Evola's paintings

Newly found: an excellent archive of Evola's paintings, at juliusevola.gr.

Nasr's autobiography (plus)

Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Ramin Jahanbegloo have published a book that is part Traditionalism, part Nasr's autobiography: In Search of the Sacred: A Conversation with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on his Life and Thought (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010).

The first 138 pages cover Nasr's life from childhood through his education in America, the establishment of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran, the revolution, and then on to his career in exile in America. The remainder of the book covers Tradition, the Sacred, modernity, Art, and Sufism. Guénon, Coomaraswamy, and Schuon are mentioned frequently, but the Maryamiyya is not.

On Prince Charles

Rod Dreher has just published an interesting article on Prince Charles in the American Conservative, "Philosopher Prince: The revolutionary anti-modernism of Britain’s heir apparent." The article is interesting both because it is a thoughtful profile that places the prince's Traditionalism within its wider context and because it provides food for thought about the political and ideological right. Dreher maintains that "Postwar American conservatism is a fusion of traditionalist and libertarian schools" (he is using 'traditionalist' in the general, little t sense, of course). I don't know to what extent this is true of American conservatism in particular (though the on-line comments on Dreher's article suggest that it is), but--more importantly--I suspect that it is true of the broad right as a whole.

The main topic, though, is Prince Charles, and my feeling is that Dreher has got that more or less right.

Coomaraswamy and the Beats

In a new article (see below), David Need draws attention to the importance of Coomaraswamy's The Transformation of Nature in Art and of Coomaraswamy's readings of the Upanishads for the music of the avant-garde musician and artist John Cage. According to Need, it was this and the idea of sabdabrahman--of brahman or being as sound--"led Cage to focus on the spaces between the notes." Hence 4′33″, the famous 1952 composition in which the assembled musicians do not actually play their instruments at all.

David Need, "Spontaneity, Immediacy, and Difference: Philosophy, Being in Time, and Creativity in the Aesthetics of Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, and John Cage," in The Philosophy of the Beats, ed. Sherin N. Elkholy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), pp. 195-210. See especially pp. 204-06.

Ivan Aguéli's art

Aguéli, Landscape with tower

Aguéli, Palm grove

Although Ivan Aguéli is best known to readers of this blog as the proto-Traditionalist who introduced Guénon to Sufism (and was also instrumental in introducing the French public to Ibn Arabi), he is still best known in his native Sweden as a painter. The Museum of Art in Gothenburg, Sweden's second city, is currently exhibiting six of his works, all small format, as part of its permanent exhibition of "Nordic art at the turn of the century." Pride of place is given to "Landscape with tower" (shown above, left), which may be an imaginary landscape, as there is something of the minaret about the tower. Then comes "Palm grove," which is probably an Egyptian scene, and some European landscapes (not shown here).

The same exhibition also has a large oil by Prince Eugen, the member of the Swedish royal family whose grant to the exiled Aguéli in Barcelona arrived too late, after Aguéli's death. It was Prince Eugeen who then took charge of and preserved Aguéli's paintings, some of which were acquired by the Gothenburg museum in 1920.

Birger, Scandinavian Artists' Lunch

Bernard, Still life with jug

For a Swedish painter to go to Paris at the end of the nineteenth century was not unusual. The museum also has a large oil of the Scandinavian Artists' Lunch at the Café Ledoyen, evidently an annual event. This lunch was in 1886, and the painting does not include Aguéli, who had then only just arrived in Paris.

Finally, the museum also has an oil by Emile Bernard, the French painter in whose studio Aguéli at one point worked in Paris, who is said also to have had an interest in esotericism and in Egypt, though I have not confirmed this. One can see the influence of Bernard on some of Aguéli's other paintings, though not those in the Gothenburg museum or in this blog post.

My thanks to Göran Larsson and Henrik Bogdan of the University of Gothenburg whose invitation to lecture in Gothenburg (on "Sufism as Western esotericism") is what led to my visit to the Museum of Art there.