For almost a century there lived in the United States a great artist, who was to be known as The Mother of American Modernism. A cultural movement had been ignited in the collective psyche at the turn of the 20th century during a conjunction between the heavenly bodies Neptune and Pluto — coinciding with the period called Fin de Siècle.
The artist was born in 1887 under this great conjunction. A 500-year cycle between the two planets was coming to a close, and seeds of a new beginning were taking form. The way humankind had come to understand, perceive and experience the Cosmos had changed deeply over these 500 years.
The mystic participation in the divine nature — which people once and very long ago took for granted — had gradually disappeared in their understanding. God had been declared ‘dead’, and it was now widely believed that the material world was the ultimate reality. What might dwell beyond, was a matter of faith belonging in the domain of religions.
With the conjunction of Neptune and Pluto, 1885-1905, this was all beginning to change1You can read more about the Neptune-Pluto conjunction in the article World Transits 2000-2020, by Richard Tarnas – in ARHCAI, The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology.— Neptune being about our collective imagination of the ideal, and Pluto about transformation. From 1895-1907 Uranus, the planet of liberating fire, was opposite Pluto bringing innovation and rebellious ideas into the picture.
Scientists were uncovering that the physical world was not ‘real’ or solid at all, and — more disturbingly — that an observer would influence or perhaps even (co)create what could be observed, meaning it was no longer wise to talk about objectivity as a separate phenomenon.
Psychiatrists were opening up a new realm of the human psyche, which they named the unconscious, and artists began to articulate a metamorphosis of the consensus about the nature of it all.
From 1899 to 1918 Uranus and Neptune were forming an opposition (180 degrees) in the sky. The cycle between the two planets is about 172 years, and research has shown that periods in history, when the two planets were aligned, are characterised by ‘pervasive transformations of a culture’s underlying vision…’ 2Cosmos and Psyche, Intimations of a New World View. Plume (2007), by Richard Tarnas p. 356
Literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture — all the arts were breaking out of old forms and traditions. In the wake of the Neptune-Pluto conjunction, the overlapping opposition from Uranus to Pluto, and the following opposition between Uranus and Neptune, Paris became the epicentre of these new currents. Artists of the avant-garde and from all over the world flocked to the elegant capital to breathe in the atmosphere, to live among kindred spirits, and inspire each other.
“For an incandescent moment from 1905-1930 Paris was a mecca, the magnetic centre of a new world of the arts – a laboratory of experiment and innovation.” 3Quote from the movie: ‘Paris the Luminous Years, Towards the Making of the Modern’, 2010, written and directed by Perry Miller Adato. You can watch the movie here below:
To be continued…
Image at top: Nature Forms Gaspé 1932, by Georgia O’Keeffe