On the Spiritual in Art

Almost one hundred years ago, Kandinsky asked himself, just like Gauguin had asked before him, where we are going and what the duty of the artist really is. Kandinsky cites Schumann:

What seemed to be well on its way to become a new philosophy full of hope, with spirituality, content and life intact, seems, instead, to have developed into something that perhaps could be formulated like this:

Clement Greenberg was only 7 years old when O’Keeffe had her first major exhibition with paintings of the fourth dimension, at the 291, and he became an art critic in the 40-ies. His critique of O’Keeffe was always negative and he brutally lashed out in his criticism, calling it “not much more than colored photography”. Kandinsky he detested as well.

Greenberg’s favorite was Jackson Pollock, whom he used to bring forth his thesis about “art for art’s own sake”, according to Elizabeth Langhorn in an article in American Art, 1998. She claims that Greenberg missed the point completely with Pollock’s art, and could only talk about the two-dimensional surface. However, the shapes that so fascinated  Greenberg, were the result of the same kind of spiritual seeking that Greenberg didn’t want to hear of. Pollock’s teacher, Frederic John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, made his students familiar with the order of Rosicrucian, hinduism, buddhism, yoga, reincarnation and concepts of karma, to expand their consciousness.

The inner search obviously meant more to Pollock than a two-dimensional, abstract play with shapes, and according to Langhorne he used his symbolic images as a “secret, holy language… in admiration, invocation of this world’s forces or spirits”.

VIDEO – Jackson Pollock in 1951

…another Modernist going shamanic and transcendental…

It seems that Kandinsky’s spiritual art was still alive after all, although hidden under the mainstream chatter of its most avid critics.

Is it then possibly the critics who are responsible, for purposely selling the audience a misunderstood Modernism?

The book Jackson Pollock, 1912-1956 by Leonhard Emmerling, can be read online.

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