The visible maintains a privileged relation with faith (…). The invisible is the triumph of faith…1.
Guy Rosolato
“A piece of advice: do not paint too much after nature. Art is an abstraction; draw it from nature by dreaming in front of it, and think more of the creation than of the result. That is the only way of mounting toward God by doing as our divine master does…”
Gauguin to Schuffenecker, August 1888
In all logic, one might think that art is deeply rooted in the realm of the visible. One of the mantras of contemporary art is the famous tautological declaration of the American minimalist artist Frank Stella: “You see what you see.” And yet, for centuries, an important part of artistic production has been bound up with the invisible. In fact, one of the stakes of painting was to represent the unrepresentable, to pass from the non-visible to the visible.
Thus, according to J.-P. Vernant, “In the third century of our era, Plotinus marks the beginning of the turn through which the image, instead of being defined as the imitation of appearance, will be interpreted philosophically and theologically, and at the same time treated plastically, as the expression of essence… for a long time, the image will take as its task to figure the invisible”2. This “image of transcendent form,” inscribed within the framework of Neoplatonic thought, which Plotinus describes, will find all its efficacy within the religious field. As a matter of fact, one admits in that field the idea of a “visual culture” (J.-C. Schmitt) which makes it possible to attain invisible realities by means of sensible things, namely images.
Two of the three monotheistic religions, the Jewish and the Muslim, opted for a radical position: images are replaced by signs or by letters. The position of the Christian religion, which develops from the end of antiquity, is different. At its origin, it is constrained to clandestinity and has recourse to the image only in the form of symbols. In the early Christian period, artists evoke God only in an indirect way, by means of signs, and rarely propose a figurative representation of him. In its beginnings, this religion was marked by great mistrust toward the anthropomorphic image. This mistrust, which is explained by its Jewish origins, finds a relay in the work of Plato, who expresses his reluctance toward all figuration in general.
It is only from the end of the fourth century that Christian iconography really begins, with the image that will appear — that of Christ — an image that corresponds to the doctrine of his human nature through the Incarnation. The image of God, a kind of inaccessible abyss, cannot be directly represented. One can no doubt see here a fundamental link between the possibility of the image within Christian ideology and the Incarnation.
This idea is often expressed in the Gospels. Saint Paul says of Christ that he is “the image of the invisible God”3. For all that, the fear of idolatry, central to the Hebrew tradition, does not disappear. The Church and by extension “the Western image has never truly decided on its option. It has rather combined the incompatibles indefinitely, made the contraries negotiate”4.
It is the iconoclastic quarrel in the eighth century that confronts two ways of seeing the image. For the iconophobes, the sacred cannot be represented: any attempt to approach the transcendental through an image founded on mimesis is idolatrous. The iconophiles reproach their enemies with a bad perception of the religious image, for, according to them, the honor goes not to the image but to the divinity of which it is the image. The latter must be regarded not for itself but for the emanation of a beyond, in other words of the invisible.
The problem of the representation of the sacred bears more on institutional than aesthetic questions. For the Church, the image represented orthodoxy; its destruction would touch the very foundations of the Christian order.
The “quarrel” linked to the birth of abstraction is not of the same scope and is situated essentially in an artistic field. It nevertheless remains the case that one can see an analogy in the question of the representation of the invisible as it is posed in the iconoclastic period and at this decisive moment in the history of art that is the beginning of the twentieth century5. As a matter of fact, the principal stake for the artists of the first generation of non-figurative painters remains: how, in the absence of a subject, to aim at the universal, how to express spirituality pictorially.
One can mention in this regard the exhibition The Spiritual in Art – Abstract Painting 1890-19856 which, as its title indicates, made it possible to observe the massive and decisive impact of religion, or rather of mystical thought, in the advent of non-figuration.
But, already in his study on Rouault in 1948, Lionello Venturi, wondering about the religious tendency at the end of the century, wrote: “A reaction to realism and to positivism was necessary… One wished to assign to art the task of expressing abstract ideas and the feeling of the beyond”7.
Numerous documents testify to the interest artists accorded to occult thought in its various forms. Kandinsky and Jawlensky have contacts with the secretary of the Theosophical Society in Germany, Rudolf Steiner, who was working on a synthesis between Western artistic traditions and Eastern thought. Kandinsky, the author of Du Spirituel dans l’art (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), a significant title, writes: “A general interest in abstraction is reborn, in parallel with a superficial attraction toward the spiritual composed of occultism, of spiritualism, of monism, of the new Christianity, of theosophy, and of religion in the broadest sense of the term”8.
The creators’ interest in the occult must be considered not as an isolated phenomenon but as an essential preoccupation of a society for which the church no longer responds to a spiritual demand. One has the feeling that “religion is the administration of the sacred”9. Mysticism, born of these insufficiencies of institutional religion, wishes, in its search for a new form of spirituality, to take less conventional paths, with the hope of finding there a direct access to the “sources.”
We thus witness the constitution of small groups of initiates, whose functioning responds to needs better than do the large structures. Let us add that the success of these new doctrines is linked to the fact that they do not reject established religions, even at the cost of giving them a different meaning.
But must we explain this attraction toward new forms of the sacred on the part of artists who move away from a more or less faithful representation of the real solely for religious reasons? One can also advance the hypothesis that at the moment when the symbolist painter Maurice Denis declares that one must “remember that a painting, before being a war horse, a nude woman or some other anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” artists need a justification, even a legitimation, to present to the public works from which all representation is absent. What is more, proximity to the sacred contributes to the spiritual character to which abstraction lays claim. It seems that for artists and theoreticians, moving away from figuration is a way of moving away from the concrete, even the trivial, in order to attain the transcendent. Let us again cite Caillois, according to whom “in relation to the sacred, the profane is marked only with negative characters: it seems by comparison as poor and as devoid of existence as nothingness in the face of being”10.
Kandinsky is probably the first to be aware of the risk of being misunderstood and rejected by the public and the critics. As the canvas becomes “illegible,” it no longer suffices to itself; one can henceforth no longer produce a canvas without accompanying it with a text that legitimates it. The disappearance of the object, which marks the fundamental rupture from which abstraction is founded, obliges the painter to present his art as the witness of a new reality. A reality that must also be shared with the public — which implies an almost missionary conception of the role of the artist. In this sense, the religious domain, where one must believe in order to see, and even more so the mystical domain, are effective tools for transforming forms, even for making them disappear. It is a language that speaks of a transcendent reality, that proposes a utopian vision of the world, common to the first generation of abstraction. Most avant-garde artists often present themselves, through their writings, as prophets who open a new way that calls the old tradition into question.
Kandinsky, pushing this attitude to the extreme, doubtless becomes its best example. In the first pages of Du Spirituel dans l’art, speaking of abstraction, he writes: “The other art, susceptible of other developments, also takes root in its spiritual epoch, but is not only its mirror and its echo; on the contrary, it possesses a prophetic, awakening force that may have a profound influence”11.
The religious reference becomes more precise thereafter, when the artist presents himself as capable of seeing and hearing the message of “God” — this message that gradually penetrates him: “Invisible, the new Moses descends from the mountain, sees the dance around the golden calf and, despite everything, brings men a new wisdom. His word, inaudible to the masses, is first heard by the artist. Unconsciously at first, without himself realizing it, he will follow the call”12.
Curiously, the way the mystic describes and communicates his experience corresponds almost term for term to the path followed by Kandinsky and the other pioneers of abstraction: “When one considers religious mysticism in the fullness of forms under which it appears, one always finds, at the various stages of the mystical experience, a progressive destruction of the appearance of the forms of the world of experiences, and in keeping with that, an establishment of mystical forms, which accompany the dissolution of the forms of the natural world at the different levels or stages of consciousness. Almost all the mystics known to us have described these structures, these forms, more or less as figurations of lights or sounds, which then, in the course of their progression, are in turn reduced into the Immutable”13. And Gershom Scholem adds: “Such an experience may have come to him (the mystic) through a sudden enlightenment, an illumination, or as the culmination of long, perhaps very complicated preparations, by which he sought to grasp or to obtain such a contact with the divinity”14. One finds in Kandinsky the capacity for the destruction of forms accompanied by the will to proclaim the disappearance of links with the old traditions. The messianic accents of his word, the constitution of the prophetic image of the artist, are integral to his approach. For him, art is, on many points, similar to religion.
For all that, the inspiration for the dissolution of forms in Kandinsky does not come solely from the religious domain. He, like other artists, is also sensitive to recent scientific developments. However, his enigmatic phrase “I would not have been astonished to see a stone melt before me and become invisible”15 must be seen in its context. This declaration is made under the impact of the scientific fact that marked the beginning of the century and inflamed the imagination of artists: the disintegration of the atom.
Undeniably, this major change marks Kandinsky, who writes: “The disintegration of the atom was the same thing, in my soul, as the disintegration of the entire world. The thickest walls suddenly collapsed. Everything became precarious, unstable, soft… Science seemed to me annihilated: its firmest foundations were nothing but a lure, an error of learned men who were not building their divine edifice stone by stone, with a tranquil hand, in a transfigured light, but were groping in the darkness, at random, in search of truths, and in their blindness mistook one object for another”16.
The debate over the “disappearance” of matter, of its transformation into energy, was a widely public debate in the first decades of the twentieth century. Kandinsky, in turn, without having any real scientific training, brings this transformation close to his artistic reflection17.
In fact, the decomposition of the atom, the suspicion that the object is not as solid and immutable as one might have thought, the calling into question of the conditions of the existence of matter, seem to inspire what Kandinsky once again explicitly defines as the path toward non-figuration: “A scientific event lifted one of the most important obstacles on this path. It was the advanced division of the atom”18.
But does Kandinsky really believe in the analogies between art and the sciences, in the cause-and-effect relationships between these two domains? Is it not rather a question of a will to make use of the calling into question of the traditional scientific model in order to legitimate the calling into question of the artistic model in place? One can suspect that the image of the sudden “collapse” of classical physics that he mentions is not the source of inspiration of his practice but a way of validating his prophecy of a similar revolution in the pictorial field.
In sum, the universe of the sacred, as well as that of science, become, willingly or not, triggers for works that engage on a path that leads them toward abstraction.
Is this a double contradiction? That of the fundamental opposition between religious doctrines and the scientific world based on rational proofs? That of the opposition between scientific materialism and its certainties and artistic creation without constraints? Not really, for Kandinsky belongs to those artists who are “Immersed in currents neither entirely material nor entirely spiritual”19. All of them witness the calling into question of what one might call scientific dogmas. For them, nothing prevents the image from being tipped over from positivism toward mysticism. From the second half of the nineteenth century, a series of phenomena makes it so that “Occult science expresses itself on the subject of suprasensible realities in the same way as the naturalist when he speaks of sensible things. It retains from the scientific method the mental attitude that inspires it. It is therefore just to qualify it as a science”20.
This scientistic climate is owed in part to a period in which the major advances — electricity, radioactivity, the fourth dimension — introduce a dose of uncertainty into the scientific vision and inflame the artistic imagination. The title given by Henri Poincaré to a work published in 1902, La science et l’hypothèse (Science and Hypothesis), is telling.
On the other hand, certain scientific discoveries — the disintegration of the atom, X-rays, the telegram, in short the “dematerialization” of form on the one hand, and the evolution of the microscope and the telescope, which make it possible to see the infinitely large and the infinitely small on the other — open up horizons without limits. More than of the invisible, one can speak of the “unseen” to evoke phenomena that one does not distinguish with the naked eye, or that lie behind various partitions, henceforth crossable with the help of new scientific inventions. This particular climate sometimes gives rise to far-fetched proposals such as the Photographie fluidique de la pensée (Fluidic Photography of Thought), invented by Louis Darget. He claims to be able to capture images of dreams with the help of a plate placed above the forehead of a sleeper (Photographie du rêve. L’Aigle. 25 June 1986). Nothing astonishing, however, when one learns that an illustrious scientist such as Marie Curie, who discovered radium, took part in séances of turning tables.
But it is probably electricity which, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth — the same years that witness the emergence of abstraction — becomes a source of wonderment. Glorified by artists, but also in literature, which celebrates the arrival, even the epiphany, of electricity and electric lighting. Let us leave Kandinsky for a moment to make room for the Italian futurists, the Russian rayonnists or the French orphists, who introduce corpuscles and waves into their painting.
“Electric lighting multiplies the plays of shadow and light, the sources of brightness. It creates a nebula of stars, aligned or distributed in a more or less coherent way… This march toward the unreal (or toward a new reality?) crosses the artistic currents… which express the same sensitivity to movement… The dialogue between science and representation is thus intensified21,” writes Marcel Roncayolo. The term invisible will often be attached to electricity. Too fleeting to be easily captured, ungraspable by the artist’s hand as by the scientific mind.
It is probably Balla’s work, La Lampe à arc (Street Light) (1910), a veritable icon of the futurist group, that best illustrates the way electric light is practically the model for the decomposition of form and the passage from figuration to what one might call pre-abstraction. Composed from rays and circular waves that propagate in a swarm of colored particles, this canvas obliges the gaze to scrutinize and decompose the optical mysteries of light. If electricity fascinates Balla, it is because for him this form of energy is a perfect example of the existence of forces invisible and ungraspable to the naked eye. The artist takes an interest in physical laws and in sensory phenomena, whether in electromagnetism or in quantum theory.
However, the artist’s imagination is also nourished by mystical doctrines. Boccioni recalls that Balla felt before the universe a contemplative fascination, close to a religious impulse. If electricity fascinates him, it is because, founded on a flow that circulates imperceptibly, it paradoxically allows the junction to be made between the most radical scientific advance and a form of mysticism that is not unrelated to the invisible, so privileged by abstraction.
At the same time as the futurists, other artists exploit the relations between artificial light and abstraction. The best known are Sonia and Robert Delaunay, whose rivalry with the Italian artists rests precisely on these shared interests.
Sonia Delaunay refers explicitly to electricity. With the Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms) of 1914, she paints the dynamism of the new urban landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century. The artist uses the motif of the disc shattered into concentric rings colored with all the colors of the prism in order to figure the bulbs of the streetlamps — these surfaces where the colors, delimited by a more or less sharp line, sometimes come to bleed depending on the play of brushstrokes, or to merge almost imperceptibly into neighboring colors. Light absorbs the entire surface of the canvas, unifies it, cancels out all perspective and almost all figuration. The Delaunays, however, are an example of rare creators whose work is not “contaminated” by occult thought.
By contrast, the plastic production of František Kupka, originally from Bohemia and Parisian by adoption, is inscribed, like that of many participants of the avant-garde, within a symbolist tradition. A mystic, a practitioner of spiritism, drawn to theosophy and Hinduism, the painter is fascinated above all by the idea of the origins of the world, which he represents through plants as well as through human beings. Gradually, the figurative motifs of symbolist inspiration — the standing man reaching toward the beyond, the Gothic church, the rain, the moonlight — are replaced by non-imitative forms.
Kupka, to whom we owe the first abstract painting exhibited in public — Amorpha, Fugue à deux couleurs (Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors), Salon d’Automne, 1912 — remains the perfect example of an artist whose practice is situated at the crossroads of mystical thought and of recent scientific evolution. In La Création dans les arts plastiques (Creation in the Plastic Arts) (Prague, 1922), he announces the coming of an art not only abstract but moreover without any material mediation, which he calls “the psychography of the future,” and whose support would be none other than “magnetic waves.” It is indeed a matter, writes Pascal Rousseau, of realizing the radical utopia of abstraction: “the telepathic fantasy of direct emotional communication… in the bath of pure vibration, messianic realization of the ancestral dream of the langua adamica, open to the cosmic dimensions of the universe in the era of wireless telegraphy technologies22.” Is one to see in this an avatar of the wave of magnetism or of mesmerism that swept through Europe in the eighteenth century?
Be that as it may, magnetic waves or vibrations conferred a kind of scientific warrant on the relation between music, that immaterial domain, and colors. Colors that are perceived through their formal, optical properties, to the exclusion therefore of their representative value. One thus finds Kandinsky again, for “recourse to vibrations first played a capital theoretical role in Kandinsky’s thought… to conceive that each color vibrates allowed him to dissociate colors and forms, by centering on the specific effect of colors23.”
Whether initiated by theosophy or by the hope aroused by scientific progress — or by both — avant-garde art, charged with spirituality, seems to want to succeed religion.
However, with Kandinsky, Kupka or Mondrian, as with other pioneers of the avant-garde, occult thought remains above all the tool for transforming forms. And yet, must one have deep Protestant roots to declare, as Mondrian does: “it is precisely because of its profound love for things that abstract art does not wish to represent them under their particular appearances.” There are, however, cases in which the mystical background seems to be translated directly into the plastic work.
The work of Hilma af Klint, Swedish painter (1862-1944), whose painting remained confidential until 1986, the date of the great exhibition in Los Angeles, is one example. Guided, according to her, by the spirits of “Great Masters” to construct a universal temple, under the influence of the theosophical theories of Helena Blavatsky, her works are typical of this approach. The cycle Chaos originel (Primordial Chaos) (1906-1907) is composed of practically abstract canvases, made of geometric forms — spirals and concentric circles above all. As is known, the principle of sacred geometry, this archaic symbolism that embodies the divinity, is often found in ancient religions and is exploited by numerous artists — Sérusier or Mondrian. For Hilma af Klint, art, in the service of mystical thought, is above all a doorway into an inaccessible world.
The balance between art and theosophy tilts clearly toward the latter with the duo Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater. Leadbeater’s L’Homme Invisible (The Invisible Man) and above all their joint work Les Formes Pensées (Thought-Forms) (1905) are doubtless the most accomplished documents of art as the illustration of mystical thought. With Les Formes Pensées, they propose correspondences between simple and isolated abstract forms and feelings, as well as figurative representations of the colored vibrations emanating from felt emotions and deploying themselves in space. This richly illustrated work seems to have played an important role in the genesis of abstract art among the European avant-gardes24.
As one can guess, science and mystical thought are not the only paths that lead toward abstraction. Beyond the decomposition of form that begins with Turner and continues with the impressionists, one can also evoke the analogy with music, considered as an abstract discipline par excellence, or again with decorative, ornamental art. Furthermore, the rapprochement between abstraction and the invisible is not self-evident, even with monochromes. One might even claim — and one of the names chosen by artists, concrete art, indicates — that for them autonomous colors and non-imitative forms can have as much presence as the representation of reality. For all that, it seems that in those beginnings, for the spectators, non-figuration introduces an inevitable but necessary tension between the visible and the invisible, or else a new, disconcerting translation of the visible. One can say that “the Other, the transcendence of God, can be expressed only in the invisibility of the form, of which the image must be able to give account25.” In other words, “between the aesthetic and the religious, there is a zone of overlap26.”
“L’objet de perspective dans ses assises visuelles,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, no. 35, Spring 1987, p. 147.↩︎
J.-P. Vernant, “De la présentification de l’invisible à l’imitation de l’apparence,” Image et signification, Rencontres de l’École du Louvre, Paris, La Documentation Française, 1983, p. 37.↩︎
Col., I, 15.↩︎
M.-J. Mondzain, “Territoires de l’image et lieux de l’idolâtrie,” Le Discours Psychanalytique, March 1984, p. 76.↩︎
It is significant that Malevich called his famous Black Square on White Ground (1915) “the icon of our time.”↩︎
The Spiritual in Art – Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, November 1986 – March 1987.↩︎
L. Venturi, Rouault, Paris, Skira, 1948, p. 21.↩︎
W. Kandinsky, “Kuda idet ‘novoe’ iskusstvo,” Odesskie Novosti, 9 February 1911, p. 3, in R.-C. Washton Long, op. cit., p. 6. For his part, Mondrian — who at one point considered becoming a priest — joined in 1909 the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society.↩︎
Roger Caillois, L’Homme et le sacré, Folio/Gallimard, 1950, p. 24.↩︎
Ibid., p. 26.↩︎
W. Kandinsky, Du spirituel dans l’art et dans la peinture en particulier, Paris, Denoël/Gonthier, 1989, p. 58.↩︎
Ibid., p. 66.↩︎
G. Scholem, La Kabbale et sa symbolique, Paris, Payot, 1982, p. 15.↩︎
G. Scholem, idd, p. 12.↩︎
W. Kandinsky, Regards sur le passé, edition prepared and presented by Jean-Paul Bouillon, coll. Savoir Hermann, Paris, 1974, p. 99.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
The terms are not always used rigorously by Kandinsky. The artist even sometimes slides into the political domain, without however speaking of it explicitly. See on this subject the very pertinent article by Jean-Paul Bouillon, “La matière disparaît : note sur l’idéalisme de Kandinsky,” Documents, Cahiers d’Histoire de l’art contemporain, III, Musée d’art et d’industrie, Saint-Étienne, May 1974, pp. 12-16.↩︎
Regards sur le passé, op. cit., p. 99.↩︎
Alain Besançon, L’Image interdite, Fayard, 1984, p. 423.↩︎
Rudolf Steiner, La Science de l’occulte, Paris, Centre Triades, 1988, p. 11.↩︎
Pascal Rousseau, “Un langage universel. L’esthétique scientifique aux origines de l’abstraction,” in Aux origines de l’abstraction, 1800-1914, Musée d’Orsay, 2003-2004, p. 31. This catalogue, of exceptional richness, is indispensable for any study on the subject of abstraction.↩︎
Pascal Rousseau, “Un langage universel. L’esthétique scientifique aux origines de l’abstraction,” in Aux origines de l’abstraction, 1800-1914, Musée d’Orsay, 2003-2004, p. 31. This catalogue, of exceptional richness, is indispensable for any study on the subject of abstraction.↩︎
Georges Roque, “Ce grand monde des vibrations qui est à la base de l’univers,” Aux origines de l’abstraction, op. cit., p. 61.↩︎
Kandinsky owned Thought-Forms (translated into German in 1908).↩︎
Jérôme Cottin, “Les iconoclasmes réformés et l’esthétique contemporaine du vide,” in Les interdits de l’image, ed. Obsidiane-Les Trois P, 200(, p. 42.↩︎
Paul Ricoeur, La critique et la conviction, Calmann-Lévy, p. 276.↩︎