The Spiritual in Art Abstract Painting 1890-1985 Book

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The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 Art Book.
Judi Freeman, Carel Blotkamp
Abbeville Press, 1987 - Art - 435 … Read more The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 Art Book.
Judi Freeman, Carel Blotkamp
Abbeville Press, 1987 - Art - 435 pages. Paperback.
Traces the use of geometric signs by the Nabis and other French artists and relates this to the development of abstraction. The author describes some of the sources of ideas about the symbolism of geometric signs, in particular the writings of Helena P. Blavatsky, and traces the impact of these on the Nabis, possibly through the stimulus of Gauguin whose paintings from his Brittany period encouraged a mystical conception of art in which sacred geometry figured as one component. By demonstrating the huge impact of mysticism and the occult on 20th-century artists from Gauguin to Pollack, Mondrian to O'Keefe, this work effectively refutes the popular fallacy that modernism is concerned solely with line, form, and color. He goes on to discuss in detail the paintings of Paul Serusier, Paul Ranson, Maurice Denis, Charles Filiger, Jean Delville, Frantisek Kupka and Mondrian.
The seventeen essays in this provocative book provide a radical rethinking of abstraction, from the Symbolism that prefigured abstract art through the current manifestations of spiritual content in American and European painting.
Seventeen essays, all by distinguished scholars, treat topics as diverse as synesthesia, theosophy, alchemy, hermeticism, Yoga, and Zen, and several overlooked or forgotten artists are given serious consideration. This work, the catalog for an exhibit mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, belongs in every serious art library.
This is a beautiful large coffee table Art and architectural Design book. See less