The exhibition called “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985,” which Maurice Tuchman has organized with the assistance of Judi Freeman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the kind of event that illuminates a good deal more than its ostensible theme.¹ The theme itself—the role played by certain occult or spiritualist doctrines in the creation of abstract painting from its origins to the present day—is an important one, and in recent years we have had ample opportunity to become better acquainted with it as more and more scholars have explored the often arcane ideas which are believed to have exerted a considerable influence on the aesthetics of abstraction. About the early history of abstract painting, anyway, these unquestionably have much to tell us. Moreover, the need for an exhibition that would attempt to bring our increased knowledge of the philosophical sources of abstract painting into alignment with our experience of the art itself has long been recognized. This, indeed, is the show which the “Spiritual in Art” was designed to give us. And while the result, I think, is a deeply flawed exhibition, its organizers are nonetheless to be commended for undertaking a difficult task and implementing it with the sort of wide-ranging research the subject requires. Certainly, as an historical inquiry into the origins of abstract art and the ideas which are now known to have governed its creation, the “Spiritual in Art” show marks a turning point.

Yet it would be idle