The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present

by Charlene Spretnak

This book demonstrates that numerous prominent artists in every period of the modern era were expressing spiritual interests when they created celebrated works of art. This magisterial overview insightfully reveals the centrality of an often denied and misunderstood element in the cultural history of modern art.

Genres: Art, Spirituality, Art History

278 pages, Paperback

First published October 23, 2014

About the author

Charlene Spretnak has been intrigued throughout her life as a writer, speaker, and activist with dynamic interrelatedness. She has written nine books on various subjects in which interrelatedness plays a central role, including its expression in the arts. She is particularly interested in 21st-century discoveries indicating that the physical world, including the human bodymind, is far more dynamically interrelated than modernity had assumed. Such discoveries are currently causing a “relational shift” in our institutions and systems of knowledge, as she suggests in Relational Reality (2011). Several of her books have also proposed a "map of the terrain" of emergent social-change movements and an exploration of the issues involved. She has helped to create an eco-social frame of reference and vision in the areas of social criticism (including feminism), cultural history, and religion and spirituality. Since the mid-1980s, her books have examined the multiple crises of modernity and furthered the corrective efforts that are arising. Her book Green Politics was a major catalyst for the formation of the U.S. Green Party movement, of which she is a cofounder. Her book The Resurgence of the Real was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 1997. In 2006 Charlene Spretnak was named by the British government's Environment Department as one of the "100 Eco-Heroes of All Time." In 2012 she received the Demeter Award for lifetime achievement as "one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time" from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. She is a professor emerita in philosophy and religion.

Reviews

[Giovanni García-Fenech · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spretnak does a tremendous job convincing you that the subject of spirituality in modern art has not only been neglected in the art world, but actively suppressed. While she stretches credibility a handful of times (for example, her chief argument for claiming Le Corbusier as a spiritual architect is that his uncle and some of his friends were Freemasons), the number of well-documented examples she presents really live up to the book's subtitle. I recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone wanting to better understand the origins of modern art.

[Tim Bascom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific overview of the evolution of modern art with a focus on recurrent spiritual expression. Spretnak has done her homework and writes from extensive research, but she does it in a compelling way, showing how art historians, museum curators, and gallery owners have often overlooked or diminished the underlying spiritual impulses of a wide array of modern artists. Spretnak defines spirituality broadly, allowing for religious or secular manifestations. She is not partisan. But she seems to have exposed a kind of modern day cover-up in the art world, and readers will definitely benefit from her close study.