on the scene. Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau had taken inspiration from the newly translated sacred texts of China and India in the mid nineteenth century and presented their ideas on metaphysics to Western ears in a respectful and well researched manner. But HPB had the passionate force of someone with a vision and powerful conviction and her research went wider than the Transcendentalists, bringing together Eastern ideas together with ideas of European occultism, alchemy and ancient Egyptian philosophy.
Not only did HPB do this, but she provided a personal addition to Theosophy: a physical and performative display. She believed in a pragmatic approach to research, she wanted to thrust her hand into the aether and directly experience the metaphysical elements of reality. She did this in two different forms: investigation of the practical meditation practices of the East and an experimentation with occult powers via seances and direction communication with spirits from the other side (Lipsey, 1988).
HPB was a driving force of Theosophy and the reason its teachings inspired so many artists and in the next article we will look at Theosophy a little more and how it impacted Kandinsky specifically.
Bibliography
Kandinsky, W., 1912. Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Lipsey, R., 1988. The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Dover Publications, Inc..
Written by Louis Loveless
Louis Loveless is a fine artist from London, specialising in painting and collage. When not making art, Loveless works at the Barbican Centre in the box office and has held various positions in hospitality.
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