Mysticism and Occultism in Modern ArtAuthor(s): Linda Dalrymple HendersonSource: Art Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1, Mysticism and Occultism in Modern Art (Spring, 1987),pp. 5-8Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776836 .Accessed: 06/06/2011 13:55

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Editor's Statement:

Mysticism and Occultism in

Modern Art

By Linda Dalrymple Henderson

T he articles in this issue of Art Jour- nal were chosen from the more than

thirty papers proposed for the session on "Mystical and Philosophical Themes in Modern Art" at the 1986 Annual Meet- ing of the College Art Association. The overwhelming response to that call for papers documents the growing activity in a field pioneered in the late 1960s by such figures as the Mondrian scholar Robert Welsh and the Kandinsky schol- ars Sixten Ringbom and Rose-Carol Washton Long.' To choose from among that group of possible articles the small number for which there was space was extremely difficult; my choices in the end were made in order to present an overview of the period from 1885 to 1930 and, where possible, to use texts by young scholars who had recently com- pleted dissertations on a relevant topic (e.g., Kosinski, Benson, Gibson, and Warlick). This group of articles also complements the catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum's Fall 1986 exhibition, The Spiritual in Art: Ab- stract Painting 1980-1985, organized by Maurice Tuchman and Judi Free- man assisted by a team of consulting scholars.2 The seventeen essays, glossa- ry, and extensive bibliographical back- ground material on mysticism and oc- cultism in that catalogue will serve as essential resources for any scholar work- ing in this area.

In the tradition of the earliest studies of the mystical and occult sources for modern art, which focused on the pio- neers of abstraction-Kandinsky, Mon- drian, Kupka, and Malevich-the Los Angeles catalogue concentrates on to- tally abstract painting. Yet a large pre- liminary section of the exhibition is devoted to Symbolism, and the first three articles of this Art Journal issue

demonstrate that mysticism and occult- ism were central to Symbolism. Indeed, apart from the text on Kandinsky by Rose-Carol Washton Long, the respon- dent for the 1986 C.A.A. session, none of the articles in the present issue discuss purely abstract paintings, since my call for papers was intended to elicit new material on modernism in general. As the following essays suggest, the emer- gence in the later nineteenth century of new theories about the nature of reality and the nature of the self created an openness towards mystical and occult ideas that increasingly can be identified as a major characteristic of modernism itself.

T he articles published here introduce a number of names and terms from

the esoteric tradition, in addition to the more general categories "mysticism" and "occultism." For an overview of this vast field, the reader should consult Robert Galbreath's excellent glossary in the Los Angeles catalogue, as well as his earlier publications on the history of occultism.3 Following Galbreath, I have adopted the term "occultism" to include all types of what Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines as "matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural agencies or some secret knowledge of them." The sense of the hidden links occultism to esotericism, a word also used widely in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to refer to such occult pursuits as alchemy, the Cabala, magic, astrology, Rosicrucianism, spiri- tualism, and Theosophy.

Mysticism, on the other hand, is a more specific term defined in Webster's as "the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate real-

ity." Although mysticism can be treated as a subset within the larger category of occultism, as Galbreath has done, there exists a prominent, independent mysti- cal tradition. Mysticism has a long his- tory in both Eastern and Western thought, and, unlike occultism, in which the individual must be initiated into a body of secret knowledge, it is based on an individual's personal experience of transcendence. Nevertheless, elements of the mystical tradition have often con- tributed to subsequent occult doctrines, as in the role of mystical Neoplatonism in Renaissance "high magic" and nine- teenth-century Theosophy or the impor- tance of Swedenborg for spiritualism.

The articles that follow demonstrate the essential role that the mystical and occult traditions (and combinations of the two) played in art and art theory from Symbolism through Surrealism. Moreover, these studies bring to light new unifying threads that connect one modern movement to another and reveal the continued relevance of mystical Romantic thought for modernism. For example, from the perspective of mysti- cism, the Neoplatonic quest for the reat- tainment of a state of unity between self and an absolute One appears in Dorothy Kosinski's text in the theories of the Romantic writer Ballanche and in those of the occultist Papus (pseudonym of Gerard Encausse).4 That mystical Neo- platonism is central to Symbolism as well is clear from Mark Cheetham's study of Gauguin's art theory.

In its popular early-twentieth-century guise as mystical monism, the Neopla- tonic search for unity of self and world (i.e., spirit and matter) appears among the Berlin Dadaists (Timothy Benson's article) and in Max Weber and the Stieglitz circle in New York (my own

Spring 1987 5

text). Even M.E. Warlick's discussion of alchemy draws on the frequent interpre- tation of alchemy as a quest for mystical revelation of self. Indeed, the connection of Surrealism to monism and a Roman- tic rediscovery of a lost unity has been made in the past by Michel Carrouges and by Anna Balakian, who has high- lighted Breton's debt to the mystical magic of the occultist Eliphas L6vi.5

Of the occult sources reappearing from movement to movement, Levi (pseudonym of the Abbe Alphonse Louis Constant) is one of the most frequently cited. Mentioned also by Kosinski, Levi's ideas are central to Vojt6ch Jirat-Wasiu- tynfski's interpretation of Gauguin's Self- Portrait with Halo and Snake as an image of a magus. Now that Balakian has established Levi's relevance for Bre- ton, the discovery of the occult lineage from Gauguin to Breton suggests a new line of continuity from Symbolism to Surrealism.

Nor did this continuity break during the Cubist era in France. Papus (cited by Kosinski) was a major collaborator on the spiritualist periodical of 1909-14, La Vie Mystbrieuse, to which the Cubists' colleagues Eugene Figuiere and Alexandre Mercereau contributed. In addition, Edouard Schur6, the author of Les Grands Initibs (1889), and the Rosi- crucian Sar P61adan (both discussed by Kosinski and Jirat-Wasiutyfiski) re- mained active through the first two decades of the twentieth century. Jacques Villon and other Puteaux Cubists read P61adan's translation of Leonardo's Trattato, and Guillaume Apollinaire wrote P61adan's obituary for Mercure de France in 1918.6 Schur6's Grands Initibs reached its twenty-fifth edition in 1912, and unquestibnably, the mystical and occult interpretation of Orpheus to which Schur6, P61adan, and Papus contributed underlies Apolli- naire's conception of Orphic Cubism.

Beyond specific mystical and occult sources, a broader theme unifies

many of the articles in this issue: that of pre-Freudian psychology and its close connection to mysticism and occultism.7 Jennifer Gibson's discussion of Breton, Masson, and the dynamic psychiatry of Pierre Janet reveals the roots of Surreal- ism's psychic automatism in nineteenth- century psychologists' studies of me- diums as recorders of the unconscious. M.E. Warlick notes that Max Ernst also relied on French psychology when he used visual images from Jean Charcot's studies of hysteria in the last chapter of Une Semaine de bonth. Further, War- lick establishes that the link between alchemy and psychology first made by the Viennese psychologist Herbert Sil- berer in his Probleme der Mystik und

Ihrer Symbolik (1914) was central to Ernest's understanding of the alchemi- cal processes he evoked in his collage novel."

Timothy Benson provides a fascinat- ing look into the thinking of Berlin Da- daists, who avidly discussed Otto Gross's psychology of the unconscious, along with the theories of Alfred Adler, Ernst Kretschmer, and Freud. In Berlin, psychology blended readily with anar- chism and mysticism to produce the new conception of modern consciousness that supported Hausmann's Dada activities. The joining of psychology and mysti- cism in the works of the British mystic socialist Edward Carpenter produced a quite different notion of consciousness, "cosmic consiousness," which had a pro- found effect in early-twentieth-century America and England (as I discuss in my essay).

The first artists and writers with a double interest in psychology and mysti- cism-occultism are to be found in the Symbolist era. As Filiz Burhan has demonstrated so convincingly in her dis- sertation, "Vision and Visionaries: Nineteenth-Century Psychological The- ory, the Occult Sciences, and the For- mation of the Symbolist Aesthetic in France," contemporary exploration of levels of consciousness by psychologists stimulated the mystical and occult con- cerns Symbolist writers inherited from such precursors as Baudelaire and Bal- zac.9 Citing Burhan, as well as Debora Silverman's study of the relationship of Art Nouveau to contemporary French neurology,'0 Cheetham's article points to changing psychological notions of the self as a factor in the resurgence of Neoplatonism in late-nineteenth-cen- tury France. Likewise, both Kosinski and Jirat-Wasiutyfiski refer to Burhan, while the latter also cites Ann Murray's study of the impact of Franz Anton Mesmer's theory of magnetism on Van Gogh." Clearly, psychology and mysti- cal or occult pursuits were seen in the Symbolist era as complementary routes for exploring the inner reality of self and world.

In a period in which the physical sciences were exploring the complex structure of matter beneath surface appearances, psychology suggested a similar complexity within the self. The new possibilities concerning both object and perceiving subject led to a profusion of hypotheses about the nature of real- ity, some of which sound little less fan- tastic than the ten- or eleven-dimen- sional world of superstrings proposed in the "supersymmetry" theories of physi- cists today.2 Occultists like Madame Blavatsky drew on contemporary scien- tific views on electricity and the ether to bolster the case for the unification of

science and religion."3 Conversely, a number of scientists were imbued with a mystical outlook, as in the case of Bal- four Stewart and P. G. Tait, whose Unseen Universe of 1875 Blavatsky cites repeatedly in Isis Unveiled.'" In addition to the psychologists interested in psychi- cal research (such as Frederic W. H. Myers, Pierre Janet, Theodore Flour- noy, Cesare Lombroso, and William James), an impressive number of nine- teenth-century scientists were convinced spiritualists: the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (Darwin's collaborator), the chemist William Crookes, the astron- omers Camille Flammarion and J. C. F. Z*llner, and the physicist Oliver Lodge, to name some of the most prominent figures.'5 Closer to the art world, Seu- rat's mentor in psychophysics, Charles Henry, not only drew on the mathemati- cal aesthetics of the Polish mathemati- cian and occultist Hoene Wronski but also followed with interest the activities of the prominent French spiritualist Colonel de Rochas.'6

s the articles published both here and in the Los Angeles catalogue

demonstrate, historians are increasingly recognizing the prevalence of mysticism and occultism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century culture. The mystical and occult context of French Symbolism has been most thoroughly examined, and these studies serve as vital sources and models for historians of early-twentieth-century modernism. Scholars of literature were the first to focus on these themes, and two of the best texts on the subject are Alain Mer- cier's Sources esoteriques et occultes de la pobsie symboliste (1870-1914) and Jean Pierrot's Decadent Imagination, 1880-1900.17 In music history Roy Howat, in Debussy in Proportion, has established this composer's deep in- volvement in the esoteric tradition and his use of mystical proportion systems in his compositions.' For art historians, H.R. Rookmaaker's Synthetist Art Theories (1959) set forth clues about Symbolist sources such as Swedenborg and Neoplatonism, which have been fol- lowed up in the articles and dissertations discussed above.'9 In addition, Patricia Mathews's recently published study of Albert Aurier's art theory and criticism is a seminal contribution to the intellec- tual history of Symbolist art.20

In the face of such evidence, no longer can we accept a streamlined, secularized history of modernism that presents mod- ern art as a product of those attitudes towards reality which characterize the historian's own milieu rather than that of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. For example, the notion of cor- respondences, so often presented as a

6 Art Journal

purely aesthetic, formal issue, is deeply rooted in the mysticism of Swedenborg and Eliphas Levi, mediated by Baude- laire.21 In utilizing the theory of corre- spondences, an artist like Gauguin was making an epistemological statement about the relationship of self to world, about the analogy between material and spiritual realms and between inner and outer realities. To the Symbolist artist, art was relevation, and Symbolist doc- trine, imbued as it was with mysticism and occultism, paved the way for much that would follow in the twentieth cen- tury, from Cubist idealism and Stieg- litz-circle pantheism to abstract art and the magical world of Surrealism.

On a broader cultural scale, several of the following articles demonstrate that an interest in the mystical and occult was often linked closely to liberal poli- tics and liberated sexual views. Rose- Carol Washton Long's study of Kan- dinsky and anarchism, in particular, focuses on this issue. Clearly, question- ing the nature of reality and self was central to the late-nineteenth-century reaction against reigning positivistic science and the status quo in politics and morality. The sociologist Edward Tirya- kian has argued that the role of "esoteric culture" has been vital at such moments of "shifting cultural paradigms":

The particular thrust of efficacy of esoteric culture lay, I would sug- gest, in the exoteric culture having what may be characterized as a loss of confidence in established symbols and cognitive models of reality, in the exhaustion of insti- tutionalized collective symbols of identity, so to speak. There was what may be called a "retreat from reason into the occult"..., a retreat ... in the sense of a reli- gious retreat, a temporary with- drawal for inspirational medita- tion which provides a restoring of psychic energy to be used in re- entering everyday life with greater vigor.22 Tiryakian's description ideally suits

the later nineteenth century and the rise of modernism as a self-conscious move- ment. Yet, apart from the efforts of a small, but growing, number of historians working in art and other areas,23 recog- nition of the role of mysticism and oc- cultism in modernism has been ex- tremely slow in coming. It would seem that scholarship on modernism has been conditioned by the spirit of seculariza- tion that from the 1920s onward led psychologists, for example, to distance their discipline from earlier connections to spiritualism. While the seculariza- tion, the transition from "cosmic to clin- ical," as I term it in my essay below, is

valid for the sciences, it has obscured for historians the relevance of esoteric cul- ture for their study of the late-nine- teenth- and early-twentieth centuries. As part of what Tiryakian calls a "seed- bed cultural source of change," mysti- cism and occultism nourished a wide variety of innovations in art, music, lit- erature, and dance.24 We historians of the postmodern era must be willing to recognize their contribution.

Notes 1 See, for example: Sixten Ringbom, "Art in the

'Epoch of the Great Spiritual': Occult Ele- ments in the Early Theory of Abstract Paint- ing," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29 (1966), pp. 386-418; Rose-Carol Washton, "Vassily Kandinsky, 1909-1913: Painting and Theory" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Uni- versity, 1968); and Robert P. Welsh, "Mon- drian and Theosophy," in Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944: A Centennial Exhibition, exh. cat, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1971, pp. 35-52.

2 The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890- 1985, exh. cat., Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum, November 23, 1986-March 8, 1987; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, April 17-July 19, 1987; The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, September 1-November 22, 1987.

3 See, for example: Robert Galbreath, "The His- tory of Modern Occultism: A Bibliographical Survey," Journal of Popular Culture, 5 (Win- ter 1971), pp. 726-54; and "Explaining Mod- ern Occultism," in The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow, Urbana, Ill., 1983, pp. 11-33.

4 On Neoplatonism and esoteric sources in Romantic thought, see: M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, New York, 1971, pp. 146-63. On the continuity from mystical Romanticism through Surrealism, see: Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanti- cism, and the Fourth Dimension," in Los Angeles County Museum (cited n. 2), pp. 219- 37.

5 See: Michel Carrouges, "Esoterism and Sur- realism" (1947), in Andrb Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism, trans. Maura Pren- dergast, University, Alabama, 1974, pp. 10-66; and Anna Balakian, Andrb Breton: Magus of Surrealism, New York, 1971, pp. 34-39.

6 Dora Vallier, Jacques Villon: Oeuvres de 1897 a 1956, Paris, 1957, p. 62. P6ladan's translation appeared as Leonard da Vinci, Trait& de la peinture, traduit integralement pour la prem- ibre fois en franCais sur la codex Vaticinus (Urbinas) 1270, trans. J. PNladan, Paris, 1910. Apollinaire's tribute to Peladan was published under "Echos" in Mercure de France, 120 (16 July 1918), pp. 372-73. I am grateful to Willard Bohn for bringing this text to my attention.

7 On this subject, which is largely ignored in official histories of psychology, see: Lancelot

Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud, New York, 1960; and Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The His- tory and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, New York, 1970. Ellenberger emphasizes the continuity between early-nineteenth-century magnetism and hypnotism and the theories of Pierre Janet and others at the end of the century. On psychical research and spiritual- ism, see: Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1856-1914, Cambridge, Eng., 1985; and R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture, New York, 1977.

8 Silberer's association of alchemy and psychol- ogy considerably preceded Jung's far better known discussions of the subject. On Jung and alchemy (as well as other aspects of occultism and mysticism), see: James Webb, in The Occult Establishment, La Salle, Ill., 1976, ch. 6. Webb also provides an overview of Freud's connections to occultism and mysticism at vari- ous points in his career. On Jung and occultism, see also the volume Psychology and the Occult, drawn from The Collected Works of C.J. Jung, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton. 1977.

9 Filiz Eda Burhan, "Vision and Visionaries: Nineteenth-Century Psychological Theory, the Occult Sciences, and the Formation of the Symbolist Aesthetic in France" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1979). Burhan's study provides a useful clarification of the Symbol- ists' appreciation of "science," a term that bore a wide range of meanings in this period. Beyond the psychology of the unconscious, which I emphasize here, the psychophysics of Charles Henry, for example, also blended readily with mysticism and occultism to support the central Symbolist tenet of synaesthesia (see n. 16 below).

Burhan's dissertation, along with those of Silverman and Murray (cited nn. 10, 11), was omitted from the listing of dissertations in the "Bibliography: Symbolist Art, 1974-1984" published in the "Symbolist Art and Litera- ture," issue of Art Journal, 45 (Summer 1985). Although articles by Vojt6ch Jirat-Wasiu- tynfski are included in that bibliography, it also omits his 1975 Princeton dissertation, "Paul Gauguin in the Context of Symbolism," pub- lished in 1978 in Garland's Outstanding Dis- sertations in the Fine Arts series.

10 Debora Leah Silverman, "Nature, Nobility, and Neurology: The Ideological Origins of 'Art Nouveau' in France, 1889-1900" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1983).

11 Ann H. Murray, "Mesmeric Theory as an Interpretive Tool in Comprehending the Style and Imagery of Vincent van Gogh" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1974).

12 See, for example: Paul Davies, Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory ofNature, New York, 1984.

13 See: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, 2 vols., New York, 1877. A patchwork quilt drawn from a huge variety of occult and scientific sources, Isis Unveiled is a fascinating record of the

Spring 1987 7

nonpositivistic science and scientists deemed acceptable by Blavatsky and her colleagues.

14 Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, The Unseen Universe; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State, London, 1875.

15 Most of these figures are discussed in Oppen- heim (cited n. 7).

16 Burhan (cited n. 9), pp. 37-38. Henry's eso- teric side is also discussed by Jos6 A. Argiielles in Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychophysical Aesthetic, Chicago, 1972.

17 Alain Mercier, Les Sources eisotiriques et occultes de la pobsie symboliste (1870-1914), 2 vols., Paris, 1969, 1974 (the second volume deals with European Symbolism); Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880-1900, Chi- cago, 1981. John Senior's The Way Down and Out in Symbolist Literature, Ithaca, N.Y., 1959, was one of the first overviews of this

subject.

18 Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis, Cambridge, 1983. There is much to be done in the history of music in this area, since, in addition to Debussy, a number of other musicians of overtly occult or mystical persua- sion come to mind, such as Alexander Scriabin and Gustav Holst. Like Debussy, Erik Satie was associated with the Rosicrucian P61ladan in the early 1890s. In addition, Frederick Delius, who was close to Gauguin and his circle in the same period, actually collaborated with the occultist Papus on a publication entitled Ana- tomie et physiologie de I'orchestre, Paris, 1894. See: Lionel Carley, Delius: The Paris Years, London, 1975, pp. 34-35. Arnold Schoenberg was an admirer of Swedenborg and described "musical space" in terms of Sweden- borg's vision of heaven. See: Schoenberg, Style and Idea, New York, 1950, p. 113.

19 Rookmaaker's original text has been repub- lished as Gauguin and Nineteenth-Century Art Theory, Amsterdam, 1972.

20 Patricia Townley Mathews, Aurier's Symbol- ist Art Criticism and Theory, Ann Arbor, 1986. Another valuable contribution to this field is Caroline Boyle-Turner's Paul Shrusier, Ann Arbor, 1983. See also the recent article by Janis Bergman-Carton, "The Medium is the Medium: Jules Bois, Spiritualism, and the Esoteric Interests of the Nabis," Arts Maga- zine, 61 (December 1986), pp. 24-29, which grew out of work in a seminar at The University of Texas.

21 For this fuller view, see, for example: Burhan (cited n. 9), pp. 128-48; and Mathews (cited n. 20), pp. 28-38.

22 Edward A. Tiryakian, "Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture," in On the Margin of the Visible: Sociology, the Esoteric, and the Occult, ed. Edward A. Tiryakian, New York, 1974, pp. 274-75.

23 Two additional sources outside the field of art history should be mentioned. Tom Gibbons has argued that modernism is deeply indebted to occultism in Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Stud- ies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas, 1880-1920, Nedlands, Western Australia, 1973. Douglas Kellogg Wood provides further

evidence for the importance of mysticism for modern expression in Men Against Time: Nico- las Berdyaev, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and C.G. Jung, Lawrence, Kansas, 1982. Wood sees mysticism and "spatialization" as the major methods by which the four antitemporal- ists he discusses (and others) sought to escape from the relentless march of historical time.

24 In addition to the musicians cited in n. 18 and the French authors noted above, the list of writers who drew on mysticism or occultism includes August Strindberg, Thomas Mann, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, D.H. Law- rence, and Upton Sinclair. See: Martin Ebon, They Knew the Unknown World, New York, 1971. On Joyce, see: William York Tindall, "James Joyce and the Hermetic Tradition," Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 (January 1954), pp. 23-39; and for Lawrence, see my article in this Art Journal issue. Gibbons (cited n. 23) adds T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to this list. Among the pioneers of modern dance, many of whom sought to capture a cosmic rhythm, Ruth St. Denis was a mystic whose dances grew out of her exploration of Eastern thought and other spiritual sources. See: Suzanne Shelton, Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis, New York, 1981.

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Associate Professor of Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983), as well as numerous articles and an essay in the Los Angeles County Museum's exhibition catalogue The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 (1986).

Photographic Credits: p. 24 (Figs. 4, 5), H. Roger Viollet; p. 25, Joseph Szaszfa; p. 32, International Museum ofPhotography at George Eastman House; p. 42 (Fig. 6), Hilla von Rebay Foundation, Green Farms, Conn. (Joseph Szaszfa); p. 47, Jirg P. Anders, Berlin; pp. 63 (Fig. 1), 65 (Fig. 5), 67 (Fig. 8), 68 (Fig. 11), Editions Tradi- tionnelles, Paris; pp. 65 (Figs. 3, 4), 66, 67 (Fig. 9), 68 (Fig. 12), 69, 70, 71, Yale University Library.

8 Art Journal