II. Geometry of the Spirit
“Music is thought made audible, in the same way dance is thought made visible,” says King. “The bottom line for me is the spirit behind form, making the invisible visible.” King’s guiding philosophy, his desire for dance that “makes the invisible visible,” was one of the first things I learned about him and it took me by surprise. The expression was deeply familiar to me, and not from dance but from the visual arts.
“To make the invisible visible” was a favorite term of Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), artist, dancer, and Bauhaus colleague of the maverick art thinker Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). For them, and for the influential group of like-thinking modernist titans—Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, to name a few—the quest “to make the invisible visible” became an unbroken strand that runs through the history of abstract painting in the twentieth century.
Although Kandinsky’s theory of nonobjective art was revolutionary, it maintained strong ties to the Romantic tradition, “in which spirit would triumph over matter and in which art would become the vehicle for communicating the quasi-religious experiences of childlike innocence or apocalyptic destruction, of the beginnings and ends of the universe, of the supernatural mysteries revealed in the world of nature.” (note 4) In the 1890s, the genesis of abstract painting was fueled by interest in mysticism and the spirit. In the mid nineteenth century, the notion of geometry as having kinship with the divine was mirrored by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he expressed his admiration for Plato’s observation that “God geometrizes.” And even as early as the mid 1700s, the German mystic Jakob Boehme was using “sacred geometry” as a means of describing nature and identifying life forms.
Between 1907 and 1915, painters in Europe and the United States, fueled by a continuing interest in the symbolism of geometric forms, began to create the first purely abstract works of visual art. The 1911 publication of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (translated into English in 1914 as Concerning the Spiritual in Art), represented a landmark for early twentieth-century artists. “The harmony of colors and forms can be based on only one thing: a purposive contact with the human soul,” wrote Kandinsky. (note 5) He and contemporaneous pioneers Frantisek Kupka, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all moved toward pure abstraction through their involvement with spiritual issues and beliefs. Kandinsky’s mystical views, many of which came from the Theosophical movement (founded in 1875) and its study of Jakob Boehme, share another point of intersection with King’s. Kandinsky draws heavily on the otherworldly truths of geometric form—particularly the triangle, the circle, and the pyramid—and the symbolic and emotional significance of color. Mondrian believed that the “inner spiritual imbalance” characteristic of his age could be overcome by abstracting from personal sense impressions and emotions. What he attempted to achieve with the aid of geometric compositions was an “absolute equilibrium” symbolic of a cosmic order. (note 6)
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