The Influence of Mysticism on Early Abstract Painting: Theosophy & Kandinsky
Guided by Madame Helena Blavatsky, the school of Theosophy entered the twentieth century and grew in membership and expansive thought. Ideas where refined, some were dropped, some raised up. Theosophy became the main school of alternative thought: the other source of ideas one could turn to if wearied by the mechanistic explanations of the world that were offered by the rational and academic communities at the time.
For those who weren’t driven only by rigorous fact-chasing but found excitement and inspiration in romantic and poetic exploration of ideas, those who found the serious process of evidence-testing tedious and pedantic. That’s not to say, however, that the proponents of Theosophy weren’t interested in evidence, the society strived to prove their theories about spiritual reality through constant experiments and techniques such as their peregrinations through meditation and seances mentioned in the previous piece.
Theosophy was a mixed bag of ideas at its height, a combination of Eastern philosophies, religions, and experiments with the paranormal. This clash of theory is what critics have taken an issue with historically, but it is important to remember how ground-breaking this was for Western thinkers at the time. Roger Lipsey said: “However mixed the stew of ideas served up by Theosophy, it was food in a time of famine” (Lipsey, 1988). In turn, trying to explain such a melting pot of ideas to new followers lead to some truly unique visual communication, created by teachers of the society to help illustrate their words. Theosophy was responsible for generating key motifs and techniques in imagery that entered the mainstream of twentieth-century art. Second-generation Theosophists C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant published two books that spurred on this new visual language in 1908: Man Visible and Invisible and Thought-Forms.
Leadbeater’s sessions involved specific exercises, the aim being to access a hidden layer of reality and dictate to his followers what he could see. He claimed to use a process of psychic clairvoyance (acknowledging that Western critics had dismissed the idea) to envisage the aura around a person and describe it to a group of artists to recreate. Along with Besant, the two worked on these exercises, claiming to explore the “etheric” forms of a plethora of human emotions, saying that when accessing the upper layer of reality, these invisible energies possess form and colour. The images the teams of artists created at the instruction of Leadbeater and Besant were ground-breaking in their strict language of abstract colour and shape used to represent metaphysical and complex ideas, purest in their style and completely divorced of any attempt to recreate figurative objects seen with the unenlightened eye.
As Lipsey put it: “The impact of Theosophy on art was selective but enduring. Its multilevel universe, its promise that human consciousness can evolve, its assurance that human beings belong to an unseen world of grace and power no less than to the daily grind, its rudimentary abstract imagery and colour symbolism-all of these would enter into the work of a handful of pioneering modern artists in forms now familiar to many of us” (Lipsey, 1988).
Artists who embraced this visual language and brought it into their own work range from lesser known painters such as Frantisek Kupka to household names like Piet Mondrian (an adherent of Theosophy throughout his life). Kandinsky was another artist who looked towards Theosophy as a new hope. He wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art: “The number of people who set no store by the methods of materialistic science in matters concerning the “nonmaterial,” or matter that is not perceptible to our senses, is at last increasing. And just as art seeks help from the primitives, these people turn for help to half-forgotten methods … Mrs. H. P. Blavatsky was perhaps the first person who, after years spent in India, established a firm link between these “savages” and our own civilization” (Kandinsky, 1912).
Theosophy’s understanding of the emotional content of colour is not regarded upon reflection as mere mystic mumbo-jumbo but a serious and accurate observation and one that has since been backed up with psychological and scientific evidence and is one of the most important aspects of the later movement of abstract expressionism. The colour chart at the beginning of Man Visible and Invisible was the perfect guide for painters to bring into their practice and one that Kandinsky was recorded to have responded to.
In 1970, Finnish historian Sixten Ringbom published a book-length study of Kandinsky’s relationship with Theosophy titled The Sounding Cosmos. The study revealed evidence that allowed for a truly revisionist interpretation of Kandinsky and the birth of modern abstract art. It stated that Kandinsky’s interest in Theosophy wasn’t a private source of amusement but performed a decisive role in the formation of his artistic outlook.
The study was incredibly important as it negated the art historical account of early abstract painters and revealed that contrary to popular belief, early abstract painters didn’t create a new abstract language in which to paint because they were purely interested in the intellectual idea of exploring formal elements and the removal of figurative depiction, but there was a definite spiritual motive at the core of the most important and dramatic revolution in art history.
Despite this paper (and many others that found evidence for mysticism, esotericism and other forms of spiritual thought being a major catalyst for the move into abstraction) the history books continued to miss this fact in all ongoing publications. To this day, major players in modernism are still depicted in biographies with their spiritual motivations scrubbed clean and with a focus on the rational elements of their intellectual pursuits.
So, to think back upon all the information we have traversed, it isn’t an overstatement when Roger Lipsey said: “Without Cezanne and Theosophy, no modern art” (Lipsey, 1988). Cezanne’s lifetime of accruing knowledge of painting combined with the teachings of the Theosophists, who gathered wisdom from shrines and scrolls, inspired a generation of artists who desired to create a new movement and taught them to look inward and to attempt to represent this inner self in visual experiments. As Lipsey said: “It taught a few to take the cosmos into account-to depict the world at large as a majestic play of energies and forms visible to “eyes of fire. […] Imagery generated by scientific means, whether of wheeling galaxies or twirling subatomic particles, can never record how we feel about these things nor what they prompt us to think. An informed poetry of the cosmos is needed no less than an informed science, and Theosophy gave some the courage to seek it” (Lipsey, 1988).
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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