The spiritual hinterland of abstract art

What did Wassily Kandinsky, W. B. Yeats, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Scriabin and Kasimir Malevitch have in common? Two were abstract painters (eventually) and three were Russian avant-gardists but what links them to the Irish nationalist poet and the Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher?

The answer (or one answer – maybe you can think of another) is theosophy, that strange mixture of progressive social thought and mystical religion (or a union of neoplatonism and Indian religious and philosophical thought) pioneered by the eccentric Madame Helena Blavatsky. She always sounds half charlatan (her claims as a medium were exposed as fraudulent by the Society for Psychical Research) but Blavatsky must have had something. Yeats, according to his biographer Roy Foster, “enjoyed her mixture of sardonic Russian wit and all-embracing mysticism”.

It would be tempting to dismiss theosophy as a “fad” (Foster’s word) – but if so it was a fad that attracted many of the most creative minds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1910s the Theosophical Society, based in magnificent premises outside Madras, had tens of thousands of adherents spread all over the world. After Blavatsky’s death, its leading light was Annie Besant, a formidable socialist and feminist, friend of Shaw and Gandhi, campaigner for Irish and Indian independence, and a woman with none of Blavatsky’s air of the fortune-teller’s tent.

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Weekend columnists - The spiritual hinterland of abstract art