Without a doubt there are strong strains of esotericism and occultism in modern Western art (ca. 1860–1970). For instance, one often hears of the Theosophical and Anthroposophical affiliation of famous De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who described his art style, Neoplasticism, as “theosophical”. The occult interests and sources of other well-known abstract innovators such as Kazimir Malevich (1897-1935), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and František Kupka (1871-1957) have been researched too, as has the widespread persistence of occult thought at the Bauhaus. The presence of occult themes in the ideas or works of avant-garde movements, such as Futurism and Surrealism, has also been charted, at least partially. Indeed, while certainly not every modern artist evinced a serious interest in Spiritualism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, modern ceremonial magic or other occult currents, the proportion of those who did among those artists generally qualified as more radical and avant-garde is remarkably high. If we look just at the formative avant-garde and modernist trends in European art in the first half of the twentieth century, and in particular at those canonised styles and (white male) artists we have come to associate with formal innovation and abstraction as well as with modernism in the arts overall, it is clear that understanding modern(ist) art as entirely separate from occultism is untenable. Indeed, it has been untenable at least since the path-breaking exhibition The Spiritual in Art (1986). Since then, several exhibitions and studies have added to the overall picture that, in the Global North, modern art, and as a part of that “the aesthetic experiments … that we call modernism,” drew significantly on the “discourses of the occult dominant during [this] period.”

Occultism and modernism are deeply intertwined, as several scholars have argued. In grossly simplified terms, both arose in response to, on the one hand, modernity and the cultural anxiety of being modern, and on the other, the heritage of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The latter forced a confrontation with paradigms such as mind-body dualism, rationalism, the secularisation thesis, and a positivist understanding of history and civilisation, among other things. Modern art faced with modernity gave rise to modernism.