Image from Tang Museum
This is a follow up to my post on Art, Spiritualism and Theosophy. As I indicated in this earlier post, spirituality must not be confused with Spiritualism. Spiritualism suggests that the spirit of a person continues to exist in another state of being after death. However, although a much more nebulous phenomenon, spirituality shares with Spiritualism the idea that there is an invisible realm of being that exists beyond the physical world. In many ways the development of modern art, particularly what we would call abstract art, created a new way to visually depict this invisible, non-empirical realm of being.
Spirituality
The concept of spirituality is incredibly vague. It can mean very different things in different contexts. In the contemporary context there is a suggestion that spirituality can be contrasted with religion. This is sometimes referred to as being ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR). The SBNR perspective tends to be critical of institutional forms of religions, which is perceived to be focused on external concerns and the maintenance of hierarchical structures.
Spirituality, on the other hand, is primarily a personal and individual quest to address existential concerns about identity, meaning, happiness and morality. Philip Sheldrake observes ‘the spiritual quest has moved away from outer-directed authority to inner-directed experience’ (Sheldrake 2012: 6). Furthermore, in the Western world, the role of the Christian Churches as patron of the arts has diminished. Consequently, artists who depict existential concerns have often moved away from any overt reference to Christian symbols and narratives.
Whilst many people identify as SBNR, this does not mean that institutional forms of religion do not have a spiritual dimension. Consequently, artists who identify with specific religious traditions have also experimented with new ways to represent their faith.
Image from MutualArt
Spirituality is also often contrasted with materiality. It is commonly asserted that we live in a consumer society, in which the possession of material things brings personal happiness. This is best illustrated by advertisements, which promote the idea that our happiness can be found in the right brand of shampoo, the right make of car or a specific chocolate bar. However, spirituality suggests that material concerns may bring fleeting pleasure but cannot bring about lasting happiness. What matters in spirituality is not so much one’s external circumstances as ‘delving within oneself to experience the primary source of the sacred’ (Heelas 2008: 5). As this quote by Heelas suggests personal experience is core to the spiritual quest. Robert Wuthnow suggests that ‘artistic expressions of spirituality correspond especially well with this current interest in the experiential aspects of spirituality’ (Wuthnow 2001: 22).
Overall spirituality, whether SBNR or religious, suggests that there is an underlying reality that underpins and transcends the physical world. Consequently, artists must find ways of visually depicting this transcendent reality. In more traditional modes of arts various conventions are utilised to represent this non-empirical reality. For example, the halo in Christian art or the multiplicity of arms and blue skin of many Hindu deities signifies the divine. However, the development of the visual conventions of modern art has created new ways of depicting the sacred.
Modern Art
Image from Wikipedia
Image from Buffalo AKG Art Museum
We often make the distinction, as I have above, between traditional and modern art. The term ‘tradition’ comes from the Latin tradere – ‘to hand over, to deliver’. The implication is that traditions are cultural practices that are passed down unchanging from one generation to the next. On the other hand, modernity is associated with change. However, it would be wrong to think that tradition is unchanging or that the modern constitutes a total rupture from the past.
Many commentators have suggested that modern art is distinctive and can be differentiated from preceding visual arts. There are, for example, numerous museums of modern art. When we refer to modern art, we are not simply referring to a temporal phenomenon – art that has been produced in recent times. Modern art is often used as a short hand for styles of art that move away from realism – the attempt to accurately depict the world as we see it. So Constable depicts an actual place in his painting Wivenhoe Park in a realistic manner, whilst Pollock’s painting Convergence has no referent in the physical world.
It is impossible to identify a precise point for the emergence of modern art. Most commentators identify the mid-19th century and paintings such as Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe as a precursor to modern art. However, it is really with the Impressionists, who experimented using dabs of paint to emphasise light and colour rather than representing the landscape as the eye sees, that really marks the beginning of what we call modern art.
By breaking away from realism, the modernist movement created, unintentionally but powerfully, new opportunities for expressing the spiritual.
Lesser 2013: 217
Claude Monet: Impression Sunrise 1872
Expressionism and Religious Art
As I mentioned in a previous post, the visual arts are sometimes thought to have the potential to express emotions and inner states that are not apparent to the physical senses. There is a particular school of modern art known as Expressionism that can be said to start with Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). The subject of expressionist paintings can be clearly identified, but form and colour are often distorted to make the image ‘expressive about the artist’s feelings or ideas about it’ (Wilson and Lack 2016: 103). This suggests that Expressionism is particularly apt in representing the spiritual, as the spiritual cannot be directly depicted.
The theologian Paul Tillich asserted:
History shows that those styles in which the expressionistic element is predominant lend themselves most readily to artistic expression of the Spiritual Presence
Tillich cited in Harries 2016: 9
The French artist Georges Rouault (1871–1958) painted Christ several times in an expressionist style. The painting Christ Mocked is clearly recognisable as the face of Jesus but the broad brush strokes, use of colour and distortion convey the idea of the suffering Christ and emphasises Rouault’s understanding of his Christian faith.
Rouault’s painting is clearly very different from Warner Sallman’s much reproduced image The Head of Christ.
Image from Chrysler Museum: Norfolk Virginia
Image from Currier Museum of Art
Rouault asserted that ‘everything in my art is religious’ (cited in Cernuschi 2008: 487). Clowns and prostitutes were common subjects of many of his paintings, both of which are marginalised figures, and also represented suffering for Rouault. In his 1932 painting The Wounded Clown – the clown represents self-sacrifice.
Cast into the public arena and spared no humiliation, despite his inner pain, the clown transforms into a representation of Jesus in Rouault’s devout hands.
Weeks, no date.
Rouault himself indicated that the painting Wounded Clown ‘is quite as religious as compositions with a biblical theme’ (cited in Harries 2016: 25). Overall Rouault perceived art as a visual representation of the inner life of the artist. As a Christian many of Rouault’s paintings depict Christ or symbolised his inner faith in some way.
Abstraction
Abstraction, which I briefly alluded to in my post on Spiritualism and Theosophy develops the ideas that inform Expressionism. Expressionism suggests that one can reveal some deep existential truth through distortion of form and colour. Abstraction, however, either reduces phenomenal objects to pure form and colour or abandons any reference to the phenomenal world. Artists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky move away from any representation and even symbolism and utilise form and colour to signify a spiritual reality that underlies the phenomenal world.
The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), one of the pioneers of abstract art, perceived a close relationship between abstraction and spirituality. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, first published in 1911, Kandinsky suggests that art in its true sense is not only an expression of inner feeling but is also can ‘feed the spirit’ of the viewer’ (Kandinsky 1977: 2). In other words, abstract art not only has the potential to represent the true spirit of the artist, but it can also evoke spiritual insights in the viewer.
Kandinsky argued that it was through use of colour and form, that the artist could depict spiritual truth. Kandinsky suggests that different colours can produce different ‘spiritual vibrations’ (Kandinsky 1977: 24). Form, for Kandinsky, is the ‘outer expression of inner meaning’ (Kandinsky 1977: 29). Furthermore ‘the more abstract is the form, the more clear and direct it appeal’ (Kandinsky 1977: 32).
Image from Guggenheim
Mark Rothko (1903–1970)
Image from MutualArt
The American painter Mark Rothko is perhaps one of the most interesting artists to try and depict ways of representing spiritual truths. Although born into a Russian Jewish family, Rothko referenced Christian themes in some of his early works. For example, he painted Crucifixion (1942) and A Last Supper (1939–42). Both these paintings, with their distortion of form and colour can be considered Expressionist.
Rina Arya suggests:
Rothko used Christian symbols in order to explore fully existential themes rather than with specific reference to New Testament narrative.
Arya 2016
Although Rothko was not a practicing Jew, many commentators have also suggested that his use of Christian motifs was an expression of Jewishness. For example, Rothko uses the indefinite article A Last Supper – suggesting the painting represents a Jewish Passover meal in general, and not the specific final meal that Jesus shares with his disciples described in the Gospel narrative (see Pappas 2004).
Rothko moved away from any form of figuration in his art as he, like Kandinsky, perceived that only pure abstraction could reveal the universal reality that underpinned the empirical world. Rothko in his later career began to paint large canvas with blocks of colour.
In the late 1950s Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of canvases for the fashionable Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building New York. He used a darker pallet than in some of his earlier large colour paintings. However, Rothko concluded that a commercial space was not appropriate for his paintings and donated them to the Tate Gallery in London. These nine canvases are now hung together in Tate Modern, which suggests:
[They can now be viewed] as the artist intended, in reduced light and in a compact space, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing their solemn and meditative character.
Tate Modern
The Rothko Room at the Tate can be considered a space that has the potential to evoke a spiritual experience for the viewer.
Image from Tate
This creation of a space that can evoke the sacred is even more obvious in the Rothko Chapel in Texas. The chapel was commissioned by John and Dominique de Ménil, who were philanthropists and art collectors. They envisaged the chapel as an ecumenical and meditative space that was open to people of all faiths and none. Fourteen of Rothko’s large canvases are hung in the chapel. These paintings are even darker than the rich maroons that Rothko used for the Seagram commission. They are also almost monochrome and there is very little variation in texture or hue.
Image from Time Out
Rothko not only determined precisely how his paintings would be hung, but also had an input into the design of the building itself. The chapel has an octagonal floor plan which Rothko stated:
[The octagon is] A space that does not point us in any particular direction for spiritual enlightenment . . . it does not orient us towards Jerusalem or Mecca or any other seat of learning. Instead, it places us in the center with an unoccluded view of the horizon in all directions
Rothko cited in Allen 2023: 3–4
The paintings and the building itself can be said to exist in a symbiotic relationship and mutually constitute a spiritual space that does not directly reference any specific religious tradition.
The Sublime
One can understand Rothko’s later work in terms of the sublime. The term sublime comes from the Latin sublimis – which is derived from the prefix sub meaning ‘up to’and limen meaning ‘threshold’. In other words, the sublime suggests something that can transport us to the edge of another way of being. This view of the other can be overwhelming. Simon Morley (2010, p.12) suggests that the sublime are ‘moments of mute encounter with all that exceeds our comprehension’.
Image from Audley Traveller
The idea of the sublime is often related to the sense of awe and wonder that the natural world can inspire. For example, the Romantic Poet Thomas Moore wrote of the Niagara falls:
I felt as if approaching the very residence of the Deity; the tears started in my eyes; and I remained, for moments after we had lost sight in that scene, in that delicious absorption which pious enthusiasm alone can produce. We arrived at the New Ladder and descended to the bottom. Here all its awful sublimities rushed upon me.
Moore cited in Rosenblum 2010: 108.
The question is whether a work of art can evoke such a response of awe. Robert Rosenblum suggests that James Wards enormous painting of Goredale Scar (approximately 11ft x 14 ft) ‘is meant to stun the spectator into an experience of the sublime. Ward’s canvas is not only vast, but he uses scale and perspective to overwhelm the viewer.
Image from Tate
In the video on The Transformative Power of the Rothko Chapel a number of the people indicated that their response to entering the Rothko Chapel was ‘wow’, and suggested they were stunned into silence. Dominique de Ménil in her speech at the opening of the Rothko chapel observed:
[Rothko’s] colors became darker and darker, as if he were bringing us on the threshold of transcendence; the mystery of the cosmos, the tragic mystery of our perishable condition: the silence of God, the unbearable silence of God.
Ménil cited in Allen 2023.
This suggests that Rothko’s canvases, have the potential to take one to the edge of understanding and evoke an experience of the sublime. We can think of the sublime as analogous to standing on a cliff edge – an experience of dread and fascination.
If one accepts that paintings, such as Rothko’s large canvases of colour, have the potential to evoke the sublime, this raises the question of whether the sublime is the same as a religious or spiritual experience. Dominique de Ménil suggests in the quote above that Rothko’s canvases can be the source of religious experience.
Image from Wikipedia
Rudolph Otto described religious experiences as numinous. The numinous is an experience that is both mysterious and overpowering (see my earlier post on Representing the Sacred). Otto thought that through the sublime in ‘great art’ we are ‘confronted with the numinous itself, with all its impelling motive power, transcending reason, expressed in sweeping lines and rhythm’ (Otto 1958:67). In other words Otto suggests that ‘great art’ can evoke the sublime, which in turn can be the gateway to the numinous.
The sublime is wonderfully captured by Caspar David Friederich’s painting The Monk by the Sea. A small figure, seen from behind, stands on a bleak beach staring out to the sea. The majority of the canvas is taken up by the sky, which is predominately dark and stormy on the horizon, but lighter towards the top. The white crests of the otherwise dark sea gives a sense of its overwhelming power. Friederich’s use of light, line, colour and scale can enable the viewer to empathise with the loan figure of the monk confronted by the awesome power of the landscape. It is significant that Friederich identifies the figure in this painting as a monk. The implication is that the monk, and by extension the viewer, interprets the incomprehensible and overwhelming power of this seascape in religious terms. The sublime, a sense of the awesome and mysterious power of nature, becomes the catalyst for the numinous, the experience of transcendence.
Conclusion
Artists throughout the ages have tried to represent the sacred. However the sacred, which by definition is transcendent, cannot be represented in any direct way. The conundrum for the artist is therefore how to visually represent the unrepresentable. The Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary believes that the artist is ‘someone who is capable of unveiling the invisible … Art uncovers a reality that is in the world, but which is in some way beyond the world’ (cited in Morley 2010: 93).
The declining importance of formal religious traditions and the increasing significance of the idea of being spiritual but not religious has led artists to find new ways of trying to unveil the invisible spiritual aspects of creation. Many artists, such as Kandinsky and Rothko, have moved away from trying to realistically depict the world of experience and have experimented with colour and form in a more abstract way to represent a spiritual reality that transcends the phenomenal world of sensory experience.
Sources
Allen, M. (2023) The Rothko Chapel: Profane or Sacred Space. Religions 14: 853.Allen, M. (2023) The Rothko Chapel: Profane or Sacred Space. Religions 14: 853.
Arya, R. (2016) Reflections of the Spiritual in Rothko. Religion and the Arts 20: 315–335.
Cernuschi, C. (2008) Georges Rouault and the Rhetoric of Expressionism. Religion and the Arts 12, 479–539
Harries, R. (2016) The Image of Christ in Modern Art. London: Routledge.
Heelas, P. (2008) Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kandinsky, W. (1977) Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover.
Lesser, H. (2013) Spirituality and Modernism. In Arya, R. (ed.) Contemplations of the Spirituality of Art. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Morley, S. (ed.) (2010) The Sublime. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.
Pappas, A. (2004) Invisible Points of Departure: Reading Rothko’s Christological Imagery. American Jewish History. 92 (4).
Rosenblum, R. (2010) The Abstract Sublime. In Morley, S. (ed.) The Sublime. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.
Sheldrake, P. (2012) Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weeks, E. (no date) The Wounded Clown. Currier Museum of Art. Available at http://collections.currier.org/objects-
1/info/158
Wilson, S. and Lack, J. (2016) Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms. London: Tate Publishing.
Wuthnow, R. (2001) Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist. Berkley: University of California Press
