"Mondrian & Mysticism: 'My Long Search Is Over'" by Hilton Kramer, in The New Criterion (Sept. 1995), 850 Seventh Ave, New York, N.Y. 10019.

Art historians who revere abstract art tend to tiptoe around the role that mysticism played in its genesis. Occult beliefs were so common among abstract art's pioneers, such as the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), that it was "a basic component of their vision," argues Kramer, editor of the New Criterion.

Mondrian and the Russians Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) were very heavily influenced by theosophy. The mystical philosophy's high priestess, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), claimed that the conflict between science and religion could be resolved by applying evolutionary theory to the "spiritual" aspects of existence. The soul was born and reborn countless times until it achieved earthly perfection.

Mondrian was a working artist before he turned to the occult, Kramer notes, "but it was as a dedicated theosophist that he creat- ed his first abstractions." The influence is clear in the notebooks he began to keep in 1914. "To approach the spiritual in art," Mondrian wrote, "one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. Thus the use of elementary forms is logically accounted for. These forms being abstract, we find our-selves in the presence of an abstract art."

The influential avant-garde movement called De Stijl (the Style) that Mondrian and other artists founded in 1917 was more than an art movement, Kramer points out. "Its ambition was to redesign the world by imposing straight lines, primary colors, and geometric form--and thus an ideal of impersonal order and rationality--upon the production of every man-made object essential to the modern human environment. Rejecting tradition, it envisioned the rebirth of the world as a kind of technological Eden from which all trace of individualism and the conflicts it generates would be permanently banished."

Where did these ambitious ideas come from? Chiefly, says Kramer, from the Dutch writer and mystic M. H. J. Schoenmaekers. Kramer says that Schoenmaekers even "specified the nature of the forms (rectilinear structures of the horizontal and the vertical) and the colors (the primaries: red, yellow, and blue) to be used in this artistic quest for the absolute."

The evolution of art was part of the larger evolution of the spirit, Mondrian and the others in the De Stijl group believed. In their abstract art, they were determined to get ever closer to what the mystic Schoenmaekers described as an "earthly heaven."