Painters
We have seen that the radically new types of painting invented in the nineteenth century were created in reaction against the following:
perceived shortcomings in institutional Christianity (Blake and Friedrich) and the mechanistic worldview (Blake);
the eclipse of religious subjects by secular subjects in paintings (the Nazarenes);
the failure of a modern, hustling society to see God’s glory in nature (the Hudson River School);
the spiritually barren, neoclassical trajectory in art that began with Raphael (the Pre-Raphaelites);
the failure of modern society to actually see the epitome of God’s creation, woman (Renoir);
the failure of landscape painting to achieve an atmospheric mystical immersion into God’s creation (Cézanne);
Dutch Reform asceticism that needed to be liberated by “the floating world” of ukiyo-e (Van Gogh);
mechanistic thinking now enlarged as “materialism” and naturalism (the Pont-Aven group);
the uninspiring nineteenth-century French Catholic visual art (the Nabis);
and the dependence of architecture on man-made Euclidean geometry instead of figuring out God’s natural geometries for design (Gaudí).
From the moment Blake mounted his defiant rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, neoclassical painting, and hide-bound strictures in Christianity and deployed his dramatic alternatives through poetry and printmaking, a new stream of modern art began to flow, one that was postmechanistic and dedicated to spiritual freedom.
Blake influenced the Pre-Raphaelites (as did the Nazarenes, who had been influenced by Friedrich), who in turn influenced the emergence of Symbolist painting (as did Puvis de Chavannes’s hieratic murals).
Clearly, the sequence of new art forms was sparked by spiritual as well as formal innovation.
Moreover, we have seen—in the artists’ own words—that spiritual concerns related to their art were very much on their minds during the years when they were creating many of their most highly regarded works.
Those direct testimonials by the artists about spiritual influences, presented here, are almost never mentioned in art history textbooks, largely because they are not widely known.
(Strepnak, C. The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art - Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. p.51)