Art and Spirituality

Speech delivered when appointed Doctor Honoris Causa, Universitat de Barcelona, June 22, 1988

Antoni Tàpies

Art i espiritualitat (versión en catalán) | Arte y espiritualidad (versión en castellano)

Abstract
 

In the last hundred years humanity has seen growth and transformation like never before. But we should not forget that such changes have brought to some social classes and to some people degradation and mortality, also without precedent. The spectacular development of science and technology, far from always bearing positive fruit, has at times turned against us in such a dangerous fashion as to threaten the very survival of our planet. The scandalous imbalance between the extreme poverty of some and the insulting wealth of others is a problem to be solved and it is as cruel now as in the worst moments in history.

Life, of course, seeks its paths and its defenses. All things considered, we must recognize that these are years when humanity will have intensely developed its best potential; years in which extraordinary personalities have been born and tireless groups formed that have greatly advanced our knowledge of the universe and human nature; years in which we have seen the growth of organizations and institutions mobilized to stop the folly of the violent, of the fanatical, of the unjust, of the speculators, who, as we approach the last decade of the twentieth century, remain a threat to the integrity of the world.

In contrast to the danger of final destruction – the greatest in history – denounced by many, we might begin to glimpse some indications that we are coming to a period of maturity and our lives, our customs, our relationships among ourselves and with our environment will experience a qualitative change. Scientists, thinkers, and numerous artists, coinciding with spiritual masters of many ages, have announced such a renaissance with a number of discoveries and proposals. It is therefore unsurprising that some voices have started to speak to us of a “new age” to which we will be led by the surprising and paradigmatic world views of many of these. Judging by the new cosmology, the new physics, biology, ecology, and art, we can now sense that humanity, as has been said, is slowly marching towards a sublime state of consciousness, in respect of which the great visionaries and mystics of the past and present have already advanced some flashes of light^[1].

Towards a Cosmic Consciousness?

Few intellectuals today would believe that only with the material development subjected to economic theories and political programs, or to mass cultural revolutions dictated by the military bugle, people and society will improve. Many think that, for a true cure, to save ourselves and the world, a radical restructuring is necessary: a restructuring of spiritual and moral values, and the appropriate teaching thereof, so that each one of us may learn to perfect his or her own consciousness and behavior. Material development is important, to be sure. And so is the work of politicians, educators, parents, and those who control the media, for these can bring about such change. But it might also be true that real transformation will not be achieved if we do not make a generalized effort, through protracted internal discipline, to bring to life in ourselves the updated teaching of so many ancient and modern masters of spirituality. Moreover, something that, by different names, is common and basic to many of them: the experience of the original unity, the intimate experimentation of the authentic total reality, which is precisely what must instill in us solidarity with the universe and with all humans and which will bring sense to our lives. Humanity, in the words of Julian Huxley, needs to find again the art of spiritual health. This will not be achieved with beliefs based on divisive dualities (natural/supernatural, spirit/matter, soul/body, God/world) but rather with uniting convictions fed by the dynamism of old and new knowledge, at once objective and subjective, of scientific and spiritual experience^[2]. We must realize, as some philosophers do, that today “we cannot think the world without thinking it in history, but on condition that this history be, above all, the history of consciousness and represent a projection of our plane of being to take us back to a meta-history where only symbols speak”^[3].

In this sense and for some years there have been important advances in the field of noetic sciences, analytical psychology, and the study of what some term “alternative beliefs” (or, as others say, complementary of our consciousness) that have opened many avenues. Let us keep in mind the reevaluation that psychologists and comparative religion scholars made of the globalizing powers of imaginative and visionary activity that the human brain has always enjoyed and that may be found especially preserved in certain wisdom traditions and religions, in the universe of myths, images, and symbols, and even in some esoteric beliefs and magical rituals. Do not forget the importance recently gained by studies in the philosophy of science. Thanks to these we have begun to understand that many of those process es of symbolization, many messages from our unconscious, from our dreams, and in particular some mystical and religious experiences may afford us views of the world to complement or even to coincide with many recent scientific discoveries^[4].

Until recently hard-line rationalists saw those phenomena as the product of primitive mentalities, but now we can see that, in their positive aspects, they may be highly civilizing. As they bear the mysterious “spirit of nature,” in reality they help that part of nature that is man to achieve greater consciousness. And, as some authors assure us, many of the phenomena issuing from what we now accept as “values of the unconscious,” and as a collective spiritual legacy, appear precisely to be at the basis of concrete modern scientific concepts, beginning by what were recently thought the most rational and positive of all: the science of numbers^[5].

In any case, it is quite possible that the irruption of the new spirituality, which we now can see in all fields, and which would “complement” the exclusive rational and materialist world view, has most interesting repercussions and in fact is changing the mind and the habits of many.

The Contributions of Modern Art

Art – as I have noted a few times – has enjoyed a privileged position in the evolution of these facts. Some twentieth-century artists have not only expressed time and again our need to head, as some authors have expressed, towards “a new paradigm that will lend more weight to ecological, human, and spiritual values,”^[6] but also the artists themselves have contributed to create it and have striven to spread it. Bear in mind that throughout this century artists have felt like never before the need to write, to publish manifestos and statements, both to orient their own work vis-à-vis the new viewpoints and to convince society^[7].

Art has always felt at ease in the world of spiritual introspection, of the great symbols, of the values of the unconscious, and mostly of many mystical and religious experiences. Even more, today we must say that, in being liberated by other media from the documentary and imitative roles it has played at certain times, art has recovered in the expressionism of images and symbols its original ends and its main reason for existing. In any case, today we can no longer doubt that the great figures of modern art contribute importantly to the formation of the new consciousness. And for this reason we must consider that artists fulfil a social function of the highest order. But nothing has been or is yet easy. Artistic intentions based on symbolism and mysticism have until recently been taboo among many art-world intellectuals and, especially and unfortunately, among many on the political left. We cannot forget that those were topics that not long ago were discredited in our country because absolutist powers, and concretely the Nazis, have always appropriated them. The art historian Maurice Tuchman explains this quite well in his introduction to the memorable exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 that took place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art^[8]. Tuchman reminds us that Hitler based his infamous theory of Arian superiority on a number of interpretations of theosophy and of symbols from Germanic mythology, which served as inspiration for the official art of that regime. As a result quite a few art critics from democratic countries, some very influential, particularly in North-American museums, gave up any idea relating abstract art to the world of spiritual symbols when, in fact, from prehistory to our day, art has always been closely tied to them. Such abandonment, Tuchman continues, resulted in explaining abstract art only by its pretended “formal” and purely aesthetic values. The consequence of this was that the main spiritual worth of abstract painting and, with it of the majority of painting called modern, was thought little of and so its real value was hidden for the greater part of society.

A large sector of recent critics and historians, naturally enough, has shed these prejudices, mostly when they realized an objective fact: the practically unanimous relations of the most important modern artists with themes, philosophies and spiritual masters of the characteristics described above. One can see this in documents and in the works shown at the great exhibition I just mentioned. The old intellectuals, more or less on the left, some of whom even thought that the “weirdness” of modern art ignored life and made it too esoteric, or those who mocked art for being too transcendent or metaphysical, now find themselves surprised that all those considered the best artists of the twentieth century, from the first to the last, are precisely the most profoundly interested in the problems of our existence that coincide with the precise teachings of the spiritual masters they all read with rapt attention. This is the case – I begin by mentioning the more abstract of them – of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, Klee, Schwitters, Arp, Pollock, Rothko, Tobey, etc. To say nothing, of course, of those who show an evident symbolic sense, such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, our own Picasso, Marcel Duchamp… and so many more recent ones. I am limiting myself to Western painting shown or cited in the exhibition just referred to. We could add many more names from Europe and America – I am thinking of Ernst, Miró, Motherwell, Lam. If we brought in the spiritual sources of Oriental art that have weighed on these artists – from Chinese painting to Japanese Zen, from Hindu Tantrism to Tibetan tankas – we could f ill another volume just with names. Not forgetting, naturally, the innumerable examples that, in the same sense, so-called primitive arts would furnish.

Or the images and symbols of so many other more heterodox authors poorly known in our Western tradition.

The change in focus in modern art criticism and history has been extremely positive. As you may suppose, however, there is still much resistance stemming from religious, ideological, political, and commercial prejudices that oppose the spread of the true contents of modern art. Some think, naturally enough, that, despite so much talk, most of the history of modern art needs to be written and divulged afresh. It is true that a great part of the public feels a vague at traction for modern art, has become familiar with the names of some artists, and knows some anecdotal aspects of it. A minority is devoted to collecting modern art and some even invest money in it. Yet those who truly enjoy the benefits brought about by the communion with the content of modern art are very few. In other words, the main cognitive and ethical function that modern art, if it were explained properly, could accomplish is unknown to society in this our disturbing century’s end.

We should never forget that the communion with works of art, of whatever period, does not come automatically. If you want art to have a true social utility you must prepare it, teach it, foment it^[9]. Fortunately, exhibitions and texts such as the ones I have mentioned are beginning to throw light onto the matter. But governmental institutions, educators, the media still need to become more aware of the real importance of the contents of modern art. First and foremost these con tents need to be entered into school education plans from elementary level onward, so that young minds can become enriched and, especially, develop their critical sense and learn to distinguish authentic values from false ones. Otherwise all efforts will be sterile and we will continue to be devoured by so much deceit from the for profit cultural industry.

Adaptation to Our Time

You can imagine that the historical, social, and cultural circumstances of the first avant-garde artists were not the same as those today. To begin with, at present, mod ern art is not limited to painting and we surely do not conceive spirituality the same way those pioneering artists did. The importance of Kandinsky, to give an example, is certainly due to an interesting immersion in the world of spirituality. But it is ludicrous to imagine his painting and his book The Spiritual in Art simply as a product of his reading theosophy and anthropology by Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, as is often claimed. The same may be said of the influence that Shuré’s The Great Initiated supposedly had on Mondrian, or Orientalists as Ouspensky and Gurdjieff on many other artists, and these did not have the easy access we have today to texts of Hinduism, Taoism, or Buddhism. Much less did they know, of course, the great parallels that Western science has now recognized between many of its topics of study and the ancient spirituality of the Orient.

Now things are quite different. Today, the idea of “spirit” has become less “spiritual.” As someone said, more than saving souls it is now a matter of saving people. Let us bear in mind that the gods themselves, as Jung announced, are abandoning Olympus to transform themselves into philosophical concepts (and into praxis, we might add)^[10].

We know full well that spiritual or mystical experiences, including religious sentiments, fall outside of the exclusivity of institutionalized religions. We also know that those experiences and sentiments today re-tie (re-ligere) us to a model of the world based on the new theories of the self-organization of the universe, of evolutionary humanism, of ecology, of the new holistic health, or the profundity of the Vedanta and the Zen rather than to the so-called classical “Western civilization.” But, despite all possible changes, there is no doubt that those attitudes, those “spiritual motifs,” of the pioneers of modern art opened a new road. At present, now that we have been brought up to date by the crit ical filter of science, many of the same “motifs” continue to inspire the work of recent artists who are also impelled by their need to know and to help make a more just world.

There will always be many ways to view art and in our time no one can believe in heavenly norms to dictate how things must be. This is an essential principle of any democracy. Everybody may paint or write as they please. But it is also essential that critics and historians follow up and apply qualifiers: this type of art gives us a naive vision of reality, this other plays to the gallery, this is a caricature, this is political art, this is short sighted, this is mere decoration, and so on. Among all tendencies and names that have paraded in front of us during the past hundred years, there is little doubt that, in the light of a rigorous criticism and seen under a certain historical perspective, the names that have become interested in the alluded spirituality and metaphysical and ontological themes are precisely those most valued today, the ones who have really made the art of the twentieth century.

Still, it would be unfair to close these reflections without bringing to light once again what might be the most curious case of this history, or perhaps simply the most natural. Observe how the names of the best artists mentioned above, in their role as exponents of the great current that is intensely preoccupied by spiritual themes, happen to be almost the same, name by name, as those chosen by the “formalist” critics denounced by Tuchman, as I have said before. How can we explain this? Is it a matter of the old conflict between beauty and expression, or between form and content? The new history of art will perhaps prove that what really and most intensely interests the great artists is to stimulate in us the spiritual life of true knowledge and at once that of true love, with all the immense consequences this may have. And who knows if the idea of aesthetics, and even beauty, may be discovered only afterwards, as a kind of reward not sought by the artists, but, who knows by way of what muses, always granted the greatest. It seems a contradiction, but this might have always been the case. As the Japanese writer Soseki said, the artist discovers the brightness of light “in places where most people dare not approach. This is normally described with the verb ‘embellish’, but it is not a matter of embellishment. The brightness of light has always been there”^[11]. To give two examples: because of our blindness, until Turner paint ed locomotives no one would have thought that a locomotive could be beautiful, and until Okyo painted ghosts we did not know the beauty of ghosts.

The question is that, as we have so often discussed, one thing is good spiritual or mor al intentions and quite another the fact that one may possess the qualities or “artistic gifts” that characterize some personalities: the quality that, all things considered, makes art truly art, with all its enigmatic mechanisms, its resources, methods, adventures, and surprises that are its own. There, as we have seen, the “spiritual” world continues to be its basic and inevitable foundation.

Notes

[1]See M. Talbot, Mysticism and the New Physics, New York 1980. There is a Spanish translation, Barcelona 1986.

[2]J. Huxley, Religion without Revelation, London 1941. There is a Spanish translation, Buenos Aires 1967.

[3]M. Cazenave, La Science et l’ame du monde, Paris 1983.

[4]The topic of the relations between science and spiritual experiences has always been a subject of study, but it has recently undergone a great development mostly as it concerns the spirituality of Far Eastern and some Third World countries. Many authors could be cited for their contributions to the topic, which has also been the object of interesting international debate and talks by numerous specialists. Some examples are provided by the meetings of France Culture, organized in Cordoba and Tzukuba, whose proceedings were published as Science et Conscience (Stock-France Culture, Paris 1980) and Science et Symboles (Albin Michel-France Culture, Paris 1986). The proceedings of another meeting, taking place in Fez, was published by Albin Michel (Paris, 1983) as L’Esprit et la science. UNESCO organized a further in Venice in 1986. Under the title La ciència i les fronteres del coneixement, it was published in Catalan (Centre Unesco de Catalunya and La Magrana, Barcelona 1987).

[5]M.-L. Von Franz, Nombre et Temps; psychologie des profondeurs et physique moderne, Paris 1983.

[6]W.W. Harman, “Inconscient et Conscient.” One of the presentations from the Fez Colloquium mentioned above.

[7]See A. Jaffé, “Le Symbolisme dans les arts plastiques,” one of the chapters in C.G. Jung, L’Homme et ses symboles, Paris 1964.

[8]M. Tuchman and others, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York 1986.

[9]See M. Shapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers, New York 1978.

[10]C.G. Jung, op. cit.

[11]N. Soseki, Oreiller d’herbes, París 1987.

Abstract

This article presents a reflection by Antoni Tàpies on the important changes that our culture has undergone in recent times and their repercussions on art. It starts with the avant-gardes, in order to understand their evolution in the second half of the twentieth century, and pays particular attention to the different ways in which spirituality is resolved in different artistic forms: symbolism, psychology, and orientalism.

keywords | Tàpies; art; spirituality; reflection; mysticism; Modern Art.