Author comment

I wrote this 20 years ago and have only slightly edited it here for Stochastic. It was one of three papers I published in the venerated Leonardo journal of arts science and technology.


  Comment and discussion on Facebook

Abstract

A recent proliferation of writings on the spiritual by scientists suggests that this may be an appropriate time to reevaluate the spiritual in twentieth-century art. This paper looks at three artistic groupings: Kandinsky and the Bauhaus, the American Abstract Expressionists, and the contempo-rary electronic arts, and traces the influences of some spiritual movements on them. The paper then turns to spiritual in modern science, observing that quantum theory has been the main starting point for many physicists to write about God. The question is examined as to whether science at this juncture is more receptive to the spiritual than the arts; whether art can mediate between science and the spiritual, and whether the spiritual is antecedent to both arts and science.

Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science

Keywords: art, physics, spirituality, Roger Lipsey, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Coomaraswamy.

First published: Leonardo Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 21-31, 1998

Year: 1998, no of words: 8,298