Mysticism, Shamanism, and the Occult

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Belief in hidden forces and spirit worlds has fed art wherever official religion left room. Hans Baldung Grien's chiaroscuro woodcut Witches' Sabbath (1510) and Francisco Goya's witch paintings of the late 1790s gave European fears of sorcery a vivid face, while Joseph Wright of Derby's The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus (1771) bathes an experimenter in eerie light.

Around 1900 esoteric movements such as Theosophy fed directly into modern art. Hilma af Klint worked with a circle of women who held séances before she painted The Ten Largest (1907), and the Belgian Symbolist Jean Delville built his luminous canvases on occult teaching. Joseph Beuys cast himself as a shaman in performances such as How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). Other artists work from living traditions: Georges Liautaud cut the spirits of Haitian Vodou from flattened oil drums, and Belkis Ayón's large prints explore the Afro-Cuban Abakuá society.