SPRITUALITY IN ABSTRACT ART Page: 2
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Nobody understood this better than Mondrian, no man ever penetrated it more deeply than he did in the course of a whole lifetime. Yet there seems to be some dichotomy in his thought as regards spiritual values as such, and this needs some brief analysis.
Mondrian was long interested in theosophical speculations. As late as 1916 the portrait of Mme Blavatsky hung on the wall of his studio. Yet in his writings he made no mention of his theosophical sympathies. Even in private conversation he avoided religious topics and closed up at the slightest hint of them. Only in an atmosphere of friendship and trust would he risk the slightest allusion to them, and even then he was more than cautious in his use of words. He usually took up an extreme agnostic position, while praising mechanisation and praising the Futurists for saying that they would prefer a motor-car to the Victory of Samothrace. He also asserted that the day would come when we could leave the job of making works of art to machines, on condition that the machines were controlled by artists.
Vantongerloo came to the same conclusion: "Everything progresses and evolves, and the time is not far off when art and science will unite into a homogeneous whole." This notion was supported by Van Doesburg, who wrote to a friend in Holland, "My final conviction, a conviction arising from the sum-total of all my activities, is that in the future art will develop entirely on a scientific basis. Until now the artist has always been at the mercy of his feelings and has had no means of controlling them. There was nothing to distinguish his methods of work from those of the milliner or pastry-cook, who merely arrange things according to their taste or inclination."
But this scientific outlook was not set up as the enemy of spirituality. On the contrary, in Classical, Baroque and Modern the same Van Doesburg wrote "However deep it went, mediaeval art was not a direct expression of the religious outlook, because it failed to find in the means of expression itself the correlative that was needed for expressing that outlook. It found that correlative in symbolic representation, with the aid of forms borrowed from nature. The expression of the religious outlook was, therefore, not direct but indirect."
At the end of the same treatise, after speaking of a collective style of which he saw a possible fulfilment in Neo-plasticism, the author summed up his views as follows: "A style comes into being when, after achieving a collective consciousness of life, we are able to set up a harmonious relationship between the inner character and the outward appearance of life. A discontinuous development of art is the natural result of the human consciousness's discontinuous development towards truth. Over the centuries, the development of art aimed at giving reality to the aesthetic idea which consists of expressing completely, through the medium of art, this harmonious relationship between the inner life and external appearance of things, between the spirit and nature . . . Modern art's evolution towards the abstract and universal, eliminating all that is external and individual, thanks to a common effort and common idea, has made it possible to bring into existence a collective style which, transcending persons and nations, most definitely and genuinely expresses the highest, deepest and most universal requirements of beauty." We can see or read between the lines that for Van Doesburg the terms art, spirituality, abstraction, universality and religion were identical. Neo-plasticism was an effort to bring together again the data and principles which civilisation had divorced from each other in the course of time, but which originally formed a single reality in the mind of man: that is to say, the urge to express his highest aspirations.
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