Modern art and the spiritual

Your goal in this lesson: to follow art from Impressionist light to abstraction, and to see how spiritual ideas helped painters let go of the visible world.

Light, then color

Historical On 15 April 1874, a group of artists rejected by the official Salon opened their own exhibition in Paris. A critic mocked Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, and the name “Impressionists” stuck. They painted modern life and changing outdoor light with visible brushstrokes; Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas were among them. In 1910 the English critic Roger Fry grouped the painters who came next, Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin, as “Post-Impressionists”. See Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

At the Salon d’Automne of 1905, Henri Matisse, André Derain and others showed paintings with green shadows and red trees. The critic Louis Vauxcelles called them fauves, wild beasts. In Germany, Expressionists used distortion and color for inner feeling. Color no longer had to match nature. See Fauvism and Expressionism.

Kandinsky and the inner sound

Historical Wassily Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art in December 1911, with the date 1912 on the title page. He cited Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical movement, and he believed colors and forms had an inner sound that touched the soul. In Michael Sadler’s 1914 translation he writes: “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.” His Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) of 1913 still holds cannons and buildings dissolving in a storm of color.

Historical Piet Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society in 1909. Over the next decade his trees and church facades became grids of black lines and primary colors, which he saw as a path toward universal harmony. See early abstraction.

Hilma af Klint

Historical The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862 to 1944) was a trained, respected artist who also took part in Spiritualist séances with a group of women called The Five. In 1906 she began a vast cycle she called The Paintings for the Temple, about 193 works made by 1915, which she said were commissioned by spiritual guides. She asked that they not be shown until years after her death, and they became widely known only from the 1980s.

Later tradition Was she “the first abstract artist”? The question is less useful than it seems. She did not use the word “abstract”, and several painters were moving the same way around 1910 to 1915. It is enough to say that spiritual practice was one of the doors into abstraction.

Surrealism and the women of magic

Historical André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) called for art from dreams and the unconscious. Leonora Carrington joined the Surrealists in Paris in the late 1930s and settled in Mexico City in 1942, where she and her friend Remedios Varo studied alchemy, tarot and myth and painted their own mysterious worlds. Most of these works are still in copyright, so the Surrealism page describes them and links museums instead of showing them.

Try this

Today’s exercise: open Kandinsky’s Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) on the Art Institute of Chicago website. Spend five minutes finding anything you can recognize, then five minutes only on color. Write which colors felt loud, which quiet, and why.

Quick recap

• Impressionists painted light and modern life from 1874.
• Fauves and Expressionists freed color from nature.
• Kandinsky, Mondrian and af Klint drew on Theosophy and Spiritualism.
• Surrealist women such as Carrington and Varo studied alchemy and tarot.

Keep going

You have reached the end of the course. Press “Mark as done”, and when every lesson is done you can open your certificate of completion. Keep exploring with all art movements, one page for each, from prehistoric caves to Pop Art. Then try another free course in the School, such as Tarot for Beginners, where every card is a picture to read slowly.

If you would like to go deeper into the cards themselves, read my book The Novice’s Guide to Tarot. For the practices behind many esoteric images, see The Novice’s Guide to Witchcraft.

Need a refresher? Go back to Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and the occult revival or see the whole course.

Sources

• Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Munich: Piper, 1911, dated 1912), translated by Michael T. H. Sadler as The Art of Spiritual Harmony (London: Constable, 1914).
• Julia Voss, Hilma af Klint: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
• André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (Paris, 1924).
• E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950).
• Art Institute of Chicago, Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), 1913, 1931.511.

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

Mark as done