Theosophy

In his beautifully illustrated book, Inventing Kindergarten Norman Brosterman links the eruption of abstract art that occurred at the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the spread of the kindergarten and its emphasis on abstraction. In support of this contention he enlists the biographies of artists like Georges Braque (1882-1963), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Paul Klee (1879-1940) among others. Where direct evidence is lacking, Brosterman speculates that these artists attended a kindergarten and were influenced by Froebel's system. In the end this thesis is unconvincing. The evidence for it is insufficient and it may be seen as a piece of rhetoric or propaganda for the Froebelian cause. Rather oddly, having noted that Mondrian was a theosophist, Brosterman failed to register that Kandinsky was too and that Klee was much influenced by theosophical ideas.

As may be seen from what he read, Froebel was also familiar with theosophical ideas but this is insufficient as a causal theory that links Froebel to these abstract artists. Among other things, the theosophical ideas that the artists encountered had, in the main, been disseminated by the Theosophical Society founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Olcott in 1875. Froebel, on the otherhand, read the work of Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg and was thus familiar with an earlier theosophical current. What might be claimed with some justification is that child centred education has affinities with Romanticism and theosophy as did certain kinds of modernist art.

Members of the Theosophical Society in several countries became active in education during the 1920s. They opened schools and were instrumental in the founding of the New Education Fellowship which was a vehicle for the international exchange and dissemination of the ideas and practices of the New Education.

The Theosophical Society underwent a number of schisms the most significant of which was led by Rudolf Steiner who founded the Waldorf Schools.

Another was led by William Quan Judge whose American Society seceded in 1895. On his death in 1896, Kathleen Tingley assumed leadership of the organisation which she renamed the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society. She established a community and Lomaland School at Point Loma in California.

In Russia after the revolution of 1905, interest in theosophy grew among intellectuals and artists such as the composer, Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915) who, when in London, was purported to have visited the room in which H. P. Blavatsky died. Of these artists, the one most centrally involved in education was the artist whose name is transliterated variously as Nicholas Roeric (or Roerich and sometimes, Rerikh.) (1874-1947)

Brosterman, N. (1997). Inventing Kindergarten. New York, Harry N. Abrams.