Pyramid

By ROBERT HUGHES

Quick, now: which had more influence on abstract art? Picasso or Jakob Bohme? Freud or Annie Besant? The theory of relativity or Robert Fludd's Utriusque cosmi? The answer, as anyone can attest after seeing the opening exhibition, "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985," in the Los Angeles County Museum's new wing is in each case the latter. The good news, one might say, is that early 20th century abstract art, long regarded by a suspicious public as basically meaningless and without a subject, turns out to have a very distinct and pervasive one -- the last mutation, in fact, of religious experience in the visual arts. The other news is that spiritualism is so arcane and culturally eccentric that it may make the paintings look even less accessible than when they were seen as "pure" form. Yet the timing of this show is brilliant. Like late Imperial Rome, modern America is riddled with superstition, addicted to gurus, Sibyls and purveyors of every kind of therapeutic nostrum. One does not need a planchette to deduce that an exhibition which demonstrates as clearly as this one how great painters like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky conceived their art in terms of thought forms, astral vibrations and hidden cosmic symbolism is bound to attract a far larger audience than any orthodox show of abstract art.

"The genesis and development of abstract art," argues the show's curator, Maurice Tuchman, in an enormous catalog comprising essays by him and 19 other contributors, ". . . reflects a desire to express spiritual, utopian or metaphysical ideals that cannot be expressed in traditional pictorial terms." One typical preoccupation was with the idea that the universe, instead of being the vast agglomeration of distinct things perceived by science or realism, was a single, living entity, pervaded by "cosmic" energies; these revealed themselves in "vibrations," the formative agents of all material shapes. Hence the desire to paint archetypal forms, so that Mondrian's rectangles and Kandinsky's floating circles are to be read as a kind of sacred geometry, pyramid power in paint. Hence, too, the peculiar use of light by artists like Franticek Kupka -- a shuddering, lyric vibration that implies the sublimities of landscape without describing them. Then there is the imagery of duality and paired opposites -- light-dark, vertical-horizontal -- and of synesthesia, whereby colors correspond to musical tones, or textures to tastes, and so on.

The work on view ranges from Symbolists like Paul Serusier to gifted postmodernists like Bruno Ceccobelli; from mannered Rosicrucians and a little- known visionary named Hilma af Klint to Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jasper Johns. Nor does it leave out that durable old alchemist, Marcel Duchamp. It also features several vitrines of early mystical, cosmological and alchemical texts known to have been studied by modern artists, some of whose illustrations are of astonishing beauty and suggestiveness. But its main focus, inevitably, is on the inventors of abstract art: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, Kazimir Malevich -- all represented by remarkable works. One would have to go a long way before finding a more intriguing Kandinsky, for instance, than his Lady in Moscow, 1912, with its gray "health aura" and its sinister coffin-shaped black mass that, floating across the street, menaces the life- giving sun.

By the end of the show, one has been given rather too much. A wearying amount of second-rate work from the '50s and '60s has been included for its imagery alone, and much of it is Kosmic Komix decor. Some artists, like Ellsworth Kelly, come out looking like resolute materialists whose pared-down insistence on the autonomy of formal means suggests no "spiritual" aspect (as defined by the earlier parts of the show) at all. But this is a brave curatorial labor all the same, a stimulating and important move in the general rereading of modern art that is so much a part of the '80s. By R. H.