From: Everdell-AT-aol.com
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 07:27:36 EDT
Subject: Re: Nazi Modernism and Yeats



In a message dated 6/5/00, Shawn Tucker writes:

<<I have been working on a comparison of Yeats and Mondrian's "modernism," and
my angle has been to see their common Theosophical interests as an attempt to
forge a new Utopia for their time.  Both emphasize the Theosophical concept of
"unity of being," and to a degree both see their works as the telos or 
pointing
toward the telos of history, art, and civilization.  Their specific utopianism
seems indicative of their time and their particular response to their social,
political, and artistic environment; it indicates their "modernism.">>

Yes.  Lots of Theosophy banging around in the early 20th-century Modernists, 
especially in artists like Curlionis, Kandinsky and Kupka (and Mondrian), but 
also in a truly Modernist writer like Andrey Bely.  My own view would be that 
Theosophy, like its immediate progenitor, Spiritualism, is a hangover from 
the 19th century, as are marxism and fascism; but clearly there is still 
something arbitrary in the exclusion.  There are too many clearly Modernist 
thinkers who are tempted by these movements, besides the obvious 
reactionaries like Arthur Conan Doyle and Hitler.

-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn