Session Title: Modern Art, Occultism and Evolutionism

 Far from occult ideas being on the margins of culture, a growing body of new scholarship attests that they were often closely engaged with contemporary scientific concepts ranging from evolutionary theory to the latest discoveries in physics. From Darwin’s theories and Lamarckian “transformism”, the concept that organisms would increase in complexity and adaptation through evolution led readily to the idea of evolving consciousness, embraced by occultists, certain scientists, and major modernists from the Italian Futurists to Kandinsky. Developments in physics − X-rays, radioactivity, ether theory − suggested invisible realities beyond the range of sense perception that would require new kinds of consciousness to experience them. The boundaries between occultism and science in this period were far more fluid than later in the twentieth century: Nobel-prize winning physiologist, Charles Richet, was not just a staunch Darwinist Neo-Lamarckian but founder of the Annales des sciences psychiques while Darwin’s “natural selection” was continually referenced in Annie Besant’s Evolutionism and Occultism and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophist Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. This session invites papers that explore the presence of occultism and/or evolutionism within modernism, primarily in art but also in adjacent fields that might include aspects of biology and evolutionary theory as well as alternative modes of consciousness derived from mystical literature, Buddhism, and Theosophy. It also invites papers that explore artists’ responses to such fields as spiritism and spirit photography; animal magnetism and electromagnetic theory; hypnotism, telepathy, telekinesis, alchemy, and the new models of reality suggested by higher spatial dimensions, as well as X-rays, radioactivity and ether theories.

Names and Affiliations:  

Fae Brauer, University of East London and The University of New South Wales

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The University of Texas at Austin

Contact details:

Name: Fae Brauer, Professor of Art and Visual Culture

Address: University of East London, University Way, London E16 2RD

Telephone number: Work: 0208 223 6828; Mobile: 07826 176 811; Home 0207 460 1704

Email address: F.Brauer@uel.as.uk, fay.brauer@unsw.edu.au