SOURCE: "Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction: Kandinsky's Art of the Future," in Art Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 38-45.

In the following essay, Long determines the influence of occultism and anarchism on Kandinsky's writings and art.

As art historians in recent years have examined the development of modern art, it has become more and more apparent that the interest in occult and mystical knowledge evinced by many artists was often part of a search for alternatives to restrictive social and political attitudes and outworn conventions. For solutions to the problems created by an increasingly industrialized and commercialized society, many artists explored heretical metaphysical concepts, fringe political systems, and deviant sexual patterns and, in the process, discovered new artistic methods for themselves. Yet the varied anarchistic, socialistic, and sexual theories that engaged these artists in conjunction with occultism and mysticism have too often been neglected by scholars. Although the quests...