Modern Artists' Spiritual Journeys

The influence of Islamic art

Matisse, Still Life with Blue Tablecloth, 1909

Here is a blog post I wrote about a year ago on the spiritual in Islamic and modern art. This is a quote from the post:

The same spirit that produced Islamic "art" - which is really a profusion of ornamentation and decoration - is the same spirit that produced, eventually, abstract and non-representational art. That spirit is the disinclination to reproduce representational art, since non-representational art is believed (by these [modern] art practitioners) to be more pure and more spiritual.

The rest is a description of the influence of textile art in these artists' non-Christian spiritual journey, and especially of Matisse's.