In recent years we have had an ‘occult’ revival in contemporary art, all be it, small and relatively under the radar. This resurgence of an interest in magic, mythology and esotericism can be seen in current serial publications like Sabat, Hexus Journal and Gut Magazine as well as exhibitions and events such as ‘Language of the Birds: Occult and Art’ at New York University, ‘Neo-Pagan- Bitch-Witch!’ at Evelyn Yard, ‘Witchy Methodologies’ at ICA, ‘The Dark Monarch; Magic and modernity in British art’ at Tate, St. Ives, ‘Witches and Wicked Bodies’ at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, ‘Folk Horror Revival: Awakening the Fields’ at The Hepworth and ‘Tai Shani: Semiramis to name just a few. This recent revival has made me want to try to understand historically how and why the avant-garde related to esoteric thought and if any of those ideas are still present in artists work today. For the purpose of this essay, I will focus on the avant-garde in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. First my examination of Guillaume Apollinaire, presents him as a spokesperson following an imaginative parallel journey that mixed scientific and occult theory. This became interested in a fourth dimension with the invention of the x-ray, then seen as an unthinkable advance in human sight enabling us to see through solid objects. I will then examine Mondrian and Kandinsky’s interest in Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeaters theosophical theory of ‘Thought Forms’ to create what is considered as some of the earliest abstract art. I then turn to the Surrealists spell-like automatic drawing and writing to look at the differences between Andre Masson and Austin Osman Spares attempts at summoning a more unconsciously driven and profoundly magical version of their art. What I have found is that amongst the avant-garde artists exploring esoteric thought most were slightly influenced with very few actually initiated into magical, occult or theosophical groups or orders. To me this came as no surprise, with all spiritual fluidity aside, these organised groups do tend to be scholarly and inherently conservative being based on inherited knowledge and tradition, leaving little room for individual explanation. What I will try to establish is that a common artistic method is that of adaption and interpretation of esotericism as opposed to a full understanding of the magic or ritual found in the objects of their fascination. This seems to create a kind of self-manifested belief system that’s point of worship is a mysterious set of analytically placed props and clues. These are offered to us by the artist, alluding to the indescribable workings of deep within and way beyond. There is something to say for a sense of wonder and yearning that can be found in ideas of the unseen and the unknown which give the curious mind of the artist complete creative and imaginative freedom in their work.
Apollinaire
The poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire’s writing encompassed the French Symbolists, Cubists and the scientific discoveries and spiritualist theories of the fourth dimension that coincided at the start of the century. As well as a vast collection of ‘primitive’ art and objects, Apollinaire had an extensive library that spanned subjects from eroticism to criminology as well as texts on occultism that would have played a part in the eclectic nature of André Breton’s Surrealism. Although arriving in Paris as Symbolism was nearing its end, its influence can still be seen in Apollinaire. He was aware of Paul Gauguin’s primitivism, and the mystic approach to everyday life subscribed to Baudelaire ideas of ‘poetic genius’ in regard to recalling childhood visions as an analogy to adult life (Buser, 1968: 375). However, even with his fascination with the arcane, Apollinaire felt that magic had been abused by his nineteenth century antecedents and argued for a practice of magic, science and plastic arts in combination. This championed the legitimate place for magic in the twentieth century despite technological and scientific advances surpassing theories of a more theological nature (Choucha, 1991: 30-31). Apollinaire was interested in the theory of a fourth dimension later popularised by Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity: an extra dimension beyond our visible capabilities of the three-dimensions of height, depth and width. With genuine scientific questioning of this possibility came proof for occultists of unseen spiritual and metaphysical realms existing simultaneously to our own (Gibbons, 1981: 130).
Apollinaire’s library circa 1910
Despite studies of non-Euclidean Geometry disdain towards the spiritual element of the fourth dimension, Apollinaire’s (1913) Les Peintres Cubistes still talks of it in relation to non-Euclidean geometry and painting in a manner that sits between that of science and spiritual—one of the imagination’s yearning for the infinite away from the confinements of our physical world. Apollinaire talks of the freedom and realness of non-Eucildean geometry and of space being eternal and extending everywhere. Human is no longer the measure of perfection, instead, a cerebral thought of humans in the universe is (Gibbons, 1981: 131). This is an enormous expansion of rules of perspective and the nature of choice of subject matter within art that unlocked unexplored ground and set a challenge to perceive the impossible.
The turn of the century sees a clear cross over between the use of non-Euclidean geometry and the fascination of ‘primitive’ non-geometric sculpture. There is also an appreciation in the function—or perceived function—of ‘primitive’ works of art and an understanding of their magic and ritual use. This would have mystified pockets of the western avant-garde at the time, and helped them to mystify themselves: the assessment as to whether his fascination was with genuine use of ritual and magic or just aesthetic hijack remains problematic. Such a hijack is absent in recent revivals that instead favour an aesthetic closer to 1980s science-fiction which avoids the problems of cultural appropriation. Picasso began to paint these ‘primitive idols’ into his works as symbolism, combined with the use of non-Euclidean geometry. This allowed a viewer to transport themselves in and around the subjects, that were unsettlingly grotesque and of the deepest and darkest of dreams, to move among them instead of stand in one place in front of a two-dimensional painting (Choucha, 1991: 31). Following on from Apollinaire art starts to become symbolic, scientific and magical and sets a precedent for the power of ritual and the use of the unknown as a subject. It is important to point out that this was all within a decade of Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of the x-ray in 1896. This encouraged further speculation about the immateriality of matter, and the existence of a fourth dimension, as the Cubists began to attempt to reach a new religiously sublime form of artwork (Gibbons, 1981: 140-141). In the painting of František Kupka from around 1912 there are shadow-like grey figures that are visually akin to x-rays and seem to allude to interactions with the spiritual realms (Henderson, 1988: 323).
Besant and Leadbeater
X-rays created a point in which occult science and rational science could meet in relation to some kind of ‘proof’ of an unseen reality, a fourth dimension, or the relativity of space. The x-ray made it into Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeaters’ (1901) Thought Forms that set out Theosophical theories that thoughts and feelings were physical yet unseen auras that were made from vivid colours and shapes (Henderson, 1988: 326). Their influence can be seen in the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky forming the fundamental basis for abstract painting (Gibbons, 1981: 137). Bringing us back to the present, rather than Thought Forms colour an auras have been presented in the influence of Yoga and Chakras in the work of young artists. Ringbom (1966: 386) asserted that this, and many other esoteric or occult influences, were often left out of writing about the work of artists of this time—showing an act of distancing by many scholars wanting to use more secular techniques while examining art through the twentieth century (Henderson, 1987: 7).
Kandinsky’s theosophical interests, are still rarely seriously mentioned in relation to his creative efforts but possibly this is changing with the revival (Ringbom, 1966: 368). It seems almost impossible to think that the main interests of an artist will not feed in to their work, even if unconsciously. In his writings Kandinsky talks about ‘spiritual pyramids’ and ‘paths of knowledge’ that forms a science that allows the laws of nature to be communicated through art. He viewed all great art as having traces of an inner sense of being in common, and not a focus on the external allowing no place for the material in his work (Ringbom, 1966: 391-395). Similar to the quest to visualise or understand the fourth dimension of many of the Cubist painters, Kandinsky was also working with what we don’t see: something ungraspable but certainly something we are able to feel but unable to explain. Again, a challenge is set, one of infinite possibility and complete subjectivity.
The Surrealists and Automatism
With Automatism, the Surrealists began to experiment with a practice of unconscious channeling of thoughts, but although still interested in occult theories their work became less a process of representing the unseen and unknown. This was more about letting the very subject possess them and produce the work while they, themselves were in a self-induced, semi-conscious trance-like state. Andre Breton talked of the practice of automatism as crossing dangerous lines to search for forbidden truths (Choucha, 1991: 47). Breton’s deistic beliefs caused him to argue that everything is in fact magic and the supernatural is actually completely natural but hidden by means of human conditioning. He thought the reversal of this conditioning and the limitations it brings can allow one to begin to fathom the unknown though not understand it in context to its universe (Balakian, 1964: 34). Automatism was a common practice used by mediums to contact spirits, however Surrealism rejected this in favour of it being a method of awakening a suppressed higher form of the self, Automatism for them, was used as a psychological experiment and attempt to unlock their goals by way of collective activities that they would have borrowed from C. G. Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious (Choucha, 1991: 48). However, on a worldlier level, the use of unconscious experiments was a way of firmly positioning themselves in opposition to the pretensions of the time. They adopted a Freudian view to suppress the ego’s conformity to those pretentions by way of oppression of the unconscious (Hoffman, 1948: 151). But also, to mangle and abuse the science of psychoanalysis, and in fact all science and intellect at the time. If psychoanalysis was investigating uncovered parts of the mind it was doing so in order to rationalize it and house it within a logical framework (Hoffman, 1938: 3). The Surrealists were using the methods of science but doing so to reject its logic and draw very different, expressive conclusions (Choucha, 1991: 49).
Automatism was primarily applied to the practices of writing and speech and assumed to be the complete elemental workings of the unconscious mind. This changes when drawing is introduced to the experiments and artists like Andre Masson began to highlight the impossibility of complete unconscious without some kind of conscious selection, even if the former did take you to a deep place that the latter couldn’t on its own (Choucha, 1991: 49). I would certainly agree with this in that perhaps a claimant to have received profound primal, unlearned or unknown knowledge deep from within is maybe just unconsciously denying themselves the awareness of the conscious mind. They are either blinded by delusion, or merely being dishonest so to support the fundamentals of their practice. For me, this would appear to have a higher presence of an ego than that of the conscious ideas suppressed by that very ego.
Austin Osman Spare
Another artist whose work used the methods of automatism was British artist Austin Osman Spare who was working with the technique some ten years earlier than the Surrealists in France. His drawings, like Masson’s have a fluid doodled quality but still resemble far too much of a structured imagination for them to have been completely void of a conscious authorship. He was also in the mindset that the act of automatic drawing wasn’t a fully unconscious practice, a scribble in the margin from the unconscious mind was enough to then inform the conscious mind where to take it from there. Where his views differ are in relation to authority of the practice in that he thought it only a useful exorcise to a person trained as an artist, in order to unlock a more advanced imaginative thought, the Surrealists would have maintained it was a practice to be used by anyone. Spare was one of the few artists that was actually an initiate of a recognized occult group being a part of Aleister Crowley’s Argentinum Astrum and the purpose of his work was not for aesthetics but for what he believed as genuine magic and occult research (Choucha, 1991: 50-53). There is something to be said about the charted and scientific nature of Spare’s work in comparison to the drawing of Masson; Spare, despite being overtly loaded with therianthropic figuration (humans metamorphosing into animals) and a constant morbid fascination, seems strangely instructional whereas the drawing of Masson. Without the scholarly insights of the arcane, they seem absurd, eerily quotidian and full of characterful imagination.
Conclusion
When we look at the attraction of esoteric thought within the avant-garde and attempt to look for comparisons with work being produced today in the revival, I only really see one similar motivation. The avant-garde had a closer affiliation to the working of science, including pseudo-science and psychology, but were curious about the different possible outcomes that the experimentation through art could produce. A revival is affiliated with science but is more interested in the aesthetics of science-fiction than experiment, but they all have in common a fascination with something of fiction becoming something of fact. It’s a kind of narrowing gap between the two that the artistic imagination finds a place to occupy—which can be related to grey areas of the unknown. In the nineteenth century, when science was trying to explain and rationalise what we do not understand in order to advance our knowledge, art tried to move around it using its given flexibility and immunity to misconception. Science gives us the x-ray, art gives us non-Euclidean perspective, abstract painting and automatism through self-induced trances. The main incentive of using esoterism as a point of interest that influences art, was, and still is, the imaginative freedoms of exploring the unknown. There are few genuine practitioners and initiates of esoterism that apply their customs to art, instead artists borrow the aesthetics and methods of the mystery to further mystify themselves and their practice. It’s a process of adaptation and imagination, which is a legitimate way of examining something that would be widely recognised as false and facile.
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New Minds Eye 