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9781472477347

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In Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-Century Art Evan Firestone rescues the oftentimes repressed or even vilified knowledge systems of shamanism and the occult as intellectual cornerstones of twentieth-century modernism. Bringing together previously disparate scholarship on a subject that bridges expressionism, surrealism, and postwar art, his clear interpretive lens presents a compendium of central concepts within animism, shamanism, and alchemy. The artists' intellectual synthesis of these subjects comes alive in the book's close readings of key modernist artworks and performances. Firestone's book expands the category of modernist primitivism beyond its accepted formalist concerns to include more marginalized ethnographic and arcane sources. This study is also a timely contribution to current debates on art's potentially healing role for self, society, and environment. - Claudia Mesch, editor of Joseph Beuys: The Reader A fine comprehensive study of how and why the imagery of indigenous shamanism caught up with several prominent Western artists, who used it to explore their troubled relations with modernity. Professor Firestone invites his readers on a grand tour through the minds and art of Kandinsky, Ernst, Pollock, and Beuys to understand what spiritual and aesthetic motives drove them to what Mircea Eliade famously called the 'archaic techniques of ecstasy.' Highly recommended. - Andrei Znamenski, the author of The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination

In Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-Century Art Evan Firestone rescues the oftentimes repressed or even vilified knowledge systems of shamanism and the occult as intellectual cornerstones of twentieth-century modernism.ã Bringing together previously disparate scholarship on a subject that bridges expressionism, surrealism, and postwarã art, his clear interpretive lens presents a compendium of central concepts within animism, shamanism, and alchemy. The artists' intellectual synthesis of these subjects comes alive in the book's close readings of key modernist artworks and performances. Firestone's book expands the category of modernist primitivism beyond its accepted formalist concerns to include more marginalized ethnographic and arcane sources. This study is also a timely contribution to current debates on art's potentially healing role for self, society, and environment. - Claudia Mesch, editor of Joseph Beuys: The Reader A fine comprehensive study of how and why the imagery of indigenous shamanism caught up with several prominent Western artists, who used it to explore their troubled relations with modernity. Professor Firestone invites his readers on a grand tour through the minds and art of Kandinsky, Ernst, Pollock, and Beuys to understand what spiritual and aesthetic motives drove them to what Mircea Eliade famously called the 'archaic techniques of ecstasy.' Highly recommended. - Andrei Znamenski, the author of The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination

Author Information

Evan R. Firestone is Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Georgia, USA.

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