Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Experiment 31 (2025) 1-5 Kandinsky would call the "spiritual in art."Their practices intersected with ideas of synesthesia, divination, telepathy, and cosmic harmony -positioning the artist not merely as a creator, but as a channel, a medium, a prophet of invisible forces.A number of important publications have shaped the scholarly understanding of spirituality and the otherworldly in Russian art.The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986) remains the definitive study on abstraction as a form of spiritual expression.Featuring essays by leading international scholars, the catalogue explores the influence of Theosophy, synaesthesia, and esoteric cosmologies across Europe, America, and Russia, with a particular focus on artists such as Kandinsky and Malevich.Julia Mannherz's Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2012) provides a vital social history of spiritualist and occult networks in the decades preceding the Revolution.Her work offers essential insight into the metaphysical climate that informed both Symbolist and early modernist visual culture in Russia.Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, expanded edition 2013) further illuminates the metaphysical models underpinning early abstraction.While international in scope, it is especially useful for understanding the philosophical and mathematical frameworks that shaped Russian avant-garde interest in invisible realities and immaterial form.George M. Young's The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford University Press, 2012) traces a distinct Russian metaphysical tradition that combined science, spirituality, and utopianism.Although its focus is largely literary and philosophical, Young's work contextualises the esoteric worldview shared by many Russian artists, from Symbolists to Cosmists, and their interest in transcendence, resurrection, and cosmic unity.Experiment No. 31 gathers a constellation of scholars to illuminate how Russian and Soviet visual culture responded to this spiritual imperative in the face of rapid historical change, ideological rupture, and shifting notions of the self.In this issue, art is treated not merely as image or ideology but as a diagrammatic, visionary, and often shamanic process -a way of thinking, feeling, and entering into contact with other worlds.Cadra Peterson McDaniel opens the issue with a reconsideration of Isaak Levitan's landscapes as proto-Symbolist meditations on mortality, suffering, and divine presence.Through a close reading of Levitan's nature imagery, Peterson McDaniel shows how his spiritual outlook, Jewish identity, and personal illness converge to produce works that function as meditative reflections on the unity of creation and the mystery of death.These paintings, often seen introduction Experiment 31 (2025) 1-5 They are symbols of underground knowledge, ecstatic rupture, and the enduring strangeness of the Russian avant-garde.Together, these essays offer not simply a retrospective commentary on the mystical aesthetics of modern Russian art, but also a timely reminder that the spiritual imagination has always been a site of resistance, renewal, and radical vision.
Source: Experiment
Authors: Ksenia Radchenko, Olga Seliazniova
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4414524817
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