The Spiritual in Art (LACMA, 1986)

Maurice Tuchman's exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, which argued in public and at scale that the occult was not a footnote to abstraction but one of its engines.

⭐⭐ THE MOMENT THE ARGUMENT THIS WING MAKES BECAME RESPECTABLE. Before 1986 an art historian who said Kandinsky read Blavatsky was being impolite. Afterwards it was a bibliography. Everything downstream — the af Klint retrospectives, the Houghton revival, the Kiefer readings — walks through this door.