Non-Objective Art and Spirituality

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The following paper will look at non-objective art and at how Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian viewed the relationship between this type of art and spirituality. Specifically, while it is evident that both men saw the important ways in which intellectual and cognitive transcendence could be achieved through non-objective art, Malevich seems the more explicit of the two men when it comes to linking non-objective artwork with western, organized religion; for his part, Mondrian favors a more diffuse or less-easy-to-label spiritualism more in line with ancient eastern occultism. Non-objective art is art that contains no recognizable objects or figures. Non-objective art concentrates on a “harmonious” arrangement or organization of grids, shapes, and colors. Some of Mondrian’s best work, like Composition in Blue, Yellow, and Black, is a good example of non-objective art at work as well as Malevich’s Suprematism paintings. Malevich’s description of the cutting-edge zaum style speaks to his view on the intimate connection between the spiritual and the non-objective. Specifically, he wrote in a personal correspondence from 1913 that zaum stylists in both literature and in painting rejected conventional reason for the simple yet persuasive fact that another kind of reason had been stirred within them that had its own peculiar law, construction and sense; Malevich chose to describe this new kind of reason as “beyond-reason-ness” and he argued that this “beyond-reason” gave pictures their right to exist. Malevich wanted to produce a new kind of art that would employ a logic using the full range of the human psyche – including its capacity for vitality, for novelty and for true creation. Ultimately, what Malevich was really after, c... ... middle of paper ... ...It is not evident that Mondrian saw art in quite the same cosmic context as did Malevich: whereas the latter would have been comfortable being grouped with those who believed art could bring into sharp relief the “monism of the universe” and could articulate an “astral vision,” Mondrian devotes his time to speaking about how art in general can be a conduit to learning about “finer regions” – without once referencing the universe or any type of (western) organized religion. That all being duly noted, it can be tentatively proposed that Mondrian saw non-objective art as a way of gaining the sort of “image-less” and transcendental vision that Eastern mysticism had long sought – an occult mysticism it seems with which Mondrian did have some experience. When we scan over the work of both men, both men saw how the spiritual could be expressed through non-objective art.

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