Making the Case
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A PPENDIX Making the Case The effort to induce the professional art world to acknowledge the spiritual content in modern and contemporary art has a history, although not a very successful one with regard to effecting widespread change in the status quo. The following list charts the stream of books, articles, exhibitions, and public lectures on the significant role of prominent artists’ spiritual interests in the creation of their art. It begins in the aftermath of Alfred Barr’s influential exhibition on Cubism and Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, before which there was little need to argue the case for recognizing spiritual interests in the new art because the subject was so well-known and frequently written about in Europe by artists and art critics between the mid-1880s and the early 1920s. Each of the works and presentations listed below addresses a sub-set of the larger story by focusing on an art movement, or a time period, or an area of influence. Monographs of individual artists are not included here, although hundreds of relevant monographs are cited in the Notes. A complete bibliography of all the books I consulted during the years of researching this book would be too vast for the space limitations I was given. Finally, this list is limited to works written in or for the art world. Many insightful papers and articles have been presented within the academic fields of religion and philosophy about modern art, but those have not generally attracted the attention of art world professionals. 1937 Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly, 1:1, January–March 1952 Herbert Read, “Farewell to Formalism,” Art News, 51:4, Summer 1959 Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting 1961 Robert Rosenblum, “The Abstract Sublime,” Art News, 59:10, February 1966 Sixten Ringbom, “Art in ‘The Epoch of the Great Spiritual’: Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,vol.29 1969 Jane Daggett Dillenberger, Secular Art with Sacred Themes 210 A PPENDIX:MAKING THE C ASE 1975 Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: From Friedrich to Rothko 1977 Jane Daggett Dillenberger, ed., Perceptions of the Spirit in 20th-Century Art (exhibition catalogue from the Indianapolis Museum of Art) 1983 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory 1984 Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, ed., Art, Creativity, and the Sacred Roald Nasgaard, The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890–1940 1986 Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985 (exhibition catalogue from Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Sacred Images in Secular Art (catalogue of a small exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art) 1987 Kathleen J. Regier, ed., The Spiritual Image in Modern Art “Abstract Art and the Rediscovery of the Spiritual,” special issue of Art & Design (London) 3:5/6, June 1988 Peter Fuller, Theoria: Art, and the Absence of Grace John Lane, The Living Tree: Art and the Sacred Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art 1990 Jane Daggett Dillenberger, Image and Spirit in Sacred and Secular Art Gail Gelburd and Geri De Paoli, The Transparent Thread: Asian Philosophy in Recent American Art (exhibition catalogue from Hofstra Museum, New York) Bernard Smith, “Modernism: That Is to Say, Geniusism,” Modern Painters, 3:2, Summer 1991 Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art 1992 Michael Tucker, Dreaming with Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit in 20th-Century Art and Culture 1993 Wendy Beckett, The Mystical Now: Art and the Sacred Mark Levy, Technicians of Ecstasy: Shamanism and the Modern Artist A PPENDIX:MAKING THE C ASE 211 1995 Spiritual Expressions: Art for Private Contemplation and Public Celebration (exhibition catalogue from the Art Institute of Chicago) Reesey Shaw, ed., Espíritu (exhibition catalogue from the California Center for the Arts Museum) 1996 Nella Arambasin, La conception du sacré dans la critique d’art: En Europe entre 1880 et 1914 Richard Francis, ed., Negotiating Rapture (exhibition catalogue from the Museum of Contem- porary Art, Chicago) 1997 “Spiritual in Art,” special issue of Artweek, 28, January Maureen Korp, Sacred Art of the Earth: Ancient and Contemporary Earthworks Anna Moszynska, “Abstraction and Spirituality,” The Age of Modernism: Art in the Twentieth Century (exhibition catalogue from the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin) Charlene Spretnak, “The Spiritual Dimension of Modern Art” (keynote address at SightLines, an international conference of printmakers, Edmundton, Alberta) 1998 Charles A. Riley II, The Saints of Modern Art Bernard Smith, Modernism’s History 1999 Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde (exhibition catalogue from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) Dawn Perlmutter and Debra Koppman, eds., Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art Sarah O’Brien Twohig, The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art (five-part lecture series at the Tate Gallery, London) 2000 Art et Spiritualité, special issue of Ligeia (Paris), no. 29–32 (October 1999–June 2000) Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (on the 291 Group and others; Introduction is on “Spiritual America”) Danilo Eccher, ed., The Shadow of Reason: Exploring the Spiritual in European Identity in the 20th Century (exhibition catalogue from the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy) John Golding, Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, Still 2001 TheArtsandtheSpiritual(conference at School of the Visual Arts, New York) Lynn M. Herbert, ed., The Inward Eye: Transcendence in Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue from the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston) 2002 Anne Morgan, “Beyond PostModernism: The Spiritual in Contemporary Art,” Art Papers, 26:1, January–February Klaus Ottmann, “Spiritual Materiality,” Sculpture, 66, April Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art 212 A PPENDIX:MAKING THE C ASE 2003 Sally M. Promey, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art,” The Art Bulletin, 85: 3 2004 Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, eds., Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art John Baldessari and Meg Cranston, eds., 100 Artists See God (catalogue of a travelling exhibition; Independent Curators International) James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art Laura Hoptman, ed., 54th Carnegie International (exhibition catalogue from the Carnegie Museum of Art) 2005 Jacquelynn Baas, The Smile of the Buddha 2006 Ronald E. Steen, The “S” Word: The State of “Spirituality” in Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue from the Judson Gallery, Los Angeles) 2008 Mark Alizart, Alfred Pacquement, Jean de Loisy, Angela Lampe, eds., Traces du Sacré (exhibition catalogue from the Pompidou Center, Paris) Franklin Sirmans, ed., NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith (exhibition catalogue from The Menil Collection, Houston) Holy Inspiration: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 2009 James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment (a seminar plus essays) Jed Perl, “The Spiritual in Art,” The New Republic,February18 Alexandra Monroe, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (exhibi- tion catalogue from the Guggenheim Museum) The Spiritual (Re)Turn (online symposium at the Guggenheim Museum) 2010 Dan Fox, “Believe It or Not: Religion versus Spirituality in Contemporary Art,” Frieze, Issue 135, November–December 2011 Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting the Spiritual in Art (online symposium at School of the Visual Arts, New York) 2012 Mark C. Taylor, Refiguring the Sacred: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy 2013 Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art (exhibition at the Jewish Contemporary Museum, in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) Linda Nochlin and Sarah O’Brien Twohig, Modernism and Spirituality (one-day conference at theTateGallery) A PPENDIX:MAKING THE C ASE 213 As the reader will note, all but two of the exhibitions cited above were held in art venues located far from New York City, the site of greatest resistance to this subject. In addition, all but two of the entries above, many of which are truly important works, are focused on a limited scope or time frame within the larger story. The exhibition catalogue for Traces du Sacré,aswell as a shorter version with the same title, contains many excellent essays and does present the comprehensive story, beginning with a Caspar David Friedrich painting from 1818. However, the large body of works and commentaries in that exhibition are presented in an array of 22 categories of concepts. To my knowledge, the only book that seeks to present the entire story in the chronological order of the art movements of the modern period, beginning with the early nineteenth century, is the present volume. In recent years, a number of art critics have courageously—or perhaps stubbornly— acknowledged and sometimes discussed spiritual content in various works of modern and contemporary art: Kenneth Baker, Holland Cotter, the late Arthur Danto, the late Peter Fuller, Eleanor Heartney, Dave Hickey, Waldemar Januszczak, Ken Johnson, Michael Kimmelman, Donald Kuspit, the late Thomas McEvilley,