After Kandinsky: Unholy Alliances in the Secular History of Ideas and Images as Modern and Contemporary Religious and Spiritual Art

Abstract

In 1912, a phenomenon appeared when Kandinsky’s abstraction and his text Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published. A paradox of the avant-garde and the Orthodox, Kandinsky exemplifies the Enlightenment freedom of subjective religious and spiritual expression. What does modern and contemporary religious or spiritual Art look like? Following the ‘separation of church and state’ artists created new expressions of traditional and new religions needing cohesive studies to locate, recognise and document these legacies; correct biased or inaccurate records; and identify these artworks’ secular disguises. This thesis considers religion and the spiritual in Art as traditional or new imagery and symbolism including agnostic and atheist impulses. Kandinsky’s abstraction as ‘Christian’ art acknowledges a collaboration of the avant-garde with the Russian Orthodox; his spiritual texts expressing the spiritual in art, universally, for the artist, he claimed, was part of a ‘spiritual revolution.’ This analysis of Kandinsky required I form the ‘immaterial frame’ methodology to map these historical renovations ideologically; culturally; socially; and politically as evidence of the freedoms of expression contextualising by religio-secular aesthetics. In order to uncover these aspects, the ‘immaterial frame’ methodology has been constructed to accommodate the process of recognising the non-physical ideas of spirituality and the religious in modern and contemporary Art using four intellectual ‘sides’ represented by the image: 1) The artist’s biographical experiences. 2) Individually defined ideas or ideologies, and the artist’s personal variations. 3) The global and cultural contextualisation of the time. 4) Correcting or revealing what was formerly unknown, to answer: What does modern and contemporary religious or spiritual Art look like?