OCIEPKA TIMELINE

1891 (April 24):  Teofil Ociepka was born in Janów, in the region of Upper Silesia, present-day district of Katowice, Poland.

1905:  Ociepka’s father died, and Teofil began working as a machinist in a coal mine. Later, he was employed in railways, where he worked until 1914.

1914–1918:  Ociepka was drafted into the German Army and took part in combat during World War I. During the war, he became interested in esotericism and encountered the book 72 Names of God, the Polish translation of Oedipus Aegyptiacus by Athanasius Kircher.

1919–1921:  Ociepka took part in the Silesian Uprisings against German rule. After the war, Ociepka came into contact with Philip Hohmann from Wittenberg, who later became his spiritual teacher.

Early 1920s:  An esoteric circle centered around Ociepka began to form.

1927:  Ociepka created his first paintings, with, as he believed, a spiritual inspiration from Hohmann. The period of “morality works” began.

1930:  Criticized by a director of the Silesian Museum, Ociepka abandoned his artistic work, and only returned to it shortly before World War II.

Before 1939:  With Hohmann’s help, Ociepka became a corresponding member of the German Section [Deutsche Abteilung] of the Rosicrucian Fellowship.

1945:  Ociepka corresponded with the headquarters of the Rosicrucian Fellowship in Oceanside, California.

Ca. 1946:  A circle of painters was established at the Coal Mine “Wieczorek” (where Ociepka worked, until his retirement, as an over-ground worker), later named by scholars Janowska Group, Janowska Occult Community, or the Circle of Unprofessional Painters. Ociepka remained a member until 1959, when he left Silesia.

1948:  Izabela “Czajka” Stachowicz organized an individual exhibition of Ociepka’s paintings, promoting the artist as the “Polish Henri Rousseau.” During this time, Ociepka was painting, among other topics, spiritual beings from Silesian folklore, in works such as Utopiec (1948).

1950s:  Ociepka created a series of well-known paintings based on a book by the nineteenth century German mystic, Jakob Lorber: Saturn: A Description of the Planet Together with Its Rings and Moons, and Its Living Beings. Among those works, there were Lion of Saturn (1954), Blue Bear of Saturn (1954), Flying Cow of Saturn (1956), and others.

1959:  Ociepka married Julia Ufnal.

1960:  Ociepka painted one of his Self-portraits, visualizing himself in the company of fantastic spiritual creatures.

1962:  Eye of Providence, a painting connected to the artist’s interest in Rosicrucianism, was created.

1963:  Living Fire, a painting inspired among others by alchemy, was created.

1969:  Because of problems in his local environment, Ociepka moved out of Janów to Bydgoszcz, the hometown of his wife.

1976:  Ociepka was decorated with the Order of Polonia Restituta.

1978 (January 15):  Ociepka died in Bydgoszcz, Poland. A street in the city bears his name.

BIOGRAPHY

Teofil Ociepka [Image at right] was a charismatic figure, an esoteric teacher and the first leader of the occult circle of unprofessional painters called the Janowska Group. He worked as an over-ground coal mine worker in the area of Upper Silesia, at the Polish–German border. He is one of the most interesting Polish unprofessional painters, and one of the most intriguing Polish esotericists, whose works were inspired by Rosicrucianism, Christian mysticism, Theosophy, and twentieth century occult currents, and whose works presented both what he called his “morality” and his esoteric teachings.

Teofil Ociepka was born on April 24, 1891 in Janów (Ociepka 1919:1). The early death of his father forced Teofil to start working as a machinist in a mine when he was fourteen. He fought in World War I in the German Army, and after that he took part in the Silesian Uprisings against German rule from 1919 to 1921 (Ociepka 1919). Having grown up in Silesia, Ociepka spoke Polish and German, but he was also semi-fluent in French. Since the war years, Ociepka became interested in Western Esotericism, particularly after he found a book of Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–1654), in the Polish translation called 72 names of God (Jackowski 1984:38). Looking for another esoteric book in Germany, he came into contact with Philip Hohmann, an esoteric writer and an enigmatic figure from Wittenberg, who became a very important influence in Ociepka’s life. According to Ociepka, they exchanged letters for the next forty years (Wisłocki 2010:43). Hohmann became his spiritual teacher, and sent him esoteric books and sets of spiritual exercises which were “to help Ociepka in gaining an internal power, which could enable him to rule over natural processes….” (Jackowski 1984:37-56).

One of the most interesting esoteric-related moments in Teofil Ociepka’s life was his awakening as a painter. Ociepka believed that it was Hohmann who made him an artist with a spiritual purpose. He claimed: “[Hohmann] wrote to me: ‘Teofil, a spirit will come to you and will teach you how to paint.’ I have never seen any spirit, but something undefined was born in my soul, which could be called love for the essence of beauty, that is for God. That was in 1927 and, from that time on, I began to paint and have been painting ever since with unfaltering joy and pleasure.” (Wisłocki 2010:43).  [Image at right]

Besides those occult experiences, there is no doubt that Philip Hohmann had a great impact on the painter’s intellectual formation, as well as on his esoteric interests. It was most probably with his support that (sometime before 1939) Ociepka became a corresponding member of a Rosicrucian circle. It was the German Section of the Rosicrucian Fellowship: An International Association of Christian Mystics, based in Oceanside, California, and founded by Max Heindel (pseud. of Carl Louis von Grasshoff, 1865-1919; for more see Faivre 1994:91, and Goodrick-Clarke 2008:127). Heindel’s teachings were inspired by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) (see Weber 2005); he had also been connected to the Theosophical Society as the vice-president of a branch in Los Angeles, California from 1904 to 1905 (Heindel 2012:6). During World War II, Ociepka lost contact with the organization, but immediately after its end he was reinstated as a corresponding member (Wisłocki 2007:202-04).

Teofil Ociepka was familiar with occult milieus in Poland; he collected most esoteric journals in the interwar period. He gathered many books related to esotericism, mostly in German and Polish. After World War II, Ociepka’s library was one of the largest esoteric collections in Poland (Prokopiuk 2010:125).

Ociepka wanted to share his knowledge of esotericism. He lent out his books, and he was actively looking for students, even making advertisements in press. Eventually, he gathered a circle around himself, including Bolesław Skulik, Walter Goj and many others (Wisłocki 2010:20). In the mid-1950s, Ociepka was inspired by a book by an Austrian Christian mystic and visionary, Jakob Lorber (1800-1864), Saturn: A Description of the Planet Together with Its Rings and Moons, and Its Living Beings (Lorber [1841] 1969), and he created probably the best-known series of his paintings. Saturn played an important role not only in Lorber’s book, but also in the writings of Heindel (Heindel 1909:205-06), which explains its special role for Ociepka too. The painter believed that a person’s astral body, both before birth and after death on Earth, exist on Saturn (Wisłocki 1984:62). Among the works belonging to Ociepka’s Saturn cycle, we can find paintings such as Lion of Saturn (1954), [Image at right] Blue Bear of Saturn (1954), and Flying Cow of Saturn (1956). It is important to note that, even if Ociepka’s paintings could appear as mere illustrations of Lorber’s detailed descriptions, in this series of paintings, as well as in others, Ociepka added some details and colors with a specific esoteric meaning (cf. Hess and Dulska 2016:68-71). He wrote a booklet called “Dialectical Religionism,” where he explained the use of symbolism; Unfortunately, the essay was never published and, if it still exists, it is not available to scholars (cf. Jackowski 1984:45, 54-55).

In Poland after World War II (under the Communist regime), the political situation strongly influenced art. The official materialistic philosophy denied any place to spiritual realities in works of art. Ociepka’s infernal-like dragons were rather interpreted as Paleozoic creatures, and other spiritual beings were treated as depictions of local Silesian legends to comply with the political guidelines. Communist authorities were interested in topics related to regional traditions of the working-class coal miners. Izabela “Czajka” Stachowicz (1893-1969), one of the official patrons of the arts, had influence on Ociepka from the late 1940s on. Many misunderstandings surrounded the author in this time: to promote Ociepka’s work, his biography was falsified, and he was presented as an underground miner who painted Silesian folklore (Wisłocki 1984:62-64), or a Polish equivalent of Henri Rousseau (1844-1910).

In fact, Ociepka gladly painted more and more folklore-related paintings, believing that the beings of legendsare part of an unknown, alternative reality that is not available to everyone, but intrudes into our world in  various ways. He depicted many folklore-related beings in works like Utopiec (1948) and Silesia-related element, such as Miner in the Forest (1956). In 1960, he painted one of his Self-portraits, visualizing himself in the company of fantastic spiritual creatures. [Image at right] Ociepka’s worldview combined elements of Catholicism and Silesian folklore, but his main interests were in esoteric traditions and concentrated on Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Astrology, Kabbalah, Magic and Alchemy. This can be seen in his works (Hess and Dulska 2016:73).

In this complex situation, Ociepka still promoted his spiritual-related works, even when they were officially interpreted as something else. In 1963, for example, he created Living Fire, a painting inspired among others by alchemy. [Image at right] He became quite popular, which unfortunately provoked his colleagues’ envy. Anonymous letters of accusation were written to the authorities, and the atmosphere around the painter became so bad that he decided to move to a different part of Poland, to Bydgoszcz, in 1969 (Fiderkiewicz 1994:35). Today there is a street in the city named after him. Ociepka was decorated with the Order of Polonia Restituta when he was eighty-five.

Teofil Ociepka died on January 15, 1978. His life become a subject of interest to ethnologists and art historians. The activities of his occult circle of painters were poetically illustrated in a movie directed by Lech Majewski, titled Angelus.

IMAGES
Image #1: Teofil Ociepka. 1962/63. Photo by Eustachy Kossakowski. Copyright Anka Ptaszkowska. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Image #2: Teofil Ociepka. 1962/1963. Photo by Eustachy Kossakowski. Copyright Anka Ptaszkowska. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Image #3: Teofil Ociepka, Lion of Saturn [Lew Saturna], 1954. Courtesy of National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw.
Image #4: Teofil Ociepka, Self-portrait [Autoportret], 1960. Courtesy of National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw.
Image #5: Teofil Ociepka, Living Fire [Żywy Ogień], 1963. Courtesy of National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw.

REFERENCES

Angelus [movie]. 2000. Directed by Lech Majewski. Warsaw: WFDiF.

Faivre, Antoine. 1994. Access to Western Esotericism. New York: State University of New York Press.

Fiderkiewicz, Maria. 1994. Śląscy “pariasi” pędzla i dłuta (1945–1993). Katowice: Muzeum Śląskie.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. 2008. The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Heindel, Max. 2012. Birth of the Rosicrucian Fellowship: The History of Its Inception. Oceanside, CA: Rosicrucian Fellowship.

Hess, Karolina M., and Małgorzata A. Dulska. 2016. “Rose Cross, Saturn’s Menagerie and the Coal Mines of Silesia: Strange Visions of Teofil Ociepka.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19:57–79.

Jackowski, Aleksander. 1984. “Teofil Ociepka.” Polska Sztuka Ludowa 1-2, n.38, 37–56.

Kitowska-Łysiak, Małgorzata. 2007. ‘‘Teofil Ociepka,’’ Instytut Historii Sztuki KUL, November 2007. Accessed from culture.pl/pl/tworca/teofil-ociepka on 31 May 2017.

Lorber, Jakob. [1841] 1969. Der Saturn. Darstellung dieses Planeten samt Ring und Monden und seiner Lebewesen. Fourth Edition. Bietigheim (Württemberg): Lorber-Verlag.

Ociepka, Teofil. 1919. “Mój życiorys. Sosnowiec, 10 October 1919.” A single-page document 8-011-283 in the Zasoby archiwalne Powstań Śląskich (1919–1921), Józef Piłsudski Institute of America for Research in the Modern History of Poland, New York.

Prokopiuk, Jerzy. 2010. “Wśród książek pana Teofila. Eine Stichprobe.” Pp. 123–30 in Wisłocki 1984.

“Uczniowie.” Polska Sztuka Ludowa, 1–2, 38.

Weber, Charles. 2005. “The Heindel-Steiner Connection.” Accessed from members.shaw.ca/rosecross713/ Heindel-Steiner.htm on 31 May 2017.

Wilk, Sonia. ‘‘Grupa Janowska’’ [The Janowska Group], Miejski Dom Kultury ‘‘Szopienice– Giszowiec’’ w Katowicach. Accessed from mdk.katowice.pl/grupa-janowska# on 31 May 2017.

Wisłocki, Seweryn A. 1984. “W kręgu okultystów Janowa – Teofil Ociepka i jego uczniowie.” Polska Sztuka Ludowa 1-2, n.38, 57-64.

Wisłocki, Seweryn A. 2007. Janowscy “kapłani wiedzy tajemnej”. Okultyści, wizjonerzy i mistrzowie małej ojczyzny. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Naukowe “Śląsk”.

Wisłocki, Seweryn A. 2010. Mistrz Teofil Ociepka. Między władzą a prawdą. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Naukowe “Śląsk”.

Post Date:
9 June 2017

POGAČNIK TIMELINE

1944:  Marko Pogačnik was born in Kranj, Slovenia.

1967:  Pogačnik earned his degree in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia (part of Socialist Yugoslavia at that time). In the1960s, he was one of the founders of the Slovenian conceptual art group OHO.

1970:  The OHO group gained international recognition by participating in the exhibition Information, one of the most influential presentations of conceptual art, organized at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). At the same time, the new esoteric phase of “transcendental conceptualism” in their art began.

1971 (April):  Pogačnik, his family, and friends from the OHO group founded the Šempas Family, a commune inspired by the famous New Age commune of Findhorn, Scotland. Pogačnik visited the Findhorn commune and attended lectures by one of its leading figures, David Spangler.

1978 (February 19-28):  Together, the Findhorn and Šempas communes organized in Florence the first “New Age World Congress.” The Šempas Family represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale. Later in this year, however, the Šempas Family ended its activities, and Pogačnik started devoting himself to teaching the method of “Earth healing” he called “lithopuncture.”

1990:  One of Pogačnik’s many “Earth healing” projects was organized at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana.

1991:  Pogačnik designed the official coat of arms of the newly constituted Republic of Slovenia (after its separation from Yugoslavia).

1998:  Pogačnik and his daughter Ana Pogačnik, who reportedly was communicating with the angelic realms, founded the “Lifenet” organization, which gathered individuals and groups involved in “Earth healing.” Pogačnik acted as the spiritual leader of Lifenet, whose members practiced his “Gaia Touch” exercises and monthly meditations.

2016:  Pogačnik was designated as UNESCO Artist for Peace for 2016. He installed his “geopuncture circles” near Bosnian “pyramids” to help the ongoing evolution of Planet Earth and humanity.

BIOGRAPHY

Marko Pogačnik (b. 1944) [Image at right] is a Slovenian artist, well known as one of the pioneers of conceptual art in the 1960s. He is also a New Age author and teacher of “Earth healing.” In the 1960s, Pogačnik was one of the founders of a Slovenian conceptual art group called OHO, which strongly influenced many young artists in Slovenia and Yugoslavia in general, and also gained international recognition. At the beginning of the 1970s, members of the OHO group experimented with telepathy and showed a considerable interest in esotericism. In 1971, Pogačnik and other members of the OHO group decided to withdraw from the art scene and move to Šempas village in Slovenia, where they founded a commune called Šempas Family, inspired by the famous New Age commune of Findhorn, Scotland. Since 1978, after the Šempas Family ceased to exist, Pogačnik consecrated himself to teaching “Earth healing.” In numerous workshops around Europe, he teaches his own esoteric method of “Earth healing” through art, called “lithopuncture.” It includes the placing of stone blocks with chiseled esoteric symbols, which he calls “cosmograms,” on “acupuncture points” of our planet. Pogačnik has written several books on “Earth healing,” published in English by Findhorn Press. Together with his daughter, Ana Pogačnik, he founded the Lifenet organization, and acts as its spiritual leader.

Pogačnik was born in Kranj, Slovenia, on August 11, 1944. He earned his degree in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1967. In 1960s, he was one of the founders of the Slovenian conceptual art group OHO, whose other members were Milenko Matanović (b. 1947), David Nez (b. 1949) and Andraž Šalamun (b. 1947). This OHO group of artists was part of a larger OHO movement which included artists, poets, intellectuals, and philosophers, such as Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949). The OHO group had an immense influence on the development of conceptual art and other forms of “new art practice” in Socialist Yugoslavia, of which Slovenia was part at that time.

In 1970, the OHO group gained international recognition when Pogačnik and his colleagues exhibited at Information, one of the most influential global presentations of conceptual art, organized at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Although there are many definitions of conceptual art, a simple way to describe it would be that it is a form of art in which the idea, or the “concept,” is more important than the final work in its material form. The work of art may be reduced to photo documentation, diagram, written text, action, and so on. American critics Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler suggested in 1968 the expression “dematerialization of the art object” as an alternative term to “conceptual art.” The word “dematerialization” referred to the new tendency in which the final work of art in its traditional form (painting, sculpture, etc.) was losing its importance. Some conceptual artists also understood “dematerialization” in esoteric terms: transcending not only the materiality of an art object, but the material world altogether, by means of telepathy, meditation, or magic.

Pogačnik and other members of the OHO group belonged to those conceptual artists who searched for transcendence of the material world both in their work and their life. The years 1970 and 1971 were of great importance for them. In this period, it became evident that the OHO group was developing a strong interest in different forms of Western esotericism, particularly the New Age. However, art historians in the 1970s still clung to the dominant idea of the secularization of modern art, i.e. the idea that modern art cannot, or rather must not, be religious. This was probably the reason why Slovenian art historian Tomaž Brejc, while writing about the period between 1970 and 1971 in the art of the OHO group, described their work as a “difficult one for the critic and historian alike.” Brejc informed his readers that the members of the OHO group were not becoming “religious,” only sensitive “to all the phenomena in the area of spiritual production and its history” (Brejc 1978:17). In his attempt to avoid describing the art of the OHO group in this period as “religious” or “spiritual,” Brejc opted for the more philosophical term “transcendental,” and described this new orientation of the OHO group as “transcendental conceptualism” (Brejc 1978:17).

Brejc was not the only art historian of that time who wrestled with terminology when confronted with works of modern artists in which religious or spiritual elements appeared. His Italian colleague, art historian Renato Barilli, introduced the notion of a “mystical conceptual art.” American conceptual artist Sol Lewitt (1928-2007) declared in his famous Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1967) that conceptual artists were “mystics rather than rationalists.” Lewitt rejected traditional, “formal art” as “essentially rational” (Lewitt 1967). It seems that the conceptual artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or at least those “mystical” and “transcendental” among them, shared with their contemporaries who were part of the New Age movement the same rejection of what they perceived as the dominant rationalism in the Western culture.

One of the first important works of the OHO group in the field of “transcendental conceptualism” was produced in February 1970. Two members of the OHO group, Milenko Matanović and David Nez (an American studying in Slovenia), travelled to New York to prepare the presentation at the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, while the other two members, Marko Pogačnik and Andraž Šalamun, remained in Slovenia. The four artists then used this condition of separation between themselves to conduct a series of telepathic experiments. In one of these experiments, they agreed simultaneously, on two different continents and at a given time, to chose and write down one among a number of possiblecombinations of lines crossing a square. This experiment was then presented in a typical conceptual art manner, through Pogačnik’s diagram titled Intercontinental Group Project America-Europe (1970). [Image at right] After finishing their preparation for the presentation of the OHO group at the Information exhibition in New York, Matanović and Nez returned to Slovenia with “a load of books on spirituality.” Through these books Pogačnik was introduced to the teachings of the Russian mathematician and esotericist Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), as well as to “Celtic spirituality” (Žerovc 2013). Nez reports being fascinated with Ouspensky and Armenian esotericist George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866?-1949), and that he was also reading Alan Watts (1915-1973) on Zen, the book by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Doors of Perception, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) on Kabbalah, and others (Žerovc 2011). Nez and Matanović were also fascinated by Indian philosophy and Tarot (Brejc 1978:17). As Pogačnik stated in an interview, after discovering “many fascinating concepts of the nature of existence,” the OHO group immediately set out exploring “spiritual issues,” and translating them into its art practice (Žerovc 2013).

These explorations of “spiritual issues” were taking place in the Slovenian countryside, where members of the OHO group often retreated during the 1970s. They kept photographic and written documentation of their actions and exhibited this material in art spaces. In Spring 1970, the OHO group started working in the Zarica Valley (Slovenia) on different art projects, described by Pogačnik as a form of “spiritual schooling” (Žerovc 2013). The artworks they produced revealed their interest in Western esotericism, especially the New Age. For example, David Nez produced the conceptual work Time-Space Structures, inspired by Ouspensky and his idea of a “fourth dimension.” He used time-lapse photography to record different shapes produced by the movement of a light source in the dark. Milenko Matanović made several conceptual works in Zarica inspired by astrology, such as the descriptively titled Relation Sun-Zarica Valley-the Star Venus, or The constellation of candles in the field corresponds to the constellation of stars in the sky. Another conceptual artwork, titled Locations of the Recent OHO Projects in Relation to Historical Locations (May 1970), represented a map of the OHO projects completed in the Zarica Valley, superimposed over ancient and historic sites from that area, such as Neolithic settlements, Celtic and Slavic burial locations, and medieval churches. As art critic Tomaž Brejc described it, the theme of the OHO group at that time was the “spiritual communication with the past, the cosmos, the rhythm of nature…” (Brejc 1978:17). The OHO group wanted to establish a kind of esoteric continuity between their “spiritual schooling” and the evolution of humanity, reflected in the archeological heritage of the Zarica Valley. They considered the nature in Zarica as a “sacred space” (Žerovc 2013), and probably saw themselves as its “prophets.” In one action from 1970, they walked twenty-five km from Zarica to the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, where they held an exhibition. As Pogačnik described it, by doing so they wanted to establish a “telepathic connection” between “the sacred space of nature and the profane space of a gallery,” using their bodies as “channel[s] of communication” (Žerovc 2013).

In the Summer of 1970, the OHO group spent another week of “spiritual schooling,” this time in the small Slovenian settlement of Čezsoča. According to Pogačnik, they conducted “various forms of creative meditation” and searched for “a way to continue working both with the body and with spiritual dimensions.” Their idea was to develop an art form “that would enable people to come to know themselves and experience the deepest dimensions of space” (Žerovc 2013). The members of the OHO group were obviously “working on themselves,” which was one of the main preoccupations of New Agers in general. As the journal of the OHO’s “spiritual schooling” in Čezsoča reveals, they were practicing yoga and were also trying to invent their own rituals.

It seems that the curriculum of their “spiritual schooling” also included the use of psychoactive substances. One page from their Čezsoča journal describes a ritual where four artists connected their hands to form a cross, i.e. a “touch sign — spontaneously derived while stoned” [Image 3 at right] Although in the 1970s Pogačnik denied that the OHO group was using psychoactive substances (which was understandable, considering the stigmatization of “junkies” in socialist Yugoslavia), he later confirmed in one of his interviews that they had been experimenting with LSD at that time (Fowkes 2015:105-06). The use of psychoactive substances to gain various forms of esoteric insights has been often explored by scholars of Western esotericism (Hanegraaff 2013; Partridge 2005:82-134). Until the recent exhibition, High Times: Reflections of Psychedelia in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1966-1976, organized in 2011/2012 at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana, little was known about the influence of psychoactive substances on the OHO group. As confirmed by Pogačnik, in an interview given on the occasion of the High Times exhibition, it was during one session on LSD that he and other members of OHO decided to stop working as an art group and start living in a commune (Fowkes 2015:105). Their idea was to escape the art system and dedicate themselves to “life.”

On April 11, 1971, Pogačnik, Matanović, Nez, Šalamun, and few of their family members and friends moved to Šempas village in Slovenia and formed the artistic commune they called Šempas Family. Matanović, Nez and Šalamun, however, soon left the commune, and started searching for their “life” elsewhere. For most of the time, the Šempas Family consisted of Pogačnik, his wife, and their three daughters as permanent inhabitants, with a number of other people occasionally joining them. The initial idea of the OHO group to withdraw from the art system was interpreted by some critics through political lenses, i.e. in terms of artists creating their “micro-political” situations, opposed to the “grey, everyday life of socialism” (see Moderna Galerija 2013). Such interpretations seem, however, to be insufficient. Yugoslav art critic Ješa Denegri defined the “withdrawal” of the OHO group more accurately as choosing “the aesthetics of silence,” referring to the title of an essay by Susan Sontag (1933-2004), i. e. an act in which the artist “frees himself from servile bondage to the world” (as quoted in Fowkes 2015:107). This interpretation is relevant insofar as it refers to Sontag’s suggestion that modern artists who chose the “aesthetic of silence” are in fact the descendants of important figures in the Western and Eastern “mystical tradition.” These include the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth-sixth century), Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260-1328), the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing (fourteenth century), as well as Zen, Taoist, and Sufi masters (Sontag 2002 [1969]:22).

The “tradition” in which the members of the Šempas Family immersed themselves was indeed “mystical.” In forming his commune, Pogačnik was inspired by the famous New Age commune of Findhorn, Scotland. The Findhorn commune was well-known for its surprisingly successful vegetable garden, grown on the infertile soil according to instructions allegedly channeled through communication the founders received from “elemental beings” or “nature spirits.” The old esoteric idea of the existence of nature spirits who may help the growth of plants was developed in twentieth century by Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who lectured repeatedly on this subject, and whose teachings significantly influenced the New Age movement in its initial phase in the early 1970s. When Pogačnik visited Findhorn in 1971, he was fascinated with its garden, created (as he writes in one of his books) “through cooperation between all three kingdoms: the world of angels, the world of humans, and the world of elementals” (Pogačnik 2001:37). According to his own account, Pogačnik was also influenced by what he had learned during the lectures on the Christ principle and “the role of Lucifer in human evolution,” given in Findhorn by David Spangler (b. 1945), one of the crucial figures of the commune and an influential New Age author (Pogačnik 1998:218). Pogačnik returned to Findhorn in several occasions, claiming he was trying to “interconnect the global movements involved in the new holistic spirituality and in an alternative attitude to Earth and nature” (Žerovc 2013).

Findhorn and Šempas seem to have organized together the first New Age World Congress, held in Florence, February 19-28, 1978,  at the Forte Belvedere (Žerovc 2013), which also featured a lecture by Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), a futuristic engineer and one of the cult figures for the New Age. [Image at right] As one print account of this event confirms, the Šempas Family designed the abstract “congress symbol” (n.a. 1978:266), which was very similar to Pogačnik’s later “cosmograms” (see below). The Findhorn commune also attracted Pogačnik’s colleagues form the OHO group, Matanović and Nez, who only spent a short time in the Šempas Family, and then left to travel around the world in a quest for spirituality, which eventually brought them to Findhorn (Fowkes 2015:108). Pogačnik keeps a connection with Findhorn to this day and he lectures and leads seminars on “Earth healing” there (Pogačnik 2000:25). Findhorn Press is the publisher of Pogačnik’s books in English.

The members of the Šempas Family lived in a typical hippie commune lifestyle. [Image at right] They grew  vegetables (and were vegetarians); collected herbs, and prepared natural remedies; lived without electricity, newspapers, or radio; and did not use money (Fowkes 2015:103). They produced artworks made from forged iron, carved wood, burnt clay, and woven fabrics, following designs, or “thought patterns,” devised by Pogačnik.  What they aimed for was a “harmonious spiritual symbiosis” and a “spiritual metamorphosis of the humans and the world in which they live” (Brejc 1978a:19). It is in the Šempas Family that the “Earth healing” rituals first started to take place (Brejc 1978a:19). They would later become Pogačnik’s main preoccupation. The Šempas family as an art collective showed its work at the Trigon exhibition in Graz in 1977, and represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale of 1978, whose theme was the relationship between art and nature.

Since the commune in Šempas ceased to exist in 1978, Pogačnik worked to develop and teach his own method of geomancy, or “Earth healing,” called “lithopuncture.” He erected stone blocks on the “Earth acupuncture points” in order to stimulate “ecological healing” of the locations. In these stone blocks, he chiseled mostly abstract, sometimes floral esoteric symbols that he called “cosmograms.” [Image at right] Pogačnik defined the “cosmogram” in esoteric terms, as a symbol “which attracts the archetypal or spiritual-soul dimensions of a location into the healing process” (Pogačnik 1998:198). Sometimes, when “Earth acupuncture points” in a specific area were not accessible, Pogačnik created a corresponding system of “substitute acupuncture points” in another location, where he then performed his “Earth healing.” One such project was performed in 1990 at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, the purpose of which was to heal nine places in the city of Ljubljana that were unaccessible to the artists. On this occasion, Pogačnik created “substitute acupuncture points” in the hall of the museum, where he placed his stones with the “cosmograms.” He explained this method as use of “the principle of correspondence between micro-and macrocosm” (Pogačnik 1998:163). The doctrine of correspondence had been identified by scholars as one of the fundamental elements of Western esotericism (Faivre 1994:10).

The method Pogačnik uses to make a “diagnosis” of a certain place is based on the esoteric idea about the existence of occult “energies” or “vibrations,” which can be detected if the esotericist is (self-)initiated in the necessary secret knowledge and techniques. The initiate may also use his or her own intuition to “tune” into these invisible realities. For example, Pogačnik examines the state of health of a specific area simply by letting himself be guided by the “sensitivity” of his hands (Pogačnik 1998:162). He also claims to receive instructions from an elemental being called Julius, whom he calls “the old sage” and of whom he also made a portrait drawing (Pogačnik 2000:33). Pogačnik’s daughters Ajra and Ana allegedly communicate with the angelic realm, which helps them in the “Earth healing” practice. Ajra channels Angel Master Christopher Tragius, and Ana is in communication with the “Angel of Earth healing” called Devos (Pogačnik 1998:20).

In 1991, Pogačnik designed the official coat of arms of the newly constituted Republic of Slovenia. [Image at right] According to Pogačnik, the Slovenian coat of arms is another “cosmogram,” which magically protects the country by appearing everywhere: on official papers and stamps, on the national flag, and so on (Pogačnik 1998:166). The Slovene coat of arms depicts river, mountain and stars, symbols of Slovenian landscape, but it also depicts the “balance between the masculine and feminine principles” (Ljudmila 2017). In the year 2006, Pogačnik became the vice-president of the “Movement for Justice and Development,” a non-political society for “raising human consciousness” led by Janez Drnovšek (1950-2008), the unusual “New Age President” of Slovenia (from 2002 to 2007), who promoted “positive thinking” and styled himself as a spiritual leader (Črnič 2008).

In the last two decades, Pogačnik has emerged as the leading figure in a global network of “Earth healing” groups. He lectures in different venues, and organizes workshops of “Earth healing” in which participants are engaged both artistically and spiritually by creating and chiseling their own “cosmograms “in “lithopuncture” stones. Since the end of the twentieth century, the basic idea behind Pogačnik’s “Earth healing” practice has been the vision of a co-evolution of the humanity and Earth, or Gaia. In the New Age movement, the name “Gaia,” or the “Goddess,” stands for the Planet Earth as a conscious, living being. According to Pogačnik, Gaia is going through significant changes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Its material structure is becoming more subtle, “so that the finer dimensions of its existence can manifest through it.” Humans need to attune to this change and learn to communicate with Gaia through the “language of cosmograms,” in order to help the transformation of the Earth and humanity. If they fail to do so, all will “end in havoc and turmoil” (Pogačnik 2017).

In 1998, together with his daughter Ana, Pogačnik founded the “Lifenet” organization to “provide a platform for people who have the heartfelt wish to be in in dialogue with the consciousness of the Earth” (Lifenet 2017). Groups and individuals who are members of Lifenet organize “Earth healing” projects, retreats, and workshops in various places throughout the world. [Image at right] Since 2008, Lifenet has organized biennial international gatherings in Slovenia, Germany, UK, Sweden, and Croatia. These are typical New Age eco-spiritual gatherings with the standard repertoire: group dancing in circles, celebrations of the summer solstice, meditating and performing different ceremonies and exercises to communicate with Gaia and its “web of life” (Gea Viva 2016).

For his Lifenet followers, Pogačnik has devised special “Gaia Touch” exercises. These exercises are presented as a kind of “yoga, dedicated to cooperation with Gaia and her consciousness,” and are designed to help human beings “attune better to the multidimensional nature of our home planet and its beings belonging to different levels of reality” (Earth Energy Network 2017). [Image at right] Pogačnik also leads Lifenet members in monthly meditations, for the same purpose of connecting with Gaia and helping its imminent transformation. In 2016, Pogačnik was designated as a world UNESCO Artist for Peace for that year. One of the most recent esoteric activist art projects of Pogačnik was a “geopuncture circle”: a group of twenty-four “lithopuncture” stone blocks with “cosmograms,” realized by him and a group of international artists in the small town of Visoko, near Sarajevo, Bosnia.

In the 1990s, Bosnia became the symbol of the civil war between different ethnic and religious groups that plagued former Yugoslavia. In Pogačnik’s project, Bosnia is the emerging place of the future spiritual transformation of the whole planet. Visoko is very popular in contemporary New Age circles as a site of the so called Bosnian “pyramids,” which allegedly predated those in Egypt and surpassed them in size. According to Pogačnik, the purpose of the central group of ten “lithopuncture” stones [Image at right] erected in Visoko is “to awake the diverse units of the Visoko pyramids system so that they may become active in the present moment of Earth’s evolution” (Pogačnik 2017a).

IMAGES

Image #1: Photograph of Marko Pogačnik.
Image #2: Pogačnik’s diagram Intercontinental Group Project America-Europe (1970).
Image #3: A page from the OHO group’s journal of their “spiritual schooling” in the Slovenian nature, which describes their ritual of making a “touch sign” in the form of a cross, under the influence of psychoactive substances (1970).
Image #4: Buckminster Fuller lectures in front of the symbol designed by Pogačnik and the Šempas Family, at the first New Age World Congress in Florence (1978).
Image #5: Pogačnik’s artistic New Age commune Šempas Family, in Šempas village, Slovenia (1977). Photograph: Bojan Brecelj.
Image #6: Pogačnik with one of his “lithopuncture” stones with a chiseled “cosmogram” on it.
Image #7: The official Slovenian coat of arms, which Pogačnik created in 1991, as a “cosmogram” of his home country.
Image #8: Fifth international gathering of Pogačnik’s Lifenet organization, Brač Island, Croatia. People dance inside a stone circle installation inspired by Pogačnik’s “lithopuncture” work (2016).
Image #9: Illustration of one of the “Gaia Touch” exercises invented by Pogačnik.
Image #10: Pogačnik’s “lithopuncture” project realized in the vicinity of the famous Bosnian “pyramids” (2016).

REFERENCES

Brejc, Tomaž. 1978. “OHO as an Artistic Phenomenon 1966-1971.” Pp. 13-18 in The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978, edited by Marijan Susovski. Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art Zagreb.

Brejc, Tomaž. 1978a. “The Family at Šempas.” Pp.18-19 in The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978, edited by Marijan Susovski. Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art Zagreb.

Črnič, Aleš, 2008. “The Changing Concept of New Age: A Case Study of Spiritual Transformation of the Slovenian President.” Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies 4:17-29.

Earth Energy Network. 2017. “Gaia Touch.” Accessed from http://www.Earthenergynetwork.co.uk/index.php/gaia-touch/ on 18 April 2017.

Faivre, Antoine. 1994. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany: SUNY Press.

Fowkes, Maja. 2015. The Green Bloc. Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism. Budapest/New York: CEU Press.

Gea Viva. 2016. “5th International Lifenet gathering.” Accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v5wr73iF9U on 18 April 2017.

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2013. “Entheogenic esotericism.” Pp. 392-409 in Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm. London/New York: Routledge.

Lewitt, Sol. 1967. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Artforum (vol. 5/10). Accessed from http://www.corner-college.com/udb/cproVozeFxParagraphs_on_Conceptual_Art._Sol_leWitt.pdf on 18 April 2017.

Lifenet. 2017. “About Us.” Accessed from http://www.lebensnetz-geomantie.de/lebensnetz-en.html on 18 April 2017.

Ljudmila. 2017. “Slovene National Symbols – The Slovene Coat-of-Arms.” Accessed from http://www.ljudmila.org/pogacnik/Stran9.html on 18 April 2017.

Moderna Galerija. 2013. “The Present and Presence: Repetition 4 – Micro-political Situations.” Accessed from http://old.mg-lj.si/node/1086 on 18 April 2017.

n.a. 1978. “A Congress that Dared the Unthinkable.” Pp. 266-70 in Associations Transnationales (5/1978). Accessed from https://www.laetusinpraesens.org/pdfs/1978_5_3.pdf on 18 April 2017.

Partridge, Christopher. 2005. The Re-Enchantment of the West.:Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture, Two Volumes. London/New York: T&T Clark International.

Pogačnik, Marko. 2017a. “The Concept of Earth Healing Has Changed.” Accessed from http://www.markopogacnik.com/?page_id=258 on 18 April 2017.

Pogačnik, Marko. 2017b. “Geopuncture Circles.” Accessed from http://www.markopogacnik.com/?page_id=888 on 18 April 2017.

Pogačnik, Marko. 2001. Elementarna bića: Inteligencija Zemlje i prirode [Elemental Beings: Earth and Nature Intelligence]. Belgrade: Snežana Tufegdžić.

Pogačnik, Marko. 2000. Earth Changes, Human Destiny: Coping and Attuning with the Help of the Revelation of St. John. Findhorn: Findhorn Press.

Pogačnik, Marko, 1998. Healing the Heart of the Earth: Restoring the Subtle Levels of Life. Findhorm: Findhorn Press.

Sontag, Susan. 2002 [1966]. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Picador.

Žerovc, Beti. 2013. “The OHO Files: Interview with Marko Pogačnik.” Artmargins online. Accessed from http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/interview-with-marko-poganik on 18 April 2017.

Žerovc, Beti. 2011. “The OHO Files: Interview with David Nez.” Artmargins online. Accessed from http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/interview-with-david-nez on 18 April 2017.

Post Date:
30 April 2017

GYZIS TIMELINE

1842 (March 1):  Nikolaos Gyzis (or, in German, Nikolaus Gysis) was born in the village of Sklavochori, on the island of Tinos, in Greece.

1854:  Gyzis started studying at the School of Arts in Athens, where he had among his teachers German Nazarene painter Ludwig Thiersch.

1862:  Gyzis was awarded a scholarship from the Evangelistria Foundation of Tinos.

1865:  Gyzis finally arrived at Munich, where he settled for the rest of his life. In October, he attended the preparatory class of Hermann Anschütz at the Munich Academy.

1868:  Gyzis was accepted in the class of Karl von Piloty at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

1869:  His first religious painting, Joseph in Prison, was donated by Gyzis to the Evangelistria Foundation of Tinos.

1872:  After a long residence abroad, Gyzis visited Greece again for the first time.

1873:  Gyzis underwent a trip to Anatolia with fellow artist Nikiforos Lytras.

1874:  Gyzis returned to Munich and, together with Lytras, rented the apartment that previously served as the studio of German painter and Theosophist Gabriel von Max.

1875:  Gyzis became a member of the Art Association “Allotria,” which several important German artists had also joined.

1880:  Gyzis was elected honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and two years later he started working there as a teaching assistant.

1884 (July 27):  The German Theosophical Society was founded. It held its second meeting in the same year (August 9) at Gabriel von Max’s Ammerland villa.

1888:  Gyzis was appointed professor at the Munich Academy.

1893 (August 28):  In a letter to his sister-in-law Ourania Nazou, Gyzis declared that he had conceived a new religious idea.

1894:  Gyzis began corresponding with Anna May, a friend and classmate of his daughter Penelope.

1898:  With Anna May’s help, Gyzis chose some of his sketches in black and white for the exhibition held in the Glaspalast in Munich in the same year.

1900 (July 20):  The Annual Exhibition was inaugurated in the Glaspalast; Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh was among Gyzis’s works exhibited.

1901 (January 4):  Gyzis died in Munich. A commemorative exhibition took place in the Glaspalast (from June to October) where Gyzis’s works were exhibited beside those of two other recently deceased painters, Arnold Böcklin and Wilhelm Leibl.

1910 (August 25):  Rudolf Steiner delivered a lecture on Gyzis to the members of the Theosophical Society in Munich.

1911 (December):  Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) published On the Spiritual in Art.

1928:  A large exhibition of Gyzis’s works was organized in Athens.

BIOGRAPHY

Nikolaos Gyzis (1842-1910) was a prominent Greek painter, much appreciated by his contemporaries for his ability to intertwine in his visual vocabulary elements from the ancient Greek heritage, the Byzantine imagery, and the more recent Jugendstil movement. [Image at right] He spent his entire life in Munich, Germany, initially studying there before becoming a professor at the local Academy of Fine Arts from 1888 until his death in 1901. He is considered the main representative of the so-called Munich School movement, and his work had a great impact on Greek artistic production during the fin de siècle and the beginnings of the twentieth century. Among his students in the Academy were the Austrian printmaker Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), the German graphic artist August Heitmüller (1873-1935), the set designer Ernst Julian Stern (1876-1954), the Romanian painter Ştefan Popescu (1872-1948), and the Polish painter Tadeusz Rychter (1873-1943?), who would eventually become an Anthroposophist. Gyzis’s late work, hovering between academicism and new symbolist tendencies, caused a sensation among his contemporaries, especially in Greece (Katsanaki 2016). After Gyzis’s death in 1901, his late paintings drew the attention of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), at that time a prominent Theosophist and the future founder of Anthroposophy. He admired the fact that the painter, at the meridian of his artistic life, left behind the traditional genre scenes that were typical for a professor in the Academy and moved to a more spiritual style of painting, including strange angelic beings and apocalyptic imagery (Picht 1951:419-21). [Image at right]

Gyzis was born, on March 1, 1842, to an Orthodox family in the village of Sklavochori, on the island of Tinos, which was also a place with a strong Catholic heritage and a large Catholic population. Tinos, an island belonging to the Northern Cyclades group, is very well known for its famous sculptors and painters, but remains also a very important religious center, notably after the discovery in 1823 of the supposedly miraculous icon of the Virgin Panagia in the ruins of an old church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, and the subsequent erection of the Church of Panagia Evangelistria in 1880 (Missirli 2002:339). Since the nineteenth century, Tinos has remained a prominent site of Marian pilgrimage and religious tourism, its importance in Greece being comparable to that of Lourdes for Catholics in France.

Gyzis settled in Athens in 1850 and, by 1854, started his studies at the School of Arts. Among his teachers was the German painter of religious subjects, part of the Nazarene movement, Ludwig Thiersch (1825-1909), who is credited with the introduction of Western elements into the Eastern pictorial tradition. According to Kaiser, Thiersch was preoccupied with the Slavic notion of “Sobornost” (roughly translated as “conciliation” or “community”), and the Church of St. Nikodemos in Athens (the local Russian Orthodox Church), which was decorated by him, manifested this preoccupation (Kaiser 2014). The proponents of “Sobornost” were promoting an understanding of the Church as a place of union between different Christian fractions and, on the other hand, were offering an alternative to unbridled individualism by endorsing a kind of universal love and unrestrained solidarity. Thus, hierarchy and institutionalized religion were often seen under a critical lens. Even after Gyzis moved to Munich, he nevertheless maintained a correspondence with Thiersch, exchanging views with him on various artistic subjects (Kaiser 2014:195).

With the aid of his friend Nikiforos Lytras (1832-1904), also a prominent Greek painter who studied in the Munich Academy, Gyzis became acquainted with the wealthy Tinian businessman Nikolaos Nazos (who later became his father-in-law), who intervened in his behalf with the Evangelistria Foundation, securing the grant of a scholarship (Missirli 2002: 341). The Evangelistria Foundation of Tinos endorsed cultural awareness by awarding scholarships to young talented painters and sculptors, thus giving them the opportunity to receive training in important art centers abroad, to deepen their own cultural ideas and import them back into Greece. After some delay, Gyzis’s scholarship was approved in 1865 and from the port of Syros, through Trieste, Vienna and Salzburg, he finally arrived at Munich, where he settled for the rest of his life. In October of the same year, he attended the preparatory class of Hermann Anschütz (1802-1880) at the Munich Academy and, one year later, he was trained by the Hungarian painter Alexander von Wagner (1838-1919). In 1868, Gyzis was accepted in the class of Karl von Piloty (1826-1886) at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. In 1869, Gyzis bequeathed his first religious painting, Joseph in Prison (1868), to the Evangelistria Foundation (where it still is), as a sign of gratitude for its support. One year later, another religious work, Judith and Holofernes (1869), was completed. The compositional approach as well as the color arrangement of these early works were strongly permeated by the teaching method of von Piloty, one of the most important German representatives of the so-called historical realism (Didaskalou 1999:143).

In 1872, after a long residence abroad, Gyzis visited Greece again for the first time and received high acclaim for his artistic mastery. The following year, Gyzis underwent a trip to Anatolia with Lytras. In 1874, he returned to Munich and, together with Lytras, rented the studio that had belonged to the German painter, and later Theosophist, Gabriel von Max (1840-1915) (Missirli 2002: 346). At the same time, Gyzis began systematically taking part in the annual and international exhibitions at Munich’s Glaspalast.

In 1875, Gyzis became a member of the art association “Allotria,” which many important German artists had also joined (Missirli 2002:347). In 1876, Gyzis got engaged to Nikolaos Nazos’ daughter, Artemis Nazou (1854-1929), whom, in the course of the following year, he married after a cursory trip to Greece. At the same time his reputation as a painter flourished as he began to exhibit his paintings at international venues, such as the Paris World Exhibition of 1878. In 1880, he was elected honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and two years later he started working as a teaching assistant there. In 1888, Gyzis was finally appointed a professor in the Munich Academy, with an annual wage of 4.200 German marks (Didaskalou 1991:150). In 1887, impressed by the international renown the painter had gained in Europe, the Greek government commissioned him to design the banner for the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Gyzis’s career was at its apex when, in 1896, he designed the diploma for the first modern Olympic Games to be held in Athens. According to the painter, the subject depicted in the diploma was the “Annunciation of Greece” [Ευαγγελισμός της Ελλάδος] (Drosinis 1953:210).

As it might be inferred from his correspondence, by the early 1890s onward, Gyzis underwent a kind of religious crisis and became obsessed with grand religious projects (Didaskalou 1993:188). On August 28, 1893, in a letter to his sister-in-law Ourania Nazou, Gyzis declared that he had conceived a new religious idea. In 1894, he began corresponding with Anna May (1864-1954), a friend and classmate of his daughter Penelope (1879-1947). With May’s help, in 1898, Gyzis chose some of his sketches in black and white for the Munich’s Glaspalast Exhibition of the same year. The sketches were considered as products of musical inspiration, and most of them explored religious themes. On July 20, 1900, the Annual Exhibition in the Glaspalast featured several works by Gyzis, including Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh. This and other religious paintings manifested an obsession with spirituality and the ideas of death and judgement. [Image at right] The murky vibe that these paintings impart to the viewer may be partly due to the devastating defeat that the Greeks suffered in what it is known in Greece as the Unfortunate War, fought in 1897 between the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire.

The various sketches, studies, and drawings of this period, now preserved in private collections and museums in Greece, reveal that the painter conceived those fragmented visions from an unseen world, as musical variations on a “greater theme,” i.e. the restoration of spirituality. [Image at right] Gyzis wasn’t satisfied with an ordered synthesis but rather was seeking to circumscribe this “greater theme” by working with different artistic media or knitting unforeseen narratives, gradually unwinding the yarn in front of the viewer’s eyes. The sketches and drawings, which often bear the name Triumph of Religion or Foundation of Faith (since 1894), depict austere archangels in a majestic and statuesque-like posture, holding flaming swords and trampling on the ancient serpent, Satan (Didaskalou 1991:124-25) [Image at right]. For Gyzis, the tireless battle he depicted stood for the eternal fight between Spirit and Matter, a subject often discussed in Theosophical circles (Petritakis 2013). Gyzis emphatically pointed towards this idea in his drawing The Victory of Spirit over Matter, intended as the upper part of a larger composition, entitled The New Century (1899-1900), of which various studies and oil drawings are preserved.

However, Gyzis’s most celebrated painting, in this context, was the already mentioned Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh (1899-1900, 2 x 2 m.), which has as its theme the arrival of the Bridegroom (in Greek, Nymphios), a service of the Orthodox Church that symbolizes the preparation for the arrival of the Messiah. [Image at right] In fact, Gyzis particularly drew on a book called Hermeneia (1730-1734) by Dionysius of Fourna (c. 1670 – after 1744), a manual of iconography, which provided a synthetic Gospel account of the life of Jesus Christ. Gyzis sought after this book in a letter dated 1886 (Kalligas 1981:176-88; Drosinis 1953:176-78). The painting depicts Christ, whose figure emerges throughout various rings of fire, which vehemently coil in vorticose motions up to the margins of the picture, where the angelic hosts genuflect (Petritakis 2014). A scene depicting the Fall of Satan was equally conceived to occupy the lower part of the composition (Kalligas 1981).

Gyzis’s religious works demonstrate an accomplished artistic skill and an integrated geometrical expression, especially regarding the use of circular and elliptical forms, which impart an impression of “hidden harmony” (Kalligas 1981:72; Petritakis 2016:89). Marcel Montandon (1875-1940), who published a biography of the painter one year after Gyzis’ death, corroborated the above statement (Montandon 1902:118). Furthermore, the playfully rhythmic, vibrant, but still determined stroke that runs through these works, conveys to the viewer a sense of incompleteness. With his series of drawings made with Indian ink on photographic foil, intended to be seen in front of a light source (a technique invented by Gyzis himself) the painter was hinting at an otherworldly universe, like the one explored by Spiritualist mediums. [Image at right] Similarly, the sketches in black paper with white chalk, that he produced, in 1898, with Anna May’s aid (Drosinis 1953:235), evoke the idea of a juxtaposition between an earthly reality and a spiritual otherness. The latter were bought from the Bavarian Government and are now kept in Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich.

Gyzis died on January 4, 1901 in Munich. His monument was sculpted by the German artist Heinrich Waderé (1865-1950). A monumental, commemorative exhibition took place in Munich’s Glaspalast from June to October 1901. Gyzis’s works were exhibited beside those of two other recently deceased painters, Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) and Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900). The Bridegroom as well as sketches from the Triumph of Religion were also on display. Only after twenty-seven years, a major exhibition of Gyzis’s works was organized in Greece, at Iliou Melathron (Heinrich Schliemann’s Mansion) in Athens, organized by the Society of Art Devotees and Gyzis’s son, Telemachus (1884-1964).

An interesting question concerns Gyzis’s relationship with Theosophy, a movement in which several of his friends and associates were deeply interested. Gyzis never joined the German Theosophical Society, nor does it seem likely that he had been aware that Theosophical ideas were circulating in Greece during his lifetime. In fact, the Theosophical Society in Athens was founded much later, in 1928 (Matthiopoulos 2005:249). In 1979, during a conversation with Greek critic and curator Marilena Kassimati in Munich, Ewald Petritschek (1917-1997, Gyzis’s grandson and Penelope Gyzis’s son) stated that, at the twilight of his life, the painter had been acquainted with Theosophical literature (Kassimati 2002:45-46). However, in his correspondence, Gyzis never referred to Theosophical books nor to specific Theosophical ideas. Furthermore, Gyzis’s journals, which were in the possession of his son, Telemachus, were burnt during the aerial bombings in January 7, 1944, near the airport, in Athens (Didaskalou 1991:1). It would be risky, therefore, to jump to the conclusion that Gyzis was an orthodox Theosophist.

A fascination for Spiritualism was shared by many artists and intellectuals at that time, most considerably among them the Munich Secessionists Albert von Keller (1844-1920) and Gabriel von Max (Loers 1995; Danzker 2010). The German Theosophical Society was founded on July 27, 1884. The Society held its second meeting in the same year on August 9, at Gabriel von Max’s Ammerland villa, south of Munich, and von Max became deeply involved in Theosophical and Spiritualist matters. In 1886, however, the German Theosophical Society was dissolved in the aftermath of the controversies where Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the Society’s international leader, was accused of having fraudulently produced the letters she claimed she was receiving from the mysterious Masters. Von Keller and von Max, together with the physician Albert von Schrenk-Notzing (1862-1929), formed the Psychologische Gesellschaft (Psychological Society), modeled on the Society for Psychical Research in England. Yet, we cannot demonstrate that Gyzis had direct contacts with the Psychological Society.

Both Keller and Gyzis were members of the Künstlergesellschaft Allotria (Art Association Allotria), from which later sprang out the Munich Secession. The Art Association Allotria was founded in 1873 by Franz von Lenbach (1836-1904), a very close friend of Gyzis, who also wrote the commemorative introduction to Montandon’s book. What remained hitherto unnoticed, is the fact that Gyzis designed in 1895 the cover for the illustrated magazine Über Land und Meer (Over Land and See), which abounds in Masonic symbols [Image at right]. A member of the editorial staff of the magazine, Ludwig Gärtner, was also a member of the Psychological Society (Petritakis 2013).

In general, Greek art history viewed Gyzis’s work as being engaged in a dialogue with Classical and Byzantine art, the two main threads that allegedly ran through contemporary Greek civilization. As Matthiopoulos correctly indicated, Gyzis’s late work has been viewed and thus appropriated with a certain uneasiness by the intellectual milieu of Greece, and sustained efforts have been made to purge it of its mystical and symbolic elements: in other words, to subdue its “lurid modernization” and supplant it with more representational thought systems and ideologies (Kaklamanos 1901:27-28, Matthiopoulos 2005:541). Kalligas stressed that “Gyzis’s religious works enrich the traditional Christian iconography with a new figure, a figure that cannot be regarded neither as purely Orthodox nor purely Western. It is essentially Christian” (Kalligas 1981:175). Similar tropes of thought have permeated the field of Greek art history until recent times, thwarting the understanding of Gyzis’s late symbolist work in its socio-cultural and ideological context (Danos 2015:11-22). Given the situation prevailing in nineteenth century artistic life in Greece, only a limited circle of artists and literates in Athens and in the Greek diaspora could understand the questions Gyzis’s paintings posed (Matthiopoulos 2016).

Apparently, after the demise of the painter, in 1901, and the concomitant exhibitions of his paintings in Glaspalast, a certain “Theosophical aura” formed around his work. Anna May, a private student of Gyzis, played a certain role in that direction. Her father, Heinrich May (1825-1915), had been Gyzis’s private doctor during the painter’s difficult late years, when Anna played the role of the artist’s muse, whose advice or opinion on various matters he would often solicit.

Margarita Hauschka, Anna May’s niece, reported that in the studio of Anna in Adalbertsstrasse, in the vicinity of the Munich branch of the Theosophical Society, a picture was hanging, supposedly with the title The Majesty of God (Majestät Gottes), apparently, a copy of Gyzis’ Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh, if not the same work. When Tadeusz Rychter, a young painter from Poland, formerly associated with the cultural modernist milieu of the political cabaret Kleiner grüner Ballon [Small Green Balloon] in Krakow. and a student of Gyzis, came to rent the studio and saw the image, he immediately recognized it and asked to keep it in the apartment. Anna May rejected the offer, and Rychter ended up making a small replica of the original work (Hauschka 1975:188). Interestingly enough, a strong erotic relationship blossomed out from this fortuitous event, although it was strongly opposed by Anna May’s parents, since they were strong Catholics and Rychter was a staunch Theosophist. We may thus surmise that it was after having indoctrinated Anna May in Theosophy that Rychter, in the first months of 1910, moved to Berlin to attend some lectures by Rudolf Steiner. It should have been at that time that Rychter drew Steiner’s attention to the Greek painter (Petritakis 2016:84-85). Furthermore, there is evidence that, around 1910, a copy of the Bridegroom decorated the premises of the Munich branch of the Theosophical Society and was well liked by its members (Bracker 2004:61).

During 1907 and 1910, Anna May, as well as Rychter, worked as set designers for Steiner’s Mystery Plays in Munich, that is, around the time Steiner delivered a lecture on Gyzis to the Munich Theosophical society (Levy 2003). Furthermore, May received a commission from Steiner for a painting that would adorn the Johannesbau in Munich, a forerunner of the Goetheanum Steiner would later build in Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland, as the world headquarters of Anthroposophy (Zander 2007:819). It was conceived as a triptych that should depict the different stages of mystical Christianity, from Solomon as its precursor through the

Holy Grail and up to Rosicrucianism. The work was reminiscent in many ways of Gyzis’s late religious projects, especially in terms of symbolism and compositional arrangement (Petritakis 2014). It is, however, preserved to us only through a transparency kept by May’s niece (Hauschka 1975), since the original painting, once in the Hamburger Waldorfschule, the Anthroposophical high school in Hamburg, was destroyed during the bombings in the Second World War (Hauschka 1975:187). [Image at right] In February 1918, May exhibited the triptych in the Munich gallery Das Reich, run by Anthroposophist and alchemist Alexander von Bernus (1880-1965), and later, the same year, in the Glaspalast, under the last name May-Kerpen (Petritakis 2016:84-85). In 1924, after receiving a commission from the publishing house “Christliche Kunst,” Rychter moved with Anna May, now his wife, to Palestine. In 1939, Rychter’s traces were lost soon after he was commissioned to restore a church near Radom, in Poland. Apparently, he was murdered by the Nazis in 1943 (Levy 2003; Bracker 2004:62). Thereafter, Anna May lived, as a kind of “recluse,” in a small Arabian house, which soon became the first Anthroposophical centre in Palestine, a meeting hub for foreigners and friends (Gottlieb 1954:128-29). Anna May cultivated limited contacts with other Anthroposophists, most of them Jewish expatriates from Central Europe. These included Eva Levy from Vienna (born Eva Rosenberg, 1924-2011), who later, in 1942, got married to the prominent Anthroposophist and pioneer of Zionist movement, Michael Levy (1913-1998), or architect Bruno Eljahu Friedjung, born also in Vienna, in 1906 (Bracker 2004:62).

Before departing with Rychter to Palestine, Anna May was tightly associated with the Künstlergruppe Aenigma, to which both she and Rychter adhered. This group, which exhibited collectively between 1918 and 1932, was founded by Maria Strakosch-Giesler (1877-1970), a former Kandinsky student, and Irma von Duczyńska (1869-1932), both of whom had received an academic art education and were ardent feminists with avant-garde tendencies (Fäth 2015). Gyzis’s work was also very well known to the artists’ group Aenigma, which was mainly steered by Rudolf Steiner and whose members were attendants of his lectures and followers of his ideas.

After Gyzis’s death, Rudolf Steiner, then a leader of the German Theosophical Society, began associating with contemporary art groups and was eager to introduce his ideas on art to young art students who attended his lectures, thereby finding a way to legitimize his activities within the German society. The International Theosophical Congress he organized in Munich in 1907 (May 18-21) was attended by 600 people, most of whom were coming from German-speaking countries, England, France, and America but also from Russia and Scandinavia (Zander 2007:1067-076).

In 1910, Rudolf Steiner presented before the members of the Theosophical Society in Munich the mystery drama by French Theosophist Édouard Schuré (1841-1929), The Children of Lucifer, as well as his own Rosicrucian play The Portal of Initiation (Zander 1998). On August 25, he delivered his lecture on Gyzis. Steiner’s lecture on Gyzis is important, as it was the first time that Steiner thought so highly of a contemporary painter that he dedicated a whole lecture to him. He even ordered a photographic reproduction of the painting to be made in smaller format, which is now preserved in the Steiner Archive in Dornach (Petritakis 2016:84). It seems that Gyzis’s paintings reaped much admiration among the friends of Steiner (who later formed the Anthroposophical community), most of all Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh, to which Steiner predominately dedicated his lecture. Steiner named the painting “Through the light, the love” [Aus dem Lichte, die Liebe]. He was in that way pointing towards an Eastern Christological doctrine, closely related to the idea of Sobornost, which had been widely disseminated in Symbolist circles, most notably in those around Russian philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) and composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) (Petritakis 2018).

In his lecture, Steiner drew the audience’s attention to the two cosmic spheres that glow in the upper part of Gyzis’s scene, aptly correlating them with the genesis scene by Michelangelo (1475-1564) in the Cappella Sistina in Rome. Furthermore, he argued that the scene echoes the moment at which the new God hovers above to create the world, whereas the old God departs leaving behind demolished shells of the old realm (Steiner 1953). At this time, Steiner’s approach was taking a turn towards more esoteric-Christian ideas. As Max Gümbel-Seiling (1879-1967), a member of the German Theosophical Society and later of the Anthroposophical Society (who had contributed to the preparation of the Mystery Plays in Munich during that Summer) recalled, Steiner imbued the two spheres of the painting with a further cosmological meaning. He argued that, in Blavatskyan terms, the ancient planet on the left of the scene echoes the astronomical period of Manvantara (manifestation) and the new one on the right, the period of Pralaya (retraction) (Gümbel-Seiling 1946:53; Petritakis 2016:87).

Elsewhere in his lecture, Steiner emphasized the use of gold-hued color over the faces and swords of the angels, regarding it as a manifestation of the radiation emanating from the “Spirit of Elohim.” He connected the indigo-blue color with rapt devotion and humility and red with chastity. Since the German Theosophists’ aesthetic predilections were leaning more towards the Madonnas of Raphael (1483-1520), Steiner admonished his audience not to be taken aback by the sketch-like, vaporous coloring of the painting (Steiner 1953:424). This remark is important, since it indicates that Steiner was leaving behind traditional Rosicrucian tropes and engaging in more experimental, one could even say, more avant-garde pursuits. Similarly, in his lectures on art in Dornach, Steiner would elaborate further on the relationship between blue-indigo, which has a centrifugal quality, and yellow-orange, which is centripetal (Petritakis 2014). Artist Maria Strakosch-Giesler recalled how Steiner demonstrated this use of blue-indigo in a series of examples, from Cimabue (ca. 1240-1302) and Giotto (1267-1337) to Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) (Strakosch-Giesler 1955:29; Petritakis 2014).

Perhaps it was precisely Steiner’s encounter with Gyzis’s images that prompted him to conceive or express his new ideas on art theory, rooted mainly in the legacy of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) (Halfen 2007). Steiner promoted these ideas in the contemporary artistic milieu, in a crucial period of his life when he tried to separate from the occult and aesthetic ideas of international Theosophical leader Annie Besant (1847-1933) and to better adapt to the historical transformations of German society (Petritakis 2013). The reactualization of Goethe’s Farbenlehre (theory of colors) as a “historical necessity” for young artists, firmly indicated by the example of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who himself attended Steiner’s lectures and who acknowledged the influence of Theosophy in his seminal theoretical work Concerning the Spiritual in Art, coincided with the revival of esoteric Christianity promoted by the future founder of Anthroposophy (Petritakis 2013, 2016).

IMAGES**

**All images are clickable links to enlarged representations.

Image #1: Nikolaos Gyzis in his studio in the 1890s. Photo by Elias van Bommel.
Image #2: Nikolaos Gyzis, Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh (preparatory sketch, 1899-1900). Oil drawing on canvas, Athens, National Gallery, inv. Π.574/4.
Image #3: Nikolaos Gyzis, Behold the Bridegroom Cometh (preparatory sketch, 1899-1900). Oil drawing on canvas, Athens, National Gallery, inv. Π.574/1.
Image #4: Nikolaos Gyzis, Archangel (study from the The Foundation of Faith), ca. 1894. Oil drawing on canvas, Athens, Benaki Museum, inv. ΓΕ _24317.
Image #5: Nikolaos Gyzis, Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh (1899-1900). Oil on canvas, Athens, National Gallery, inv. Π.641.
Image #6: Nikolaos Gyzis, Fall of Satan (?), 1890-1900. Indian ink on photographic foil, Athens, National Gallery, inv. Π.628/17.
Image #7: Nikolaos Gyzis, frontispiece depicting the Fame, for the periodical Über Land und Meer (1895).
Image #8: Anna May-Rychter, The Triptych of Grail, transparency preserved by Margarita Hauschka (the original is now lost). Rudolf Steiner Archive, Goetheanum, Dornach.

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Post Date:
17 April 2017