By Joseph Masheck
When the average person of today looks at art from a few centuries ago, they take religious themes in stride, alongside the mythology of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, and so on, so that belief is not an issue. Neither is it an issue with the fully secular art of recent centuries, where nothing religious has been forgotten because it was never there.
But early in 20th-century Europe, founders of a new “abstract” or non-representational art opted for a kind of pure “soul” without human figures. From about 1970 on, scholars believed that whatever one could consider spiritual in these early abstractions derived from a mystical order known as “Theosophy” that was in intellectual fashion around 1900 and exists in some forms today. Supposedly, the abstract art had nothing to do with organized Western religion.
I disagreed with that interpretation of the beginnings of abstract art as an early form of “spirituality without religion,” and as Covid lockdown began, the lack of distraction helped me write a book on the religious presuppositions of four principal founders of abstract painting, one of whom I had already researched. Although some modern Western artists have made a point of non-belief, probably more have been, however distantly, Jewish and Christian adherents of what used to be called “revealed religion,” meaning, religion anchored in scriptures that have been preached and discussed and argued about for centuries.
I was pleased but not surprised when in different ways all four of my candidate artists turned out to be not only influenced by an organized religion but left-wing.
I had already explored Piet Mondrian’s Protestant connections with Dutch Neo-Calvinism for a lecture at the National Galleries of Scotland in 2017, and now I wanted to see what these other early abstract founders likely understood from Christian Orthodoxy (Wassily Kandinsky), Catholicism (Kazimir Malevich), and Judaism (El Lissitzky). Together they could represent, in chronological order, chapters concerned with each of the major religions in the Euro-American development of abstraction in painting. Faith in Art: Religion, Aesthetics, and Early Abstraction (Bloomsbury, 2023) was the result.
We can look at Wassily Kandinsky as first in terms of abstraction, not just for a 1910 watercolor (which may be predated anyway) called First Abstraction, but especially for his theory book still read by art students: On the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular, of 1911. Along with Malevich and even Lissitzky, he was interested in the stylized anti-naturalism of the Russian Orthodox icons, though in his case also in a liturgy that kept him more religiously observant, later in life, than the others in this group.
Orthodox Christianity offers a great “mystical” tradition as well as liturgical spectacle; but I believe that in Kandinsky’s case its sustaining virtue was a communion insistently directed toward bringing about the “kingdom of God in his justice” here on earth. Why else would the otherwise bourgeois Kandinsky (his father was a tea merchant) have stayed on after the Bolshevik Revolution, trying to do his best as a museum administrator for the new state.
Piet Mondrian’s religious practice was altogether different, private yet devoid of mysticism. But its great motivating theme was justice, even with “justification” as an aesthetic as well as a theological principle. It had already long been known that Mondrian quit the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church of his youth. But who knew that he soon signed up for, and passed, a confirmation class in a Neo-Calvinist church where striving for justice in the world was considered an important religious concern?
Awareness of the Russian icon tradition also inspired Malevich, but probably more on formal, artistic grounds than with Kandinsky, because in his Catholic family they seem a more ecumenical concern. What has usually been completely ignored in Malevich’s work are signs of West-European Catholicism. As a Catholic myself, I was keen to investigate this chapter, because it has often troubled me how even educated English-speaking Catholics, unlike their Continental brothers and sisters, seem either oblivious or downright hostile to modernity in the fine arts. Well, here was a great “Russian” master of early abstraction who was really a Polish Catholic.
On an even more secular basis, the stylized Russian icon also affected Malevich’s protégé El Lissitzky. But the religious imperatives of justice in the Hebrew Bible influenced him much more broadly, as they also did the more hidden critical socialism of Mondrian. Lissitzky helped to convert the earlier phase of idealistic abstraction into the worldly applications of the succeeding, altogether social, style of Constructivism. Even Lissitzky’s enthusiastic communism seems part and parcel, early on, with a fundamentally Jewish ideal of healing or redeeming the given social world.
Needless to say, in all of this we are talking about Russia before Stalin. If religious faith and abstract art both tended to be denied by successive repressive regimes in the Soviet Union, that only suggests to me that they had a “dangerous” idealist element in common. For what now seems remarkable among these four artists is a more or less close familiarity with the Word of God issuing in action. Even the Communist Lissitzky, who beyond a certain point clearly left behind anything religious, calls to mind—mine at least—the great Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote, “It is the theme of the whole Bible that … God’s kingdom is to be upon the earth, that his will be done on earth” (Creation and Fall, 1937).
Before my book was published, I was asked to write an article about it (of which this is a shortened version) by the distinguished British liberal Catholic journal The Tablet. Yet once the book appeared, I heard nothing from the magazine. On the other hand, I was soon interviewed enthusiastically by Fr. Silouan Justiniano, an American Orthodox monk who is both an abstract painter and a painter of icons, together with the art historian Joachim Pissarro, for Orthodox Arts Journal, on-line. Much later, it struck me to ask Fr. Silouan if he could imagine why my actual book turned the once gung-ho Tablet against me. When he said, “Yes,” I asked why. “Because it’s soft on socialism!”
Joseph Masheck, a former editor-in-chief of Artforum, received the Distinguished Lifetime Award Achievement Award for Writing on Art from the College Art Association in 2018. Faith in Art, published by Bloomsbury Academic, is now available in paperback.
Image credit: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, El Lissitzky (1920), public domain