Modernism and Spirituality Paperback – November 3, 2024

When carefully scrutinized, the modernist aesthetics that were born with Malevich, Mondrian, Kupka and Kandinsky, etc., not only show traces of their engagement in various forms of theosophy, but reveal a degree of interaction with occultism and mysticism, that forces us to reconsider the birth of abstraction as a spiritual event.It is also quite clear, that as the impetus of first-generation abstraction moved from Europe to New York due to the world wars, its spirituality was recognized and actively transformed by other artists with a deep engagement in spirituality. This change paralleled how they changed the appearance of abstract art. I’m thinking of Rothko and Reinhardt in particular.Especially after the early 19th century a lot of academic research was carried out to determine the common elements in world religion and spirituality. Also pseudo-scientific occult research flourished―and gave birth to numerous societies such as Rosicrucianism (formal Rosicrucian Order, AMORC, was founded in 1915), The Spiritism (1850’ies), the Theosophical Society (1875) and Anthroposophy (1912).The main tenet was, that religion was an institutionalized version of timeless truths about how man could evolve into a higher being. Christianity was generally considered the worst, because it did not permit of direct cognition of the higher worlds. It only insisted on faith in dogma. And faith and dogma both seemed unscientific and naive.So around 1900’s there began developing spirituality as a path of cognition, not as a path of faith, and this change is really one of the fundamentals of modernism.The open minded engagement in spirituality as a means to transcendental cognition is also one of the reasons it might seem that modernism is non-religious: Apparently we have no faith. Read more