Sunday, April 3, 2011

Revisiting the Spiritual in Art, Ctd


The virtual symposium Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting the Spiritual in Art continues online. Topics such as “The hidden spiritual dimension of American art,” “Some Formal Qualities of Visionary Art,” and discussions defining the “Spiritual,” have been among some of the areas covered by the panelists. In a post on April 3, “Steiner, Thought Forms, and Kandinsky,” Jeff Edwards gives the results of his investigations:

Kandinsky was very open about his appreciation for Helena Blavatsky. He was a lot more elusive about Steiner. I just took a quick look back through the Collected Writings on Art, and couldn’t find a single mention of Steiner anywhere in the texts. However, his name comes up several times in the editors’ introductions, and—most importantly—they cite Kandinsky’s attendance at several of Steiner’s anthroposophical lectures in 1908.

The rest of his post can be read here. He provides a link to a provocative piece on the exhibition “Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction” at the Tate Modern in London in 2006 that describes its reception: “It was met with a mix of praise and hostility, ridicule of theosophy and a simplified reliance on the theory of synthanaesia, the ability to see music.”

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