The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 - the Russian avant garde and its influence on Western art at the turn of the 20th Century (pizzagateart)

submitted ago by letsdothis3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0,10_Exhibition

The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 was presented by the Dobychina Art Bureau at Marsovo Pole, Petrograd, from 19 December 1915 to 17 January 1916.[2] The exhibition inaugurated a form of non-objective art called Suprematism, introducing a daring visual vernacular composed of geometric forms of varying colour.

The mysterious number 0,10 refers to a figure of thought: Zero, because it was expected that after the destruction of the old world, zero could begin again, and ten, because ten artists were originally scheduled to participate. In fact, there were fourteen artists who had participated in the exhibition.

because it was expected that after the destruction of the old world, zero could begin again

this has Theosophy overtones and correlates with current transhumanism research being conducted at Sante Fe Institute (for another post)...

'*The exhibition has been celebrated as a watershed moment not only in art of the Russian avant garde but also in the history of Western art... *' Matthew Drutt, In Search of 0,10, Fondation Beyeler

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/609/modernism-and-the-spiritual-in-russian-art--new-perspectives;

In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism.

Revolution Incorporated: Avant-Garde Artists and the Legacy of Modern Idealism -

“The earth will be a heaven in the 21st century in comparison with what it is now.” – Madame Blavatsky

The artist and collector Katherine Dreier was a follower of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy, along with many of the artists that she collected and exhibited, including Piet Mondrian and Vasily Kandinsky. Along with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Dreier in 1920 set up the Société Anonyme, the focus of a startling exhibition now at the Dallas Museum of Art, as a way to promote modern art that held the potential for radical social and spiritual transformation similar to that espoused by theosophy.

Between 1920 and 1940, the society held 80 exhibitions, as well as sponsoring lectures, concerts and publications. In the process, the Société Anonyme introduced America to the most progressive and radical experiments in art going on in Europe at the time. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was the only other institution doing similar work. ...

In his 1984 book Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger argues that modernists and the avant-garde are often mixed up. The difference is that modern artists like Matisse or Picasso were interested in new aesthetic forms, while avant-garde artists like Duchamp or Aleksandr Rodchenko were more interested in a radical change of life itself. If we follow this logic, the Société Anonyme was a museum of the avant-garde, given the attention it paid to artists engaged with social and spiritual subject matter.

Art, Theosophy, and Kandinsky - https://www.theosophyforward.com/theosophy-and-the-society-in-the-public-eye/47-articles/theosophy-and-the-society-in-the-public-eye/381-art-theosophy-and-kandinsky

The influence of Theosophy on modern culture is a well-kept secret, even from many Theosophists... Art historians sometimes assert that abstract art is nonrepresentational—depicting nothing, being just a pattern of colors and shapes. That, however, was not Kandinsky view. He believed that his art was esoteric. His abstract paintings certainly did not represent the outer or exoteric form of things; they were intended to represent in inner side of reality. Kandinsky thought such art is a way to transform oneself—both the artist who produces it and the viewer who contemplates it. In arriving at that conclusion, Kandinsky was greatly influenced by Theosophy.

He read Theosophical books, particularly those of H. P. Blavatsky and also those of Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, whose book Thought Forms influenced his painting.

http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/esoterica/leadbeater_c/leadbeater_c.html

letsdothis3 ago

Kandinsky's Thought Forms and the Occult Roots of Modern Art By Gary Lachman

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. But this was not always the case. 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. Critics and biographers hemmed and hawed over the attention eminent figures like W. B. Yeats, T. S. 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. D. Ouspensky. 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."

I have even made a small contribution to this effort myself. 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 remark that, although I focused on writers and poets, another book could easily be written about the occult interests of composers and painters. In music, seminal figures like Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Debussy all have dipped, at one time or another, into the magical grab bag. (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.)

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. While recently re-reading some of the catalogue's articles, I came upon a few names with considerable frequency. 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. 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. However, as I said, certain names kept turning up, especially in the period preceding the birth of abstract art. These were the Theosophists Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner.

The artist upon whom these leading Theosophists made the strongest imprint was the one most associated with creating non-representational art, Wassily Kandinsky. Just when the first abstract painting was made is still a matter of debate. Some say it was Kandinsky's First Abstract Water Colour in 1910; others give the honor to the Czech Frantisek Kupka. But Kandinsky is the name most associated with the new approach to painting.

As Sixten Ringbom made clear in his seminal study, "The Sounding Cosmos," Kandinsky was deeply interested in a number of occult, mystical, and paranormal pursuits and, at times, was a practitioner of various spiritual disciplines, specifically some forms of meditation and visualization. His interest was wide and his reading eclectic; one form of paranormal phenomena that particularly intrigued him was "thought photography," the idea that thoughts could be captured on sensitive plates.

Kandinsky's interest in the occult, and Theosophy in particular, was most evident during the years 1904—1912, which roughly coincide with the attempts of various psychic investigators to use scientific methods to prove the reality of the spiritual world. Sadly, most of these efforts proved fruitless and later examples, like the Cottingley Fairies, did little more than reinforce the suspicions of an already skeptical public. These were the famous fairy photographs of 1920 that earned Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who expressed belief in their veracity, much criticism, including suspicion of senility. Kandinsky's interest in thought photography, however, had a deeper impetus than to prove that the wee folk existed. Thought photography was, for Kandinsky, linked to a more important issue: the advent of a new age in human evolution, which he called "the Epoch of the Great Spiritual."

Along with many other artists and thinkers of the time, Kandinsky believed that by the beginning of the twentieth century, western civilization had reached a crisis and was sinking under a crushing materialism. It was the artist's task to lead society out of this impasse and to open new avenues of meaning and significance. One vehicle for achieving this was Theosophy. The influence Kandinsky's occult reading had on his ideas of the coming "Epoch of the Great Spiritual" is clear in his influential manifesto Ãœber das Geistige in der Kunst, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), one of the most important theoretical works in the history of modern art.

Kandinsky's occult library was considerable, but certain books in particular fuelled his speculation. Three key works were Man, Visible and Invisible (1902) by C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (1905) by Annie Besant and Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner's Theosophy (1904). Kandinsky was very interested in Steiner, and attended some of his lectures in Munich and Berlin. He was also a keen reader of Steiner's theosophical journal, Luzifer-Gnosis, and in his notebooks Kandinsky copied out several passages from a series of articles Steiner had written entitled "Von der Aura des Menschen" (On Man's Aura). Kandinsky was interested in a great deal of Steiner's thought. The interested reader might look to Ringbom's study or the internet for material about Kandinsky's interest in the occult, as well as informa-tion on his friend Arnold Schoenberg, who combined an interest in Steiner with one in the Swedish religious thinker Emanuel Swedenborg....