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Spirituality in Modern Art

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Once, the artist expressed religious themes at the behest of wealthy church patrons, but following the Enlightenment, both religion and art took on a more personalised and experimental character. Modern art critics and curators express a preference for secular art, and secular interpretations of art. Overtly religious works gain attention and success mainly through controversy.

Did secularisation strip the artist of their role as the aesthetic scribe of the spiritual? Key figures in the history of modern art, Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Motherwell, would vehemently disagree. As artists and theorists in their own right, Kandinsky and Motherwell affirm the spiritual heart of modern abstraction, revealing, as they do, a long-standing practice of omission and censorship when it comes to artists’ religious concerns.

Spirituality in Modern Art seeks to capture and record aesthetic expressions of the spiritual in all their subjective variety by looking beyond the artwork and illuminating inferred meanings through close analysis of conceptual frames. Here, the artwork gains significance beyond its immediate appearance, becoming a locus manifesting cultural, religious, and biographical elements. Importantly, the book seeks to unravel and dispel historical inaccuracies that accumulate around works of abstraction, to set the record straight.

Published: Mar 1, 2026