Faith in Art - (Aesthetics and Contemporary Art) by Joseph Masheck

Book Synopsis

Metaphysical thought has been excluded from much of the discourse on modern art, especially abstract painting. By connecting ideas about faith with the initiators of abstract painting, Joseph Masheck reveals how an underlying religiosity informed some of our most important abstract painters.

Covering Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and El Lissitzky, Masheck shows how 'revealed religion' has been an underlying but fundamental determinant of the thinking and practice of abstract painting from its very originators. He contextualizes their art within some of the historical moments of the early 20th century, including the Russian revolution and the Stalinist period, and explores the appeal of certain themes, such as the Passion of Christ.

A radical new theorization of the influence of religion over visual art, Faith in Art asks why metaphysics has been eliminated from the discussion where it might have something to say. This is a new way of thinking about a hundred years of abstract painting.

Review Quotes

"Masheck brilliantly corrects two blind spots regarding 'religion' in the history of modern art-first, by illuminating how Jewish and Christian conceptualities shaped the work of four pivotal modernists and, second, by exploring these as theological rather than (mis)attributing them to occultist spiritualities. The resulting account opens the history of modernism into lines of inquiry that art scholars have not yet adequately accounted for." --Jonathan A. Anderson, Artforum

"In this rich and beautifully written book Masheck argues for the serious place of religion as opposed to the vague term spirituality in four founding artists of abstraction. Against the complex background of European culture the central place of Christian and Jewish theology and liturgy from icon to the writings of Karl Barth is affirmed and luminously presented. An intellectual and aesthetic feast." --The Revd Canon David Jasper, Emeritus Professor of Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow, UK

"Rather than, as is commonly understood, supplanting the religious impuse with an avowedy atheist or agnostic position, the book argues that Kansinsky's Russian Orthodoxy, Mondrian's Calvinist Protestantism, Malevich's Catholicism and Lissitzky's Jewishness can be shown to be ongoing aspects of their thinking and development. Equally, the looser and more prevalent term in the vocabulary of modern and contemporary art, 'spirituality', is critically examined and found to be limited or unreliable as an account of what these individual practices were about." --Art + Christianity

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