THE VERY GREATEST ARTISTS AND WRITERS find ways of expressing what it means to be alive at a moment in history.
The great art at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century was on one level the cry of a hurt and puzzled humanity. Some artists and writers, including a few very great ones, looked squarely into the face of existence and decided that it was quite meaningless, that life on earth, human life, is an accident of chemical combinations and that, as Jean-Paul Sartre concluded at the end of La Nausée, the only way life can have meanings is if we choose to devise goals for ourselves.
It is true, too, that some artists have taken great pleasure in the material age and its shiny surfaces. Modernism was undoubtedly iconoclastic. However, by the end of the nineteenth century the tyranny of kings, clerical superstitions and stodgy bourgeois morality were pretty soft targets for iconoclasts.
For the majority of great artists of the modern era, the mechanical model of the universe has been the icon they really wanted to smash.
We like to think of Modernism as smart, hip, in tune with the machine age, impatient with the authority and dogma of earlier times. It is all these things, but it is not, as we also sometimes like to think, atheistic, at least not in the radical, modern sense of atheistic. In fact, if you like to see esotericism as the refuge of ancient superstition, then that is what Modernism really is. The great unifying spirit of Modernism — the spirit that unites Picasso, Joyce, Malevich, Gaudí, Beuys, Borges and Calvino is a desire to undermine and subvert the prevailing scientific materialism. It needs a little probing into the lives of these artists and writers to see that they were all deeply involved in the occult, and that esotericism provided them with their core philosophy of life and guiding aesthetic.
If we take Baudelaire and Rimbaud as representative starting points for Modernism, it is all too easy to interpret the derangement of the senses they recommend as ends in themselves. What they really believed was that when the material world is dissolved, the lineaments of the spirit worlds will present themselves. ‘The poet makes himself clairvoyant,’ said Rimbaud, ‘by turning all meaning upside down in a long and reasoned manner.’
Gauguin, Munch, Klee and Mondrian were theosophists. Mondrian’s theosophy taught him it was possible to discern a spiritual reality structuring the appearances of the material world. Gauguin saw himself as creating sculptures which — like Golems — could be enlivened by disembodied spirits. Kandinsky, like Franz Marc, was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner’s, but the great formative influences on Kandinsky’s paintings, leading the way into abstraction, were the ‘thought forms’ perceived in a trance state and recorded by theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbetter. Klee depicted himself meditating on the Third Eye. Malevich was in thrall to Ouspensky.
The esoteric roots of Matisse’s art may be better hidden, but he said that sometimes he looked at an object such as a plant he intended to paint for weeks, even months, until its spirit began to urge him to give it expression.
Gaudí’s Arab-influenced architecture, flamboyantly surging arabesques in which animal and human forms merge and morph into each other, invites the visitor to walk into an altered state of consciousness.
Spain is perhaps the country in Europe where the supernatural lies closest to the surface of the everyday. Picasso, the great artist-magus of Modernism, always had a strong feeling for the intrusions of the spirit worlds. As a boy he was believed by some of his friends to have supernatural abilities, like mind-reading and prophecy. When he travelled to France, Max Jacob, Eric Satie, Apollinaire, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau and others initiated him into a sophisticated occult tradition.
Picasso often used esoteric themes in his work. Sometimes he painted himself as the Harlequin. This figure is associated with Hermes and the Underworld, particularly in his native Barcelona, where Harlequin’s victory over death is re-enacted annually in street carnivals. His friend Apollinaire sometimes referred to him as ‘Harlequin Trismegistus’. At other times he portrayed himself in terms of an image from the Tarot, suspended between the material world and the spirit worlds.
In an analysis of a 1934 drawing of a Spanish bullfight, a long-overlooked work, Mark Harris highlights the theme of Parsifal. His essay is an inspiring example of the way that esoteric thought can illuminate dimensions closed to conventional criticism. In his youth Picasso had been a founder member of a group called Valhalla, formed to study the mystical aspects of Wagner. The drawing depicts the scene in Wagner’s opera when the black magician hurls the spear of Longinus at Parsifal, but, because Parsifal is now initiated, it only hovers over his head.
Georges Bataille researched Mithraism, and in 1901 Picasso made a series of paintings depicting women wearing a Mithraic cap, a traditional symbol of initiation. The 1934 drawing, Harris convincingly shows, is a portrayal of an underworld initiation. Like Dante and Dostoyevsky before him, he shows that the hell that the candidate must traverse begins with the hell of his own desires. Hell lies the other side of the grave but this life is hellish, too — and hellish according to the temper of the times.
This drawing is a depiction of one of Picasso’s grand themes. Our world is being shattered, fragmented by an eruption of evil, subterranean forces. The initiatic artist, Picasso, can remake the world, can be a fertility god reborn, but he will do it not in terms of the conventional canons of beauty. He will recombine the discarded, the shattered, the ugly, in beautiful new ways.
The abstract and conceptual painter Yves Klein discovered esoteric thought when he chanced upon a book by the modern proponent of Rosicrucian philosophy Max Heindel, who had been initiated by Rudolf Steiner but broke away to set up his own Rosicrucian movement. Looking forward to the transfiguration of matter, Klein intended his art to inaugurate a new Age of Space, depicted in canvasses of ultramarine unbroken by line or form. In his new age human spirit free of the restrictions of matter and form would levitate and float.
THE GREAT WRITERS OF THE TWENTIETH century were deeply immersed in esoteric thought, too. Inspired by rumours about William Blake and his sexual religion, W.B. Yeats and his young wife, Georgie, explored first the direct link between sexual and spiritual union to be found in The Zohar, then Tantric yoga. Yeats even had a vasectomy in the hope that stemming the flow of semen would help build up the energies needed for a visionary trance. Not only did their experiments produce more than four thousand pages of spirit-inspired automatic writing, but Yeats remained sexually rejuvenated into old age and wrote some of his most magnificent poetry then. He described ‘the love that moves the Sun’. Yeats was also a member of both the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical society, studied the Hermetica, wrote openly about magic and an introduction to a popular edition of the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali. Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake show his familiarity with Hindu and Hermetic doctrine, including direct quotes from Swedenborg, Madame Blavatsky and Eliphas Levi. The poetry of T.S. Eliot also uses occult references in an eclectic way. Eliot attended Theosophist meetings and the breakaway Quest group attended by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Gershem Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. But perhaps the formative influence on his poetic sensibility was the Sufi-inspired philosophy of Ouspensky, whose lectures he also attended. In fact the famous first three lines of perhaps the most influential poem in English in the twentieth century, Four Quartets — on time past and time future contained in time present — are a paraphrase of the philosophy of Ouspensky.