These were the Theosophists Annie Besant, C. However, as I said, certain names kept turning up, especially in the period preceding the birth of abstract art. The roll call of artists so influenced reads like a who's who of the cutting edge: Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Frantisek Kupka, and Joseph Beuys, to name a few. Certainly, the history of the occult's influence on art is filled with many illustrious figures, including Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Eliphas Levi, for example. While recently re-reading some of the catalogue's articles, I came upon a few names with considerable frequency. The best book I know for making clear exactly how much modern art owes the occult is The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 by Maurice Tuchman, a massive catalogue from an exhaustive exhibition I had the good fortune to see many years ago. (For a brief account of this history, see my article ' Concerto for Magic and Mysticism: Esotericism and Western Music' in The Quest magazine's online archives.) In music, seminal figures like Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Debussy all have dipped, at one time or another, into the magical grab bag. I remark that, although I focused on writers and poets, another book could easily be written about the occult interests of composers and painters. In The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, I sketch an overview of how a collection of occult ideas and insights fed the European and American post-Enlightenment literary imagination. I have even made a small contribution to this effort myself. Thankfully, those days are over and much credit is due to a group of historians, critics, and researchers for uncovering what in my subtitle I call 'the occult roots of modern art.'

Eliot, and others paid to a variety of 'charlatans' and 'mountebanks'-in Yeats' case it was Blavatsky herself for Eliot, it was the Russian philosopher P. Critics and biographers hemmed and hawed over the attention eminent figures like W. For a long time, the notion that belief systems like Theosophy, founded in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and her companion Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, were anything more than a disreputable side-show to the mainstream of cultural development was scandalous. IN RECENT YEARS, the contribution that occult or mystical ideas have made to the evolution of art-or to culture in general-has been increasingly recognized. 'Kandinsky's Thought Forms and the Occult Roots of Modern Art.' Quest 96.2 (MARCH-APRIL 2008): 57-61. Originally printed in the MARCH-APRIL 2008 issue of Quest magazine.Ĭitation: Lachman, Gary.

Frantisek kupka la coloree 1919