The Complications of Hilma af Klint

[Music] you [Music] hello everyone good evening yeah thank you and thank you for coming out on a lovely Los Angeles evening my name is Greg Salyer I have the best job in the world I am the president of the philosophical Research Society so let me take a moment and tell you where you are and who we are before I introduce our speaker tonight so in 1934 a man named Manley Palmer Hall founded this society and wanted it to be the the place where seekers could come people who were looking for wisdom which is the etymological meaning of the word philosophy the love of wisdom now he hated academics like me people who study philosophy and theoretical and abstract and inapplicable ways but we tried to do that here still even though I am an academic we love wisdom and we have a value here that is focused on the seeker and her path and as long as that path is compassionate and open we're here for you we've got plenty of resources for you we've got Manley halls amazing library that he found it again in 1934 and 27,000 volumes of esoteric and and other wisdom he was a remaining speaker lectured all over the world lectured at Carnegie Hall and he had an amazing gift of teaching as well so in 1959 he built this auditorium where you are now and filled it every Sunday there are photographs in the bookstore where people are lining the walls and he asks for a dollar if you give a dollar on Sunday morning at 11 and he would speak for 90 minutes straight flawlessly no notes not a hesitation not an um as I've already probably done three flawless and he would sit in that chair and then they'd say well that's about enough and he'd walk off no questions this is a different time but we still continue that mission today and I'm happy to say we've expanded it even through the use of music and art we opened an art gallery last year and we've had already had two amazing shows in it we've we got another show coming up in September we we have a marvelous bookstore that I hope you saw and we have the library and we also have these amazing events like this special lecture tonight on this terrific artist that I am eager to know more about let me say one more thing invite you to one more thing every Tuesday night I do what's called the president's class I'm the only president of an educational institution who gets to actually teach so I'm going to take advantage of that and we have the president's class that is great fun for me I think it's fun for the people who come I can't get them to leave so that's probably a good sign right now we're doing a series called passages where I'll just we just take a passage from world literature or sacred text or philosophy or whatever and I'll read the passage I'll provide some context for it then we just talked about so last night was the amazing mystic Marjorie Kemp where we got to talk about her ecstatic experiences yes raise a hand for Marjorie Kemp I see her back there because next week is William Blake 7 o'clock by donation feel free to come and fill the auditorium as you've done tonight so here's our good friend Michael Carter here's what it says about Michael Carter he received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2010 and his work is an inquiry into metaphysical theories of art and has been exhibited extensively locally and abroad including recent exhibitions in Denmark and Romania he studied Blavatsky and theosophy for more than a decade now Michel is being very humble here Michael's into all kinds of things and you should ask him about it at some point I got to know Michael by visiting his studio downtown and seeing the result of his pendulum paintings and we were happy to have Michael in our second art show here called Unified Field and part of that show was what we called a happening and so we gathered in the courtyard out here at about 8:30 it was just getting dark and I'd had a rough day and traffic was traffic in LA and people are like grumbling coming in and Michael set up his paint can we had rigged the thing where he could hang his paint can and there was a black canvas on the ground and I thought man you better not get paint on our courtyard you know I'm thinking all these monkey Minds thoughts and 125 Angelenos showed up and for 45 minutes after Michael started the paint we sat there in silence and watch the paint dry it was amazing and that is the Michael Carter I know please welcome Michael Carter thank you Greg hello everyone thank you for coming tonight I'm very excited to give this lecture this is a topic that has been very interesting to me for a number of years and I realized recently that at least at this moment in Los Angeles that I was carrying around in my head more information about this more details and probably anybody else that I knew so I thought that was a great opportunity to share this with you and hopefully couldyou is equally excited about this so let's begin so I'm going to be talking about Hilma of Klimt as you all know and we'll be talking about the complications of her story and the story that I think circulates in a lot of places right now today so the first thing I want to kind of address is why me like what makes my particular perspective on this different than other people so you notice the diagram that I have here on the screen it's kind of broken into these three groups its artists right the kind of academic and by that I mean like our historians art writers curators other kinds of groups and then the last group I've used this word a cultist I don't think that's necessarily the most precise word but it's probably encompassing the broadest range so these three groups they don't necessarily overlap and I've kind of tried to show that a little bit through the diagram there there tends to be a lot of dialogue between the artists and their art historians the art curators and there's definite interest when the artists in the spiritual but it can often be sort of superficial equally to between the kind of like academic world looking at the meta physicians and occultists they can tend to kind of stop at a certain level and not go much deeper then sort of from the spiritual realm of people there tends to be a kind of partial engagement with academia part partially because there's a lot of rejection there and also too with artists there's not necessarily like a really deep understanding from people who would consider them spirits themselves spiritual with what it is that artists actually do with their practice our lights today and so this is what I think makes my particular contribution of this unique is that I kind of sit at the middle of this diagram I'm an academically trained artist so I'm familiar kind of with what's going on in the scholarship I'm a practicing artist so I know I can talk about this from the perspective of an artist and also you know I've been a student of 'i'm theosophy specifically for almost 15 years now so I know a lot of these references and connections that the other two groups will just totally miss so I want to share this perspective with you night and hopefully kind of bring you along on this so the way I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna kind of break this talk up into three parts first we're gonna go through kind of a timeline we're just gonna look at off Clint's life like you know birth to death and talk about what happens during that time the second thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna we're gonna look at a few of the works in particular and kind of go into them more deeply and then finally I want to try to reflect on why I think this is important today so let's get started so often born in 1862 in Stockholm this is a photo of stockholm from that decade she's born into a family of naval captains and Mariners to maritime family and you can see right there right it's support city there and the boats so jumping ahead a little bit to the 1870s we're now kind of she's a teenager at the age of 17 she joins a spiritualist group and begins participating in seances about a year later or so her younger sister dies at age 10 and this kind of really spurs her engagement and her involvement she becomes more serious in these groups within a couple of years however she kind of drops out of this she kind of feels what the scholarship says that she is that she feels kind of like that the seances are perhaps not serious enough for her they're they're two frivolous on a certain level and so at 20 she's basically more or less has left the spiritualist movement of her era I kind of want to talk just briefly some of you will know who these women are to kind of get a sense of what's going on in the broader spiritualist movement you know in the 19th century obviously some of you will be aware this was very popular spiritual movement for many people there were thousands tens of thousands of people who saw themselves as members worldwide so these are the Fox sisters Margaret on the left and Kate on the right and they're usually given credit for sort of the spark that starts the Victorian era spiritualist movement they were living in upstate New York as teenagers and they reported these code of encounters with Knox or rappings that they were hearing and eventually claimed that these were coming from contacts of spirits and they could communicate with them but by the time the 1880s are all around this happens in the 1840s originally they're they're kind of not doing as well they're in their 50s and they're they both been tragically widowed and and it's usually said that they're struggling with alcoholism at this point but the end of the 1880s around the time when off Clinton is actually entering the spiritualist movement over in Stockholm back in America the Fox sisters are actually have confessed or there they are they've sign these confessions that are published in papers that basically say we made this whole thing up these the wrappings are fake we they're not spiritual contact we were able to kind of like trick people and that's that's really what this was always all about and for about a year they actually go on a speaking circuit and they earn money as a debunker of spiritualism so however about a year or two after this happens both of them recant this confession and Kate once again begins conveying spirit messages to her close friends and so there's kind of they get stuck in the middle they're not welcome in either group and by the early nineteen hundred's they're actually sorry about the early 1890s they're both dead they both died quite young and it's often says that they died basically because they drunk themselves to death so I wanted to sort of point this out because it kind of colors what happens then in off Quinn's life forward which we'll get back to and some other points so they're 1880s back in Stockholm were a back with off Clint she attends the Royal Academy of Fine Arts she's part of the first generation of women who are able to do this she graduates the Academy there with honors and she's awarded a studio in the center of Stockholm and the Arts District there this is a very prestigious award with the time she's able to basically enter into a professional life as an artist we know during this period 1887 to 1905 she's working as a professional artist she's a portraiture she's a landscape painter she makes her living this way here she is from this time period it's about 1885 if you look in the background of this painting kind of on the wall behind her you can see there's two studies kind of one up by her head which seems to have maybe like a road in it and then there's one lower down by her paintbrushes it seems like there's a tree or something kind of in the background and these are likely studies for this painting that she did in 1888 called summer landscape so this is a very of the era it's a very typical academic painting this was a typical style that you would learn if you went to an art academy at this era so trying to give you some context or what this is like this is another work from 1888 as well this is John William Waterhouse's the Lady of Shalott this is a big painting that's maybe five foot by seven foot and the best way to understand these paintings academic paintings in this era is they're kind of like a like a big-budget studio film there they were they involve many different people it's a real production assistants they do all kinds of sketches and studies from life they would have a model come in and they would draw her with costumes they would find the items they would figure out every piece of this they would do studies in color they would do studies in greyscale and then finally they would execute the piece so it was a real observable studio production I'm also from the same year as this piece by Paul Gauguin this is a vision after the sermon this is a much more modest piece it's about two foot by three foot and you can already see this is a very different style of work go ganas often times connected to several different movements sometimes this is considered a symbolist work it does not depict reality in art history classes were usually told that the red is a depiction of a kind of another world or psychological state or something like that so in the foreground these are parishioners who've just been to a sermon and coming out of the church they have this vision of an angel in this case the sermon is on Jacob wrestling the angel yes you can already start to see that there's a there's very different kinds of work being created in this era so 1889 this is a year that often becomes a member of the Theosophical society in Sweden she comes member the first year that it's founded there and she'll stay a member for 30 years this is her major involvement the hill Moff clinton foundation has this statement on their website about her involvement it says above all you know that off Clint was heavily involved with the esophageal society from which she was a member from the very start so this is her major kind of spiritual connection and her framework for I think a lot of what comes later one other thing I will not talk about from this period this is a mechanic botanical drawing that she did from 1890 there's a lot of talk sort of in the scholarship about this relationship of the science or the scientific in her work and people will often try to connect this to her studies and as an academic artist or sometimes to her upbringing in a naval family but I think there's also another really strong reason for this sort of scientific perception and that actually comes from her spiritual interests and so this is the title page to the secret doctrine and you'll notice there in the subtitle it says the synthesis of science religion and philosophy and science is first and even further to even within the spiritualist movement right this excuse me we get to this quote first so this is a quote from Blavatsky from Isis unveiled from the same era and she says there is no miracle everything that happens is the result of law eternal immutable ever active apparent miracle is but the operational forces antagonistic to the well ascertained laws of nature this ignores the fact that there may be laws once known now unknown to science this has really always been a part of the sort of Theosophical perspective that Blavatsky is communicating this scientific approach to spiritualism or this scientific approach to religion and even in the Spiritualist movement we see this kind of thing the BBC even has this little website section where they describe sort of world traditions and religions and contains this particular quote many spiritualist teach that spiritualism is not based is based on natural scientific laws and does not involve the supernatural they say the difference between their faith and other religions is that most religions are based on belief while spiritualism is based on demonstrated evidence that there is life after death so we don't even have to go into kind of other explanations this seems to be kind of at the core of her understanding of spirituality of this era also from the same period here 1895 this is her she's in her early 30s at this point this is her studio in Stockholm another thing that we know that starts to happen in this era as well is the secret doctrine right which is sort of the main metaphysical text that levansky writes is fully translated into Swedish at this point so it starts in 1893 it's published serially and by the end of the 1890s it's been totally translated into Sweden Swedish this is a significant because we know she had a copy of it when you know she had it in Swedish that she referred to it often and read it and studied it so 1896 this is the kind of a period where I think you mostly start to hear a lot of information you're here most of the kind of details right this is when a flinchy forms a a group known as called the five with five with four others of her female friends and other artists and they begin to engage in the kind of regular spiritual practice that includes seances and mediumship and other kinds of work here's the altar that they used for this and one thing you should notice about this altar - is it has Christian iconography they consider themselves a Christian spiritualist group the whole time so it's got the portrait of Jesus it's got the cross in the center it's the cavalry cross on the three steps so I quote irregularly from a in this presentation from an anthropological art historian named David Adams and he has this to say about this particular moment in 1896 she formed with four other women the Friday group or the five a Christian spiritualist group that met weekly for the next ten years in each other's homes and studios for meetings consisting of a prayer meditation reciting sermons study of a text from the New Testament a benediction and ending with the seance while kneeling around an altar with a triangle and cross during which they contacted disembodied spirits and spiritual guides 1891 Labatt skee dies in london this will set off a lot of events that then become will reflect later on in Austen's life in terms of her own path who she is around 1900 she's 39 or so at this time we know during this period she's still working professionally as an artist for about a year she works as a draftsman for the veterinary Institute in Stockholm doing medical illustrations related to animals okay and so now things sort of start really getting underway in 1904 she and during a seance with the five they received this message from their spirit guides to carry out this monumental commission of art work within the group the other women actually reject this and off Clint is the one who says okay I'll take this on it seems for all of them to be too too large perhaps too much of a commission so over the next year she spends this time under the spirit of under the guidance of a particular spirit that they have called Amalia and she's prepares for this commission she spends a year in in cleansing and preparation so here's their the table where they were doing this these spirit communications and back to Adams again the five found themselves in regular repeated contact with a number of named spirits to you hat yes Emilio Clemens Jorge Gregor Esther and andhe two of whom Emilio and Ananda were said to belong to a group of still more advanced spirits than the others served called de hoga the high ones or the high guides or high masters and of Clint described these these spirit guides in her own journals like this the master of mysteries synonymous with the Vestal aesthetic servants of Christ who reside in Tibet in the astral body and exalted and holy Brotherhood known to all mystics who participate in the evolution of the world the high masters filled the entire universe that's quite a mouthful so from the same era it's an example of the kind of drawings that they were doing in the seances right this is a what happens eventually is initially all of the women take turns doing the spirit drawings but eventually off cleaned is the only one who does it so this is one by just by Hilma and here's another one as well from a year later so I'm gonna come back to this one a couple of times because I think that there's several things that are happening in this illustration which will open up into other aspects of her practice later on so here note the spiral and you might be able to see it from where you are but if not she writes the word evolution on this one three or four times in the background so these kinds of things were probably done right these illustrations would have been done flat on a table right they might have used something like this which is like a planchette but it's wheeled so that multiple more than one of them could hold it and move it around as the drawing would take place 19:06 so she's got the Commission she needs to start doing this preparatory work in 1906 is really where the first of these new kind of works happens so she prays what our preparatory pieces for paintings of the temple during that year she makes this entry in her journal and she says Emilio presented me with a task and I immediately said yes the expectation was that I would dedicate a year to this task in the end it became the greatest work of my life so she gives up the realistic painting that she's been doing professionally at during this time period she continues with the prayer and fasting cycle that she's been involved with and in November of 1906 she's 43 at this point she creates 34 preparatory paintings that are called the group one so this is that group this is at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and you can see they're all kind of a similar quality they're painted with yellows and blues or combinations of them to make green they have different kinds of sometimes these are described as sort of scientific illustrations so here's one this is number four from that series they're all about like 20 by 15 inches they're pretty small but painted directly on the canvas this is the same work at the Guggenheim so you get a sense of what these are like and see they're really they're just painted immediately there's no preparation she's just picking up the paint and painting right on the canvas this is a totally different kind of practice compared to the academic work that she was doing before these things are great they're literally just framed or like tacked up inside these frames I love the tactile quality of these pieces this is number five from the same series so going back to David Adams again he described this in the freely painted primordial chaos series she explored principles of polarity light and dark good and evil male and female and their possible reunification and these and later works the letter W represents matter or the letter U represents spirit with the W u indicating a union of the dualities and you can see all of that happening in this particular piece it's an interesting to note in the center where the U appears there's also a cross here's another one from this series in her own notebooks Auckland talks about this era of work and she says the pictures were painted directly through me without any preliminary drawings and with great force I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely without changing a single brush stroke so this thing that she points out in this statement where she says I have no idea what these paintings were supposed to represent is actually a common theme and this will appear again and again she's often doing these works and she doesn't quite know what she's doing but she is sort of compelled to work them out 19:07 so this is the kind of a major year perhaps of the major year of her work this is when she paints in this year 111 pieces that become the painting the temple this is when she paints what are the largest works of her entire career her entire practice the ten largest this is number one childhood these works are all very large they're about ten and a half feet tall by 8 foot wide she paints this entire group this is group 4 from May of 1907 to April of 1908 and she spends four days on each one of these pieces which is kind of mind-boggling to me she's just literally like cranking these things out here are the same works installed at the Guggenheim you can get a sense kind of how big these are so 1907 like what else is going on in the broader art world at this time this is the same year that Picasso finishes the Demoiselles d'Avignon he actually also doesn't show this work immediately but turns it over and puts it away in his studio because he feels like it's too much at the time this work is not as big as any of the 10 largest it's only maybe 8 foot by 7 also very important to this conversation this is Vasily Kandinsky the colorful life 1907 this is this as works about 5 by 6 feet or so so you see he's he's never an academically trained artist he's already kind of working in this kind of looser method at this point but still definitely representational also important for our conversation here is Mondrian this is Mondrian's the red tree from 1908 this work is maybe 2 foot by 3 foot so you see he's already at this point very much engaged with ideas that he's reading about it in theosophy but it really hasn't permeated into his work yet so just really quickly I want to go back to the 10 largest this is number 10 old age so I think these kinds of photographs it's really hard to get a sense of what these pieces are really like so this is some of my you know iPhone photos from the Guggenheim again and you get to get us better sense of what the physicality of these pieces they're painted on paper in tempera and then they're glued to canvas so they're this texture of them is very wrinkly and rough they're almost like a leather or skin on these these works this one is really interesting too because this is old age it's the last work but you can see this this kind of teardrop element on the bottom is sometimes called the seed and so there's a kind of art historical reading of this that perhaps she's talking about the full cycle right at the very end of old age there's the seed that starts it over again there's one other thing that's really interesting about these works to me personally which is that as our historians and conservators have been looking at them one of the things that they've discovered about them is that they have footprints on them and then that's because she worked on all of these pieces on the floor so she basically in her studio in Stockholm she maxed out the floor space that she had and laid out paper on the floor and painted these works with the help of a single assistant on the floor so you can kind of get a sense of what that was like this is a Matisse working on the Stations of the Cross in the rosary Chapel and you can see how he's got this like it's a bamboo stick and he's got maybe a piece of charcoal on the end and he so he's able to work at this at a distance and work on this scale so off Clint would have been standing above or around these pieces and making these marks with this kind of like long elongated stick so of course another example floor painting right Jackson Pollock this is a great photo by hen's Namath from the 50s of Pollock working on his a drip paintings with action paintings another example this is my work right this is the work with the pendulums thanks same kind of thing right it's actually when I developed this process I had no idea that the affluent had done this as well I guess it's something that artists do when you need more space same kind of idea right so I'd make these with the pendulum on the floor and then the finished painting is hung vertically on the wall okay so 1908 this is a really interesting moment in Auckland's life it's a there's some kind of confusion about exactly what happens in this period we know that she stops painting it's there's some contention about why she stops painting during this time period it's kind of as perhaps like a Rorschach test about what you think we know at the bean this error her mother becomes seriously ill and eventually becomes blind and that she gives up her original studio in the center of Stockholm and she moves to a different space this is also the year 1908 where she first meets Rudolf Steiner so there's some uncertainty in the record about exactly when this meeting took place or what the content of that meeting was there the there it's still not a hundred percent certain again talking going back to Adams who I discovered before he actually had the opportunity to go look in the archives at door knock and discover there's actually correspondence there from this time period between Steiner and Auckland so he has at least been able to confirm this meeting definitely happened so some of the first kind of art historical information that was written about this meeting goes like this by chance Rudolf Steiner general secretary that the oesophagus Association German section and founder of the anthroposophy visit Hilma off Clint most likely the visit occurred in 1908 he witnessed the entire body of work which had been inspired by his lead and he expressed himself on the painting there are only vague notes from this visit and the exact point in time is not completely established Steiner observed that he had no possibility to understand the work that it could be understandable approximately in the fifty years the other thing is Steiner also objects to and this is kind of one of the points is basically that he he had issues with the fact that the work was created through the passive mediumship so atavistic aliy passively through mediumship guided by spirits and he said he courage during his time period basically that she should develop her in fact with these more own spiritual faculties to a greater degree and rely on those instead of these guidances from these spirits and he felt this was a more proper way to develop and Express spiritual knowledge so this is not a unique view to Steiner you know and blatsky always was hammering this point home and in early writings she talks about this repeatedly over and over again in many ways she describes that her effort to develop who to organize at the oesophagus Society partially was to combat this rising tide of spiritualism this desire to give over to a kind of passive mediumship and so in Isis unveiled in 1877 she writes mediumship is the opposite of adept ship the medium is the passive instrument of foreign influences the adept actively controls himself and all inferior potencies and she goes on later in the kita theosophy in 1889 to describe mediumship even more dramatically they were now accepted to indicate that abnormal that abnormal psycho physiological state that leads a person to take the fancies of his imagination his hallucinations real artificial four realities no entirely healthy person on the physiological and psychic planes can ever be a medium that which mediums see hear and sense is real but untrue it is either gathered from the astral plane so deceptive in its vibrations and suggestions or from pure hallucinations which have no actual existence but for him who perceives them so one of the other things that I want to kind of talk about this moment too to digress a little bit is when we read the first quote here about the meeting with Steiner it discussed his involvement with the Theosophical society I've noticed that many people don't know much about the origin of the sort of Steiner movement and the anthroposophical society in in the world and so I want to just address that slightly because it ends up having a big impact on up life so here's this diner in 1907 and some of you might know who he's seated next to this is Annie Besant she becomes the president of the International at the esophageal Society the one that's headquartered in India in Adyar and in through the rest of the lecture when I discussed the different Theosophical societies if I ever say I'm talking about the TS that's the group that I'm referring to is the Indian based one in 1902 Steiner becomes the head of the newly formed section German section of the TS in 1904 best and the points cited in be the outer head of the esoteric section for both Germany and Austria so he's a he is by the time he meets off Clint he's in a very substantial and powerful position within the Theosophical society is responsible not only for the organization of it in Germany Central Europe but also for the metaphysical instruction in it so one of the things that it was really fascinating to me however is that there's a schism that develops and part of that schism actually has to do with the use of art in the TS at the time so in his biography autobiography he writes this in the Theosophical society artistic interests were scarcely fostered at all from a certain point of view this situation was at that time quite intelligible but it ought not to have continued if the true sense for the spiritual that was to be nurtured the members of such a society center all their interests at first upon the reality of the spiritual life in the sense world man appears to them only in his transitory existence severed from the spiritual art seems to them to have its activity within this severed existence it seems therefore to be apart from the spiritual reality for which they seek because this was so in the Theosophical society artists did not feel at home there so this photograph is particularly interesting and there's a number of details here that I want to point out to become significant over the course of this story so this is a photo from 1907 this is the Congress of the European Federation of the sections of the Theosophical Society often called the Munich Congress as I'd be looking the very first row there - from the left that's Annie Besant again and then three more over from her with his hand across his chest is Rudolph Steiner the thing that's really interesting about this photo though is what's in the background on the walls and beside everyone who's sitting so if you look above every one you'll see that there are these round images on the walls of the painting these are sometimes called Hondo's it's basically a painting these all have some kind of representational image in them and then if you look also you'll see that there are pillars painted on the walls kind of like this room and then finally up through the right and above them there's there are statues and sculptures so Steiner writes about this meeting in his autobiography as well and he says a large concert hall which was to serve with the conference we had provided with an interior decoration which should reflect in form and color artistically the mood that prevailed in the content of the oral proceedings artistic environment and spiritual activity in the room should be a harmonious unit I put the art most importance on avoiding the abstract in our stick symbolism and letting the artistic sensation speak and he goes on to say a great portion of the old members of the Theosophical society were in orally displeased but the innovations offered them at the Munich Congress but it would have been well to understand but was it clearly grasped at the time by exceedingly few was the fact that the anthroposophical current had given something of an entirely different bearing from that of the theosophic the oesophagus society up to that time in this inner bearing the true reason why the anthropos society could no longer exist as a part of the Theosophical society here's Hilma again 1910 or so she's in her late 40s during this time period too Kandinsky publishes what is probably his best-known book this is concerning spiritual and art in this book he liberally discusses the Ossipee Steiner and he quotes livanski and the same time period Mondrian moves to Paris where he actually stays in the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Paris he lodges there for a while well he's sort of figuring his way out he paints this painting called evolution that's three foot by maybe five foot or so and again this is a similar to the primordial chaos series of affluence we looked at earlier on showing a sort of synthesis or a unification of spirit and matter during this time period as well Kandinsky paints what's considered his first abstract artwork this is called first abstract watercolor it's typically dated to 1910 however scholarship has bump this up to 1913 recently which is an interesting note the dating of the painting is actually 1910 but that's basically and put into he's been contested so 1913 1915 this is also a very interesting time period as well we know that Ocwen participates in the World Congress of the Theosophical Society in Stockholm in 1914 we know that she exhibits her naturalistic paintings at the Baltic Exhibition in Malmo and also in that same exhibition Kandinsky shows some of his abstract works this is from that exhibition those are convinced keys works on the walls this is the catalog register from that same exhibition you can see hilma's names up there on the top left with the one work that she displayed and lower on the right side is Kandinsky his name as well also during this time period 1915 this is when she completes the altarpiece series between 1912 and 1915 she completes additional 82 works and concludes them with this series these are the three pieces as displayed in the Guggenheim we'll come back to this series towards the end so something else really interesting happens in 1913 as well this is from a page of the general report of the 30th anniversary in convention of the Theosophical Society in Adyar from 1914 and if you can see the text what it says is that under rule for you for the charters of the German sections have elapsed so what's going on here so this is what's going on some of you might know who this is already yeah or you might recognize him when he's slightly older this is Jiddu Krishnamurti so Krishnamurti plays a very interesting role in this whole story if you've ever been to Ojai you've been in the sort of North's western edge of town is the Krishnamurti Society of America same person here he is in the 1920s lecturing there at the Oak Grove in Ojai so what is this all about well many times in her writings Blavatsky makes what is kind of a claim or perhaps even a prophecy and she says the following in century xx some disciple more informed and far better fitted maybe sent by the Masters of wisdom to get final and irrefutable proofs there exists a science called the gupta vidya or the secret wisdom sheer pieces claim many times she basically says in the twentieth century there will be another spiritual teacher a major spiritual teacher it helps to kind of understand the arc of her major works Lavazza keys to understand a little bit more of this so Isis unveiled 1877 the idea here is that basically we're clearing away misconceptions these are misunderstandings in both science and the religion of her era in 1888 or probably what is considered her most substantial work the seeker doctrine so now we've cleared away the underbrush now we can talk about new concepts and terminologies but that is not all that happens in 1888 what also happens is esoteric section that the Asafa chol society is organized and so the idea here is for the student of theosophy who is who has mastered the other two material now this is a way to implement this in your life and this is another development of those concepts and a way to do it in practice and in that material she makes the following statement those who will not have profited by the opportunity given to the world in every last quarter of the century those who will not have reached a certain point of psychic and spiritual development or that point from which begins the cycle of adaption by that day those will advance no further the knowledge already acquired no master of wisdom from the east will himself appear or send anyone to europe or america after that period and the sluggards will have to renounce their chance of advancement in their present incarnations until the Year 1975 she's very specific about this so this sets off a whole lot of conversations within the Theosophical society ever era including this article which is titled will the masters help be withdrawn in 1898 until 1975 if you know anything about the broader sleep of the spiritual movements in the West and America the 1970s is a major moment for this especially in 1975 pretty much I think the majority of the the variation and growth of different kinds of spiritual movements that happen related to the New Age many of them come from this prophecy or that's failure to be realized or its realization depending on how you think about it so going back to India and Adyar this is Charles Ledbetter he is a depending on how you talk to can be considered a controversial figure within Theosophical society and one day on the beach on the long the river and a dr he sees this young boy and he says that's that's the spiritual teacher that's the world teacher that's him right there that's Krishnamurti and there he is in 1910 with his brother and it's yeah so the theist of the t s basically takes this idea and runs with it in 1907 annie besant becomes the president of the Theosophical society and through some process that I've never been totally clear about she says actually this is gonna happen much sooner we're gonna accelerate this whole timeline and in 1911 she forms what's called the order of the star in the east and here's the the statement she makes for that disorder has been founded to draw together those who whether inside or outside the Theosophical society believe in the near coming of a Great Spirit teacher with the helping of the world and that's exactly what they do so there's Krishnamurti as the world teacher this painting is actually hanging today in the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America up in Wheaton I just saw it a couple weeks ago and it this gets so large that when Krishnamurti visits Los Angeles in the early 20s he speaks at the Hollywood Bowl and he speaks to 16,000 people so back in Europe this situation becomes untenable for the theosophist that our language Steiner for a number of reasons they don't agree with this idea at all and in 1913 after basically coming being more and more critical publicly about this Steiner leads a succession of the European Theosophists that are aligned with him and it's this group of succeeding Theosophists they're primarily Central and Western European there's several thousand of them in number that group becomes a nucleus of what we think of today is anthroposophical society and you can see that this is the general register again the third column is the date of the Charter and you'll see they're all 1912-1913 that's because the entire German section all of the German lodges seceded with Steiner 1914 World War one breaks out okay so back to Hilma 1916 there's a major shift in her work she's done with the temples the paintings the temple the it's the the scholarship basically says that we think the shift happens because she comes home to this greater influence of the Steiners approach and what she does instead is she begins to develop an esoteric systemization of nature so this is from series one of violet blossoms with guidelines it's about 20 by 10 inches and so she compares or earlier botanical illustrations with these charts and references that connect to the inner qualities of these plants that she's documenting also in 1920 her mother finally passes away and she joins then the what is the newly-formed anthroposophical society here's our local chapter and past year she also begins traveling now to what is the center of the antipas offal society in Dornoch in switzerland so going back to Adams he says when her mother died in 1920 off Clint felt freer to travel and in September began to undertake regular journeys to door knock over eight or nine separate visits from 1920 to 1925 she spent altogether more than a year there with the longest single visit lasting six months this is the first Scottie Otto and it does not exist today it was finished in 1923 and it was destroyed the same month it was finished the assumption has always been by arson during this time period she says she engages in these sort of more systemization works this is from series 2 and these are basically attempts for her to articulate the perspective of different world spiritual additions through abstract forms so this one is called number 20 the current standpoint of the Mahatma's and these are also pretty small they're about 14 by 10 this is the time - this is so she's continuing this she's doing these sort of botanical illustrations combined with kind of like esoteric documentation and she makes this large collection of these works and basically ends up at the end with two notebooks that are about 300 pages and she donates these to the Natural Science selection at the Goethe the einem and they're still there today so this is another kind of quiet period for Hilma 1921 she's going back and forth to Dornoch to study recently and at some point it seems like she stops making work around 1925 to 1930 there's nothing there dated from those area there's some conjecture that what happened is that basically she had encountered some of the Steiners aura lectures regarding the sort of original sins the visual art which was copying or merely imitating an appearance of the physical senses or right the attempt to represent the supersensible and if you realize what she's basically been doing up to those point it's both of those things so she seemed the kind of chill on her own work for a moment 1921 as well so a Mondrian this is when Mondrian finally sort of realizes what we think of as mature style this is probably one of the first works from that series Pablo won he's in Paris again this is about two by three feet so there's another strong shift in hilma's work she starts doing what big basically are known as her late watercolors if you're familiar at all with the kind of art that is produced with the waldorf schools today you should recognize that this is a standard style from that Adams believes that she's looking at examples that come from Texas diner produced called how to know the higher worlds in that it has a number of meditations or practices that are designed to cultivate spiritual capabilities and she seems to actually be referring to those while she's making these paintings 1923 this is Kandinsky is composition 8 so this is also now the moment when Kandinsky seems to reach also his mature style in 1925 March 30th steiner dies he's 64 in 1928 the second go at the autumn is completed you'll notice it's poured concrete fireproof and it has this very beautiful auditorium in it in the anthroposophical style so if you remember all the way back to that Munich Congress in 1907 right this is the full realization of that kind of vision for an auditorium for a spiritual dialogue so one thing has come out that's been very interesting often times it's said that often never exhibited her spiritual work during her lifetime and some scholarship was discovered recently that this is actually not correct we know there was at least one situation where she displayed some of these works while she was alive including the paintings of the temple so what happened was in London in 1928 there was a World Congress for spiritual science and it's practical applications and it was a conference basically designed by the anthroposophical Society in London as a way to introduce the work of the different sections to the public and so we know Helen was given a whole room and she showed a whole bunch of her spiritual works there and actually did a lecture as well July 25th of that year so jumping back to the Theosophical society remember they're on their world teacher kick right now and in 1929 what happens is Krishnamurti rejects this mantle he basically says I'm not that person and he dissolves the order of this that's been built around him he withdraws to Ojai where he continues to live for the rest of his life between traveling and lecturing this is from film made of him from the 1930s again in the oak grove in Ojai where he's giving the speech that dissolved the order it's usually called truth is a pathless land and I want to read just a little bit of it truth being limitless unconditioned unapproachable by any path whatsoever could not be organized nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path if you first understand that then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief I have now decided to disband the order of the star as I happen to be its head you can form other organizations and expect someone else with that I am NOT concerned north creating new cages new decorations for those cages my only concern is a set and man absolutely unconditionally free so this is a moment that actually I think is a major blow to the TS and one that I'm not sure they've totally ever recovered from 1930 in her notebooks at this point off clean basically makes a note there and she says that she's resolving never to travel to Dornoch again in the wake of Steiners death there's too much infighting that she's experiencing now and the bicycle society as well and she says this is not for me either this is a work from 1931 of hers an untitled work another small work it's about nine by eleven at the end of the decade World War two breaks out so this is one of the final series of works that off Quint produces this is an untitled watercolor from 1941 that's about 19 by 12 inches and you can see it still has many of the features of the earlier work especially the spirals okay 1944 this is where the timeline ends now in New York Mondrian dies on February 2nd 1944 in October of that year off Clint writes what will be the last entry in her journal and ends it with this sentence you have a mystery service ahead of you and will soon enough realize what is expected of you on October 21st in the aftermath of a tragic accident she eventually dies from injuries that she sustained she's almost 82 years old as she's not 82 in this photo she's a little younger but when when she passes away she leaves behind approximately 1300 paintings 125 note and sketchbooks with approximately 26,000 pages which according to her will the works will never be shown or will not be shown for at least 20 years after her death and that none of them should ever be sold ending out that year in December 13th Kandinsky dies in southern France after world war ii the effluents work is moved to an anthroposophical colony in Sharna in sweden this is that colony today it still exists this is the culture house there they're safely stored away by arnie Klingberg who is the president of the swedish anthroposophical society at this time it also has a very beautiful auditorium and the anthroposophical style so there's a lot of very interesting things things that happen now after her death into the present moment but I want to jump ahead to the present and sort of discuss what's been happening recently so Lily's great memes that have showed up she got a cover of Vogue Paris maybe you guys would like some merchandise so yeah so I've noticed that in talking to people sometimes is this perception that this Google has exited kind of a period of nowhere it's like oh she got this exhibition Guggenheim awesome it just comes out of nowhere but that's not the case at all it's actually the result of a very long process that interestingly enough starts here in Los Angeles the very first place that Oakland's work is shown after her death internationally is here in LA at this exhibition in 1985 called the spiritual art abstract painting 1890 to 1985 her work is actually becomes a kind of center point to this exhibition if you know me you know that I told you about this exhibition and if you don't have this catalogue I've told you to buy a copy of it because I still think it's an incredibly important exhibition and the catalog is amazing it's still it was in play it was in print for years and years and you can still get it fairly inexpensively it has even though it's 30 years old at this point it still has some of the best kind of compilation of this this history of the spiritual influence on Modern Art the other thing is really interesting about this exhibition is it was the exhibition that opened what was called the Anderson building of the LACMA campus so you've ever been along wilshire and you've seen this building this is the Anderson building it's called the art of the Americas today this is one of the building that's gonna be torn down really soon yeah so I don't know there's some kind of full circle thing happening here and here's some photos from the exhibition Mondrian in the front there's Clinton the back there's the altarpiece painting here it's paired with you Sean this is probably the first didactic wall text ever written for him off Clint and it has the standard story that I think most people are familiar with today this exhibition is really interesting for another reason this is the center of that exhibition Center room so they had this kind of like yellow painted room that was a hug and then they divided the works into these themes that were based on kind of ideas that were commonly seen in spiritual art and you notice that this room has vitrines in it right and in these vitrines they're it's books so the exhibition had every room vitrines with books paired with the paintings and here's the the helmet room and you can see they're off on the left right so that's one of her sketchbooks that's actually one of the the one the left there down below is her mediumistic drawings below that in the center is what is known as one of the blue books where she documented all of her works sort of her future understanding so what they did for this exhibition that was really I think a very important step and one that I haven't seen repeated so far is they really tried to pair the sources with the work so they were basically are making this argument that up to this point had sort of had been marginalized and I'll talk about this towards the end more that these artists were involved in these spiritual movements and they were reading these texts and that these texts were directly responsible for the works that they were making so does anyone have any guess where these texts came from right here yeah so you can see in this photograph they're in the center that's actually a book that's in the collection of the PRS that's a hand transcribed and hand illuminated version of the esoteric instructions of levansky it's in the library here so this is the first time her work is shown internationally in this catalogue is incredibly important to sort of it share knowledge of her work to many people since then but between then and now she's had an incredible exhibition career for someone who's dead so if you go to the website of the up Clint foundation they have a list of all their exhibitions and it's one two three four five six seven pages long so this would these primarily have been in Europe already been international these the works have been circulated extensively so the boomerang exhibition which sort of was such a breakthrough I think in America is really the result of this long process it's kind of a coming home and and you know or at least us over here is bringing to a greater awareness something that's been going on elsewhere okay so that's so kind of recently and the next thing I want to really talk about is I want to kind of look at some of the works more specifically because I think that this is the really interesting point and the thing that I can most share with you all there's a lot of conversation about what the influences are in her work especially among art writers curators art historians and the like and because most of them have very little knowledge of the metaphysical doctrines that she was interested in or involved they completely missed that particular influence they just don't know that it's there and they try to come up with other explanations of what's going on so going back to these very early works 1904 the spiral the word evolution right she does a whole series based on this this is called thesis group six evolution 1908 seven from the same series so I would like to argue that this pairing of the spiral and evolution is a obviously Theosophical influence obviously comes directly from Lebowski's writings so Christine Bergen who edited a recent text called Hilma off Clint's notes and methods which is a publication or a republication of her notebooks this to say about the use of evolution in her works is important to note that for helmet off Clint evolution is not used in the Darwinian sense refers instead to spiritual evolution both at the auspice and Rudolf Steiner believed that humans were once pure spirit but they had been separated from their spiritual selves by the material world evolution for Steiner and of Clint is the process that will ultimately need the Reese Pyrrha qu ization of humankind so if we go into Lavazza keys writings secret doctrine right away we find these kinds of images so one of the things I also want to point out about this image right now is what is definitely a controversial aspect of the Velasquez writings which is the worst use of the word race and I think it's easy to understand what she's maybe talking about if we think about the places where you see race in the secret doctrine spelled either all uppercase or with an uppercase R she's basically referring to the human race collectively at a particular period in time and not ethnicity which is how we typically use the word today so going on Labatt Suki says this kind of thing a lot this tracing of spiral lines refers to the evolution of man's as well as nature's principles an evolution which takes place gradually as does everything else in nature only in relatively recent geological periods has the spiral course of cyclical law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution the plane of gross material causation were there no such thing as evolutionary cycles an eternal spiral progress into matter through proportionate obscuration of spirit though the two are one followed by an inverse ascent into spirit and then defeat of matter active and passive by turn so if we know that off clean is looking at these texts she's using this word evolution in this particular way she's pairing with use of spiral for me it's very hard to separate that from the Theosophical talk it seems to be a direct source but there's another source that I also would like to discuss in this time period that's very interesting so again here's the ten largest this is number three youth and that's this work this is from 1868 this is titled glory be to God this is the work of Georgiana Houghton Houghton lived from 1814 to about 1884 and she was also an academically trained artist she was a prominent figure in the early spiritualist movement in Victorian England during the 1880s sorry 1860s and 1870s she produced what is probably an unprecedented series of abstract watercolor works as part of her practice as a spirit medium and she called these spirit drawings this is a high of God from 1862 I had the Lord 1870 and on the back of these paintings they're pretty small they're maybe 12 by 9 or so she would record what she had received as a medium she would make notes and information about which particular spirit she had been in contact during the trance and you can see some of these get they get very poetical but they have the same also the botanical the natural feeling the use of curves and spirals that we see from affluence work from the same period I wouldn't actually win so far as to organize self organize an exhibition of her works in London in 1871 she rented a gallery she tried to sell them no one would buy them she continued to make them at this time period but she stopped trying to popularize them publicly so today less than a fifty of these works are known to exist but I think the thing that's interesting to me about this mostly though is this idea of spirit drawings or art made through spirit contact this text this is a account right it's a story about this individual named William wilkinson he talks about his experience with spiritual or and he uses the word spear drawings but in 1858 and even by the 1883 this was a popular enough idea that there were magazines being circulated about this continue to have representational work but it's the same kind of thing so anyways this is a detail right from the ten largest and then from mountains work on the right so to me this is really interesting not because this idea that maybe off Clint saw this work or she copied the work or something like that but the possibility that there's like an aesthetic for spiritual art that somehow these people are operating independently and they're unconnected they they they're not in contact with each other but they're coming up with the same kinds of aesthetic and formal decisions based on these experiences that they're having and that's really interesting because in terms of art scholarship in our history that's a totally unknown moment there's no information about this at all and this again while this even predates this idea that of Clint is a pioneer abstraction or advanced abstraction and a Western tradition it's quickly been going on long before this okay so the next one this I want to go into is the altarpiece series so well couldn't thought these were very important works they were the kind of summation of the pinnacle of the painting slit temple and in her notebook she describes them this way as a summary of the whole work this is altarpiece one and so look at some of the details here right this sort of gold it's actually gold leaf in the center there the disks it's got this blue line around the outside it's the Seven Rays of a spectrum right that all descend from that center point it's red orange yellow green blue indigo violet and it comes from this kind of black and gold point in the center this was done in 1915 so this is an illustration from the harmon manuscript which is in the collection of the philosophical research library here the exact dating and this one is kind of unknown we know that this text was the manuscript was started sometime in 1891 and finished sometime in the 19-teens so it's either before or happening simultaneously with off Clint's work so Harmon was an early associate of Manley Hall and he was in contact with Hall in the early days when Hall was a preacher and speaking in downtown LA so this is from the all-seeing eye from 1926 and this is an article that Hartmann contributed to it in general this is a kind of it's a kind of a recent rediscovery here of this text and an Harmon in general there's some thought that he's living in the East Coast Philadelphia Boston somewhere like that and he pops that he was an optometrist but he made this incredible hand Illustrated hand-drawn manuscript and it's filled with these kind of illustrations so what I think is going on here and much as I'm open to the idea of a collective unconsciousness or an astral prototype or some other kind of explanation I suspect that there's probably a more mundane reason for this and that there is some common source that both of these people off Clint in Sweden Hartmann in America the both were involved in Theosophical society that they were looking at some common source to make these works probably it's a pamphlet or a diagram or something like that printed around 1910 and the part of the reason I suspect for this is because I know a lot of Harmons other sources so here's another one on the left this is a diagram from the esoteric instructions on the right is Hartman's variation of that on the left this is john world kili chart of harmonic evolutions Keeley was an American inventor and he was based in Philadelphia he Bob at ski actually discusses Keeley's work and the secret doctrine and on the right that's Harmons origin it's an identical recreation of the same diagram so what's going on I want to go a little deeper for a moment into the altarpiece one series because I also want to connect this back to some particular Theosophical concepts that I think are happening from this time period so I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to go up to Chicago and I went to the National headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America I was able to spend some time in their library and their archives looking for texts so I remember we were looking at the rainbow before this idea of these seven rays and this is a very popular concept it's a kind of key occult doctrine that surfaces definitely with blatsky but possibly much much earlier so I was able to look at this pamphlet there it's also from about 1910 and it has in the back it has a straight note in the front it says the forth creative hierarchy with colored diagrams and in the back is this diagram so it's not quite there exactly but I think that there I'm kind of getting close to what is probably a source so let's go back look at Harmons manuscript helpfully for us he's labeled this part of his manuscript and I don't know if you guys can read those from there but he basically starts from the right and each one is labeled according to different qualities so the orange for instance they're actually can't read it on the screen here it's too small let's go to the green one which is like the animal or natural soul right the yellow says it is the aggregate of daehan truck intelligences right the blues is the synthesis of a cult nature the the indigo is divine ideation so you might start to recognize some of these associations with color these are the very particular very typical color correspondences that you often hear right so we talked about these in terms of color healing color magic color psychology those kinds of things and the claim is that these correspondences are thousands and thousands of years old that they come from Pythagorean teachings so we know that Harmon was an associate of halls and if we go to the secret teachings of all ages there's literally an entire chapter on this called the Pythagorean theorem use akin color and this is the illustration from the front of it notice the rainbow notice also the rays coming from the mouth of the figure so if we go deeper into that chapter at the very end we get this paragraph this is the final paragraph in the chapter and it basically is hall saying Lavazza he talks about this in the secret doctrine and he gives the color correspondences that are identical or similar to the ones that Hartman is using here he's using both the Sanskrit terminology for these things and also a translation for them so you've been before when I was talking about green he talks about lower green being the animal soul or indigo being the spiritual intelligence so these correspond to what Harman wrote on his diagram and then at the very end of this section right at the very end of this paragraph where he's now connecting it to the planets and what are these called doremi facility right he says at the very end see the es instructions and these are of course esoteric instructions again so if we go into the second one of these instructions I get this chart and this is basically the chart that is identical to Harmons work that we saw earlier except turned on its side so it's the same colors with the same associations and like Harmons illustration is it as a hierarchy of seven that's broken down into seven seven sub hierarchies as well so a good I want to go a little the grass a little bit and go a little farther here with this one because I think this brings up a really interesting point and to get a little farther with that we need to look at this phrase which is d honcho horn and this is a phrase it shows up often in blue bat-skis writings especially in the secret doctrine it turns out to be a little controversial it's not if you try to translate this from Sanskrit it you will get stuck I'm trying to do that the first word is really easy which is D on so these are what was known for many years as the dyani Buddha and you'll notice there are five of them they all have different colors now we typically talk about these as the tub tathagatas and these are meditating or contemplating Buddha's and the way that we should understand these is they are not historical figures like Gautama Buddha but transcendent beings who symbolize universal divine principles or forces the dyani Buddha's represent various aspects of the enlightened consciousness and are great healers of the mind and soul so the second word from that phrase before dion Shawn is a little more complicated if you look it up in a sense with dictionary you won't find that phrase anywhere if you try to look that up in Tibetan you so not find that phrase so I like the idea that this phrase is perhaps a slightly corrupted transliteration of this word which is chose scaling vastly translates Chauhan as a chief or Lord but this word translates from Tibetan into sanskrit into Dharmapala so Adama Paulo is a protector of the Buddhist Dharma there are typically divinities usually depicted with wrathful iconography in the Mahayana and tantric traditions of Buddhism though benevolent they represented as hideous and ferocious or to instill terror and evil spirits their wrath depicts their believed willingness to defend and guard Buddhist followers from dangers and enemies this is a Mahakala the supreme time is actually right over in the wall here as a thunka of one of the time Apollo's so to continue with this idea right the bat Suki says in a secret doctrine the seven Wise Ones rays of wisdom Gianni's fashioned seven paths or lines also races in another sense - one of these may be distressed - one of these may the distressed mortal come which is interpreted solely from the astronomical and cosmic aspect is one of the most pregnant in occult meaning the past may mean lines Mirada but they they are primarily beams of light falling on the paths leading to wisdom it means ways or paths they are in short the Seven Rays which fall free from the macrocosmic Center the seven principles in the metaphysical the seven races in the physical sense it all depends on the key used and she goes on limiting the teaching strictly to this earth it may be shown that as the ethereal forms of the first men our first projected on seven zones by seven Dianna hanok centers of force so there are centers of creative power for every root or parent species of hosts forms a vegetable and animal life this again this is again knows creation nor is there any design except in the general ground plan worked out by universal law but there are certainly designers though these are neither omnipotent norm Nishant in the absolute sense of the term there are simply builders or masons working under the impulse given them by the effort to be unknown on our plane Master Mason the one life and law so I think that this gives us a sense of maybe what Auckland is intending in these altar place pieces right so if we go back and look at this is altarpiece too right we can see she's using these Ray's as a kind of a starting point in these pieces everything emanates either from or out of these rays the spiral the rainbow colors are all used again and again this is the third one right and again seven rays the use of colors again so we sort of work and understand these as to mean these are depictions of kind of primordial forces that develop the material universe however there's an interesting point that connects all this that I could want to go down for a second which is uh Lavazza is very clear about how we shouldn't understand this idea and she says that I he the uncho hands are the collective hosts of spiritual beings who are the vehicle for the manifestation of the divine or universal thought and we'll there are the intelligent forces that give to an act in nature her laws well themselves acting according to laws imposed upon them in a similar manner by still higher powers but they are not the personifications of the powers of nature as erroneously thought I said after baskis death this idea actually gets developed quite a lot so you might have remembered this gentleman from earlier before Charles Ledbetter and he takes this idea quite far in the 20s he writes a book called the masters in the path and the second ition includes this diagram so I want to go into what is described as a sixth level in this one right there's that word Chauhan and you'll see now he's listed these seven Ray's again but now they all have names so the outside to the one in the two here these are the names of bovitz keys teachers the sixth one you probably recognize is Jesus right the seventh one is the count the count Saint Germain and the fourth fifth and the third are also different masters different spiritual teachers and this is from the the chapter in that book called chohan's and the Rays so these things are now are fully personified there's a diagram of the same thing now with colors and pictures of these rays now as people it's very interesting before this word chauhan because it seems to not be a word that actually exists in any other language you can follow it through the changing groups and then in the Western New Age movement you'll see it come up again and again so when it leaves that the Asafa chol society intersects with these individuals this is Guyana Ballard and sometime around the 1930s so a guy Ballard there on the left he is up on Mount Shasta in the 1930s and he claims that he has an encounter with the saint with the count of st. Germain and he then moves on with his wife to create what is now known as the I am or the I am movement or the I am activity the full early name I am the activity of st. Germain so if you think the word Chauhan means Lord and we're talking about these rays and there's seven rays these are the Lords of the seven rays you probably have seen these images or if you haven't seen images you're probably more familiar with the name that these are known by more regularly now these are the ascended masters so you can take and do with that of what you will but I want to go back to Bob Otsuki again who I think is very clear about how we should understand this idea in the first place and she says these abstractions must be necessity must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the material universe which presents itself to the senses and intellect and they underlie the secondary and subordinate powers of nature which and the prime or Phi's have been worshipped as God and gods by the common herd of every age ok so let's look at one more piece of work here so this is a Swan series these are all from about 1915 these are all like 6 foot by 6 foot so notice here the colors use especially the beaks and the feet as you've seen other works in this series you may not realize this is a series because it changes very quickly so now it's this polarity of these opposites and there's a kind of a churning this is the 10th from this series and you can see the same colors are still being used here is part of the whole series installed at the moderna museet unfortunately this is not an order the one on the far right is early the ones in the middle are actually the later ones this is the end of that series this is number 23 from the Swan so I think we can start to understand this by actually looking in the Indian tradition in the Vedas some of you recognize this as the Trimurti right these are the three deities that are conceived to be in charge of creation on the left is Brahma as the Creator the center is Shiva the destroyer and on the right is Vishnu the preserver you've ever seen images of Hindu deities you'll probably notice they often are company with an animal this is Ganesh right with you the rat música and the rat the animal is called a vahana it's a vehicle it has a look a metaphorical or symbolic quality that complements the deity's powers or potencies so here is Brahma with his Mahon which is the Swan so Brahma has a compliment his polarity is the goddess sarasvati she also has a small this Swan in sanskrit is called hunter this is the emblem of the Ramakrishna order if some of you are familiar with the vedanta society here in los angeles the founder of the vedanta society he belonged to this order and there is the Swan once again so if you probably know who this is as well so if you look at the title here underneath autobiography o Beauty it says who it's by which is Paramahansa Yogananda so that first word Paramahansa is at honorific it means the supreme Swan so Yogananda helps us understand what this means the so on is equally at home on land and on water similarly the true sage is equally at home in the realms of matter and of spirit to be in divine ecstasy and simultaneously to be actively wakeful is the Paramahansa state the Royal Swan of the soul floats in the cosmic ocean beholding both its body and the ocean as manifestations of the same spirit the word Paramahansa signifies one who is awakened in all realms so this Swan is a very important symbol in Hindu tradition in the Vedic teachings but I think we can even get farther with this is we know that there is one Swan in particular that is very significant and that is kala Hansa which is the Swan of time and space kala Hansa the dark Swan of everlasting duration which manifests as the white swan of eternity and time so Blavatsky goes on to say the first cause had no name in the beginnings later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinker's as an ever invisible mysterious bird that dropped an egg into chaos which egg becomes the universe hence prom was called kala Hansa the Swan in space and time he became the Swan of eternity who lays at the beginning of each Maha Maha mantra a golden egg and that long Sanskrit word Maha Maha mantra means the great cycle of the creation of the universe so what she's referring to is apart from the Rig Veda this is that section in that chain Yoga Upanishad the universe was at first non existent being without names and forms solely it manifested itself as a shoot comes out of a seed it turned into an egg the egg leg for a time of a year the egg broke open the two halves are one of silver the other of gold the silver one became this earth the gold one the sky the thick membrane of the white the mountains the thin membrane of the yolk the mist with the clouds the small veins the rivers the fluid the sea and in her personal notes to her own students Blavatsky makes this comment about kala Hansa carla Hansa has as a dual meaning exoteric Li it is Brahma who is the Swan the great bird the vehicle in which darkness itself Dirac was manifests itself to human comprehension as light and this universe but esoterically it is the darkness itself the unknowable absolute which is the source so I think we can think of this Swan series and the one that follows it was just called the Dove as as often working out a cosmological structure she's starting with this idea that she's encountered in the secret doctrine which has these roots to the Vedic tradition and she's basically working it out visually through this whole series okay so I want to conclude this conversation by talking about why I think the law of Quint is important now the first thing I want to go back to is this original entry from 1906 right this is uh what she's claiming is she's getting this message from her spirit guides they were right 110 years later whatever we think about this encounter or whatever we think about the idea of spirit guides whatever we think about the metaphysical the spiritual this entry is correct this is indeed was the major task of her life and it would turn out to be the greatest work so I really like this quote from Tracy Bosch cops she was the curator of the Guggenheim exhibition so she tries the frame like how do we think about Oakland right now and she says how do we look at her work as a modernist his impact is most urgently felt in contemporary art it forces us to think more openly and inclusively than before because we can't explain her otherwise so I would like to read kind of my summation of why I think this is important to us now towards the end of her life Lebowski piled and published a small book called gems from the east this book contained aphorisms and axioms think truisms or established propositions one for each day of the year the axiom for June 19th reads spirituality is not what we understand by the words virtue and goodness it is the power of receiving formless spiritual essences - most of you I would imagine the arts today is all about income principle sums of money paid at auction museums made for selfies or as a forum to process the excesses of the 1% some of you also know and others maybe not that as early as the decade before off Quinn's death there has been a persistent effort almost a pitched battle to diminish and completely marginalize the spiritual interests and concerns of artists in the European American traditions perhaps there is the connection between these second situation and the first one the spiritual was acceptable for those quote primitive cultures unquote but it was framed as immature and at best delusional and at worst pathological something for those people over there but not for us at the highest levels great energy was spent on this effort countless exhibitions books scholarly papers dissertations and dialogues were summoned to this fight all in order to find some other rationale some other motivation than the spiritual in art this effort was so successful that even as early as 1945 at the dawning of the New York School and one year after Oakland's death the young Barnett Newman could write the present feeling seems to be that the artist is concerned with form color and spatial arrangement this subjective approach to art reduces it to a kind of ornament it is a decorative art built on slogans of purism where the attempt is made for an unworldly state now to be fair this desire to diminish the spiritual wasn't completely illegitimate I'm not saying we should abandon all other understandings and uncritically embrace a so-called spiritual interpretation but in the zealousness of this effort to suppress the spiritual this entire realm a realm that is arguably greater and vaster than the material was obfuscated and then written out of existence in the arts instead generations of artists have been educated and worked in a materialist orientation first as modernists later as post modernists and today as contemporary artists all of us working and later critiquing this monolithic and amnesiac understanding but in this fact is revealed the importance of Helmuth qin today it isn't possible to marginalize her spiritual orientation it cannot be removed from understanding her work or her motivations it is to present to persistent and to overarching to try and do so as to admit the weakness of this attempt to marginalize it and reveal that these criticisms were at best strong men built on ignorance and personal bias it was never descriptive of what the artists themselves were actually thinking discussing and doing however it is not enough that we should study and appreciate her works in isolation but that we should also consider her path the importance of Auckland in the now calls us to return to the source it calls us to reconsider our motivations and our reasons what drives us as individuals and what do we think will come of it consider that off Clint walks away from their successes of her youth she is first of a generation of women academic artists she is a star student with a promising career and institutional support yet she leaves all of this behind she leaves the art world and its systems of galleries institutions and patronage for something that she herself never completely understands instead propelled by conviction and belief she walks the small and narrow path and in the tradition of her or fathers sales into the unknown thank you so I just want to add one tiny PostScript to this well I was in the process of doing of researching this particular slide deck here I came across this article in the Hindu which is a newspaper that's been published in Chennai which is the same location as the Theosophical society's headquarters in India since 1878 and check out that title come off Clint the tantric artist in Sweden so there's that word Tantra right in Sanskrit means like loom or weave or a system right in the term Tantra and Indian traditions also means any system broadly applicable a text a theory a system a method an instrument a technique or a practice as some of you might know this book that came out about 19 2011 this was compiled by the poet Frank Andre John and basically he claims that through this process he traveled extensively in Rajasthan and met these tantric practitioners and they had these pieces of artwork that they used for meditative processes and these artwork were causes descriptions of cosmological processes and this is what they look like and these are all from the 1600s it's what he says right so this is really interesting to me because it points the possibility that off Clint and the idea of abstraction is she is actually part of a very old and long tradition it's just that it eats roots or outside of the West and outside of our culture okay thank you I want to thank especially Julia Kim from the LACMA the librarians of the Henry s Olcott Memorial Library and especially dr. Sawyer where is he and the entire staff of the PRS thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Philosophical Research Society

Views: 43,903

Keywords: wisdom studies, manly p hall, mythology, literature, philosophy, religion, los angeles, los feliz, occult studies, esoterica

Id: KLQtcXAHJA4

Length: 102min 18sec (6138 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 17 2019