100 books like The Spiritual in Art

Lipsey, an art historian, was inspired by Coomaraswamy’s perception of spiritual interests in the work of early modernist artists who exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York in the 1920s. Lipsey had a hunch that many more prominent 20th-century artists most likely had a similar engagement with the spiritual. In seeking to present “the hidden side” of modern art, he discusses some 20 renowned artists and relevant movements that attracted many of them in various decades, such as Theosophy, Orphism, and Cubism. The title is taken from a quotation by the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who favored a nature-based spiritual sensibility that was distinct from church-based religious art: “It is time we had an art of our own.” Lipsey is an insightful and graceful guide in this area.

The Romantic painters of the early 19th century were intrigued with notions of the sublime, the Absolute, and the unity and divinity of all nature. After the mid-1880s the focus of the avant-garde painters became energized by the quest to escape the bounds of “materialism” (an umbrella term by which they meant positivism, the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics, as well as the destructive effects of industrialism). Lynn Gamwell illuminates the fascination many of the modern artists felt for various scientific discoveries in various decades. For instance, the first exhibition of x-rays by the Berlin Physical Society in 1896 was hailed by the artists as proof that an invisible structure underlies every surface, just as Theosophy asserts! Exploring the Invisible is subtle, thorough, and insightful engagement with this rich interplay.

Most of the impressive artists in this exhibition catalogue did not call themselves Surrealists, but they all were engaged in the initial Surrealist project: to go beyond the tight constraints of Western “reason” to explore the subtle dynamics of the larger gestalt. Toward this end, many of them became interested in esoteric spirituality, portraying the female body as a site of creative energy as well as psychic and cosmological power. Some of them depicted shamanic initiation; some painted serenely detached goddess figures manifesting aspects of the physical world. More than 200 works were included in the exhibition. The featured artists include Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Maya Deren, Lee Miller, Yayoi Kusama, and Francesca Woodman. Capsule biographies with striking photographic portraits of these extraordinary women close the book.

I noticed when I was interviewing prominent contemporary artists for my book that many of them had a Catholic childhood. Eleanor Heartney noticed the same thing when she began to research the art and artists who became a focus in the culture wars of the 1990s. This is a dimension of the art history of the modern era that has not been told. Heartney explores the influence of an “Incarnational consciousness” in works that transgress boundaries. Beyond that, she frames artistic manifestations of the “Catholic imagination,” tracing the influence of “the beauty of religious art, music, and literature and the slippage in sacramental rituals between the carnal and the spiritual.” Her final chapter is on “Knowledge Through the Body: The Female Perspective.”

This book is an absolute must-read for all painters. Kandinsky is known as the father of modern art who brought abstract painting into the realms of art history. As an important aside, there is now controversy over his title, as new information has come up about a woman painter Hilma af Klint, that preceded Kandinsky for abstract painting ideas. Even so, Kandinsky was the first to write about spirituality and art for painters. His ideas still feel fresh on how color plays an integral role to express emotion in painting. He originally wrote this book in German, and so the translation to English along with his determination to express inner motivation for painters, makes this read a bit of a challenge. A worthy task guaranteed to surprise even the savviest painter, on how Kandinsky points out our inner thoughts as contemporary painters, but more than a century ago.

Hito Steyerl is one of the most prominent artists and media theorists in the world. Her essays draw unexpected and always stimulating connections between media technologies, surveillance, war, and political power. They are short, concise, and a pleasure to read, but they always engage with big ideas around the ethical and social challenges of a world made global through the framework of the Internet and digital communication more broadly.

This book brilliantly revives the concept of cosmography, the visual depiction of the universe, from the beginnings of Romanticism to images from the Hubble telescope. By intermingling images from art and science, the book underscores the powerful visual parallels between the two disciplines, their discoveries equally strange, wondrous, and insightful. 

This book provides a primer on the global art market from scholars around the world.

The issues addressed include economic integration of multiple circuits/regional markets, the rise of markets in Asia, online marketplaces, and the importance of galleries and collectives to propel artists to success. The biggest advantage to this work is that it is the first book to consider global art markets from divergent perspectives.

While there remains a real center to the art world analyzed in this volume, you can start to see how new regions and countries are charging forward, transforming the domain of contemporary art in the twenty-first century by making it far more diverse and global.

This book will dazzle you. How is it that someone can see these seemingly hidden connections between math and modern art?

Modern mathematics and physics are on one side, modern art is on the other, and concepts of space, randomness, and even the universe itself are explored, with one side illuminating the other. A good number of the art pieces presented are from the author herself, which adds another layer of credibility to the entire presentation.

Art history also knows a Romantic movement, as does music history. Brown’s book has 250 color plates, mostly of painting from Constable, Turner, Blake, Friedrich, Delacroix, Goya, and many others, but also of some architectural wonders. Brown makes continual connections to the poetry and philosophy of the time, and to political events, as he organizes his chapters by theme: the cult of the artist, the religion of nature, the sense of the past, orientalism, and the exotic, and so on. There are several fine books on Romantic painting, but this is probably the best place to begin.