Occult Connections in France & Elsewhere, 1870-1939
The formal experiments of the Synthetist painters were only one manifestion of the drive towards a pure world of ‘absolute’ or Abstract Art.
A more rigorous approach was initiated by the aesthetician Charles Henry, an intimate of the Symbolists and a covert influence on the Neo-Impressionist painters. It was the magazine La Revue Blanche that published his L’Esthetique des Formes in 1894. In his article – one among many – Henry expounded his theory of the ‘scientific aesthetic’, an attempt to unite art and science much as Eliphas Levi and Papus wished to unite science and religion. Here he talked of an ‘unconscious calculation of forms’ in a theory developed from Theodore Fechner’s Psychophysics. With some success his theory strove to explain the impact of a work of art on the psychosomatic apparatus of the human spectator, and presumably the artist himself. He elaborated a complex colour theory of ‘directions’, ‘dynamogony’, inhibition, contrast and measure.
At this point, with this intuitive NeoPlatonism, the esoterisme of the fin-de-siecle artists and poets shows affinities with some arcane aspects of Renaissance art, which, as Francis Yates has shown, was also permeated with ideas of ‘essences’, ‘forms’ and stellar influences transduced via the magical contours of the imagination.
Gustave Moreau and The Rosicrucians after him were keen students of the Renaissance masters. In fact Julius D. Kaplan has detected the influence of NeoPlatonism in Moreau’s aesthetic theories. In his notebooks the artist described the evolution of his conception of the mystical idealism which infuses his paintings. Here the creative process transfigures the soul of the artist and, again, like Rimbaud’s Voyant or Verlaine’s Maudit, the artist-poet is possessed by what might be defined as ‘shamanistic’ powers. He is the participant in a quasi-divinatory Orphic mystery conferring a special level of awareness: ‘The divination, the intuition of things belongs only to the artist and the poet.’ According to Moreau this ‘divination’ takes the form of ‘interior flashes’ of perception – eclairs interieurs.
Kaplan points out that during the first half of the nineteenth century there was some interest in the subject of Neoplatonism among French philosophers like Victor Cousin (one of the first to use the phrase l’art pour l’art) and his follower Simon-Thodore Jouffroy. Jouffroy lectured on the subject in 1822.
A quasi-Neoplatonic conception of Light (The Astral Light) was a key tenet of Eliphas Levi’s teachings. It was also a significant element in Theosophy and its late German offshoot Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner, who founded Anthroposophy around the year 1909, was much preoccupied with magical ideas of art and was himself a pioneer of Expressionist architecture -a fantastic Expressionism with elements of Art Nouveau. His great monument was the remarkable Goetheanum (version 1 destroyed by fire, 1923, version 2, 1928) at Dornach in Switzerland. Steiner based his view of art on the doctrine of ‘atavistic clairvoyance’ and tried to externalize this in his architectural projects. He wrote: ‘Many of the forms to be found in primitive art can only be understood when we realize that they were the outcome of this primordial clairvoyant consciousness’. Here Steiner approaches mediumistic Trance Art and Surrealism, although, rather than the Surrealistic Unconscious he would have preferred the Akashic Record, a supra-mundane Anima Mundi, the repository of ancient knowledge only the initiate can exploit. This theory of art is also similar to that of English trance artist and sorcerer Austin Spare, founder of the cult of Zos-Kia and pioneer of Chaos Magic. Spare’s article on ‘Automatic Drawing’ appeared in Form magazine in 1916. Steiner’s Anthroposophical theories had some influence among Russian artists particularly the novelist Andrei Bely (Boris Bugaev), the painter Kandinsky and the composer Alexander Scriabin.
It is worth considering the case of Scriabin in more detail as he exemplifies the impact of occult teachings on musicians. Originally a composer of Chopin-esque piano pieces, Scriabin found his true voice under the influence of Wagner. His works represent a radical development of late nineteenth century Romantic tonal experimentation. Fascinated by the idea of musical colour-correspondences (following Baudelaire, prefiguring Messiaen), he devised a ‘piano of light’ and reinterpreted the Wagnerian ideal of the Total Artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) on a mystical basis:
There will have to be a fusion of all the arts, but not a theatrical one like Wagner’s Art must unite with philosophy and religion in an indivisible whole to form a new gospel… I cherish the dream of creating such a mystery… But mankind is not yet ready for it.
In his piano sonatas Scriabin explored intimate etats d’ame and in his orchestral works moved towards the ultimate ‘mystery’ with tone-poems such as ‘The Divine Poem’ (Symphony No 3 in C minor, 1905) and ‘The Poem of Ecstasy’ (first perf. 1917). In his last unfinished project, the total art ritual or ‘Mysterium’, Scriabin envisaged a performance in The Himalayas, home of the Hidden Masters. The conception was gigantic: a performance lasting seven days and ending with a general apocalyptic enlightenment. He called for a synaesthesic extravaganza incorporating costumed processions, dance, perfumes and coloured lights. By his death from septicemia in 1917 Scriabin had only begun work on the masterpiece, making outline sketches for the ‘Prefatory Action’. This has recently been reconstructed by Alexander Nemtin under the title Universe.
In 1905 the Theosophists Leadbeater and Besant published a book called Thought Forms containing illustrations of fluidic semi-abstract shapes purporting to represent images from the Astral Plane, linking the astral with esoteric psychology and physiology.
It is known that these images made an impression on a number of late Symbolist painters who found in their amorphous shapes corroboration and support for the idea of Abstract Art – an art of pure Platonic ‘form’: the ultimate stage of the Synthetist experiment in the purification of the image. These pseudo-scientific colour theories were seriously explored by artists like Kandinsky, the founder of Lyrical Abstraction) and Frantisec Kupka, the originator of mystical Orphism. Kupka developed a curvilinear, post-Art Nouveau mode of abstraction stimulated by astrological ideas of the macrocosm and the microcosm, fusing Theosophical astral teachings with the latest discoveries in molecular energy to create a form of cosmic evolutionary idealism. These images, like the ‘lines of force’ imagined by the Futurists and the Russian Rayonists, are similar to electromagnetic waveforms or the photographs of particle tracks obtained in Cloud Chambers by contemporary physicists. This is the art of Psionics and the Ether-Fields.
Theosophy and similar doctrines like Steiner’s, also provided a stimulus towards the development of the polar opposite of Kandinsky and Kupka’s lyrical paintings: Geometric Abstraction.
One of the main exponents of Geometric Abstraction was Piet Mondrian.
In his early years he had been associated with the Symbolist Jan Toorop, a contributor to the Rosicrucian Salons, an artist deeply influenced by occultism in all its forms, a creator of some of the most ‘decadent’ masterpieces of the fin-de-siecle era: ‘Apokalyps’ (1892), ‘The Three Brides’ (1893) and ‘De Sphinx’ (1894). Like many other personalities of the age, Toorop eventually became a fervent Catholic. However it was a book by the Dutch Theosophist Schoenemaekers, Het Nieuwe Wereldbield (1915) that provided Mondrian with some of the ideas for the geometric representation of pure Neo-Plastic or Platonic Images.
A more rudimentary geometricism was also present among French painters. In the work of the Nabi Serusier, for instance, who was moved in this direction by contact with the work of Desiderius Lenz and The Bueron Brotherhood. Lenz wanted to find a correlation between art and music (specifically plainsong) and worked out a canon of ‘sacred measurements’ inspired by the Ancient Egyptians. The Bueron Brotherhood, or School of Beuron) were a quasi-monastic-artistic fraternity based at a Benedictine Abbey in South Germany, again modelled on the prototypical Romantic Nazarener. Apart from Serusier, who translated Lenz’s book into French (Les Saintes Mesures, 1905), the Beuron fraternity influenced Denis and Bernard, and the Russian pioneer Abstractionist Alexei Jawlensky. Geometric theories were also manifest in the notations chromatiques of the Synthetist Filliger. In his work, described by one critic as attaining a ‘primitive angelistic perfection’ (Pincus Witten) an intuitive understanding of esoteric geometry was permeated by representationalism, producing miniature devotional icons for a private mysticism. Filliger committed suicide in 1928 by slashing his wrists.
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A.C. Evans
Illustration: Organisation of Graphic Motifs, n.d., Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957)
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