The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
And what of Art? Here, again, these senses will be the builders of the
new art, the givers of the new ideals; and there are already signs, in
the world of painters more especially, of new powers which are opening,
new splendour of colour, and new wedding of emotion to colour also. A new
school of painters is beginning to grow up, some in this country, one at
least in Belgium, several in Hungary. I was looking at their paintings
only three or four days ago, in which new use of colour is being shown
to indicate the higher emotions of the mind, in which the painter is
throwing into forms of new beauty, glorious in new brilliancy of colour,
the higher thoughts and emotions which show themselves especially in
religious feelings. There was one painting that was hanging in the
hall in which we were holding our International Congress, which from
the further end of the hall seemed as though it were impossible as a
mere painting on opaque canvas. As you looked at it from a distance it
seemed as though the colour were transparent, as though the canvas were
transparent, as though there were a light beyond the painting shining
through the colours from behind. Now, there is something of that quality
in the paintings of Mr. Mortimer Menpes which he did in Japan. It shows
so strongly that I remember, in one exhibition of his paintings, that
people looking would hardly believe that a light had not been hidden
behind the painting, so extraordinary was the brilliance that seemed
to shine through; but if you talked to that great colourist, you would
find that he sees colours in quite a different way from you, or at least
I will say I found he saw them in quite a different way from my normal
sight, and in talking to him about the colours that he saw, I was able to
recognise, having unfolded some of the higher vision, that he was seeing
astral colours, and not physical, and that the effort to throw those upon
the canvas brought about the remarkable results which everyone wondered
over, though they did not understand. Now there are many artists who are
growing up along that line, who are groping after new possibilities of
colour as well as after new ideals which they seek to limn, and you will
find in the more modern paintings of that school, at present so small but
with the promise of the future in it, that they are seeking after new
forms of beauty; that they are trying to translate some of the higher
visions that belong to worlds of matter subtler and finer than our own;
that they are beginning to draw down from the ideal great thoughts, which
they are putting at present imperfectly into form and colour, but in
which is the promise of the Art of the Future, where larger worlds shall
be drawn upon, where a vaster Nature shall unfold herself to man, where
new colours and new possibilities of outline shall be found in every
direction, and where human genius shall have a wider range, because a
wider world and wider powers will come within the power of the painter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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