Esoteric Art Strikes Back

In 1970, Finnish art historian Sixten Ringbom (1935–1992) published his seminal work The Sounding Cosmos, ¹in which he argued that Theosophy and other new religious movements had a decisive influence on Russian pioneer of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and, through him, on the birth of modern art as we know it. As I documented in an article published by Nova Religioin 2018, the book made Ringbom persona non grataamong art historians, and he was even prevented from accessing some museum archives. The art establishment was horrified by the possibility that the founding father of artistic modernism might be associated with disreputable "cults." ²

Almost fifty years have passed since Ringbom published his book, which was never reviewed during his lifetime. It took sixteen years, and the efforts of American star curator Maurice Tuchman, for Ringbom to be invited to lecture in Los Angeles and contribute to an exhibition in 1986–87 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, whose concept was largely based on the theories introduced in The Sounding Cosmos. And it was only twenty years after Ringbom's death that the first major academic conference on the relationship between modern art and esoteric new religious movements was organized at the University of Amsterdam in 2013. Other initiatives followed, including a special issue of Nova Religioin 2016. ³

From the second decade of the twenty-first century, books and exhibitions exploring the links between new religious movements, mostly of the esoteric variety, and modern art multiplied. There was still resistance though. Although a 2016 exhibition in London of works by Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884), a Spiritualist painter who claimed spirits guided her hand, was well received by critics, ⁴when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City proposed an exploration of the (very significant) influence of Rosicrucian movements on European Symbolism in a 2017 exhibition, one of the art critics of the New York Times, Jason Farago, protested the involvement of a respected museum in "kitsch," "trash," "mystical mumbo-jumbo," and "spiritualist schlock." ⁵

Like other colleagues, I found Farago's review of the Guggenheim's exhibition titled Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897to be arrogant and ill-informed. Unlike some of them, however, and after having visited the exhibition, I believed Farago had received some ammunition from the captions accompanying the paintings, which included significant mistakes and confused one religious movement with another. The catalogue was not memorable either. ⁶

What was missing in the Guggenheim exhibition of 2017 was what had made the 2013 conference in Amsterdam a success: cooperation between art historians and scholars of new religious and esoteric movements. This cooperation is by no means easy, as the two disciplines use different languages and methodologies. Without it, however, scholars of new religious movements remain at risk of misunderstanding what is relevant for the art community and the museums, and art historians may not fully understand what the movements their favorite artists were affiliated with were all about. The history of esoteric movements is intricate, very different movements may have similar names, and one does not become an expert...