The Chaosmos of the Mycological Russian Avant-Garde: Key Nodes of Its Aesthetics The Kandinsky Case: The Visuality of Alchemy and the Search for the Invisible

The theme of occultism and the avant-garde seems to move, as it were, from marginalia to a metanarrative. In her now-classic article on Kandinsky’s anarchic occultism, Washton Long begins by asserting that occultism, mysticism, and radical political currents—anarchism in particular—exerted a far more significant influence on the formation of modernism and abstraction than traditional art history has been willing to acknowledge. As is well known, Kandinsky was closely connected with circles in which political, religious, and artistic utopias sought ways out of the “cruel rationality” of modern civilization. In his concealed essence Kandinsky appears as a mystico-anarchist, for whom, in particular, the concept of spiritual anarchy proves crucial. Here it is also necessary to reflect on the dialectic of opposition between the material and the spiritual in Kandinsky: the artist as a rule covertly positions himself against a positivist worldview, against commercialized art, and, in effect, against bourgeois aesthetics in general. He appeals to folklore, the primitive, icons, and folk painting as sources of archetypal power, outside the academic canon. Painting, in Kandinsky’s context, striving beyond mimetic reality, functions as a medium of revelation, a path toward understanding the inevitable Apocalypse as a transcendent event. He draws on the metaphysics of color, the disorientation of space, and “dissonance” as an aesthetic principle (in parallel with the music of Schoenberg and Hartmann’s essay on “musical anarchy”).