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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Mystical Turn

The Essay: The Mystical Turn: Episode 5: Kandinsky and Contemporaries

Religion & Ethics

The Mystical Turn

Episode 5

Episode 5: Kandinsky and Contemporaries

Kandinsky and Contemporaries

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Dr Jane Shaw explores art's relationship with spirituality in the early 20th century.

Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, explores the relationship between spirituality and mysticism in the work of Russian artist Kandinsky and his contemporaries.

Concluding our series, The Mystical Turn, Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, explores the relationship between spirituality and mysticism in the work of Russian artist Kandinsky and his contemporaries.

Artists - as well as devout Christians and seekers on the edge of institutional religion - sought a path to union with the divine. Kandinsky's manifesto on the relationship between spirituality and art - The Art of Spiritual Harmony (later retitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art) - was first published in English in 1914 (it had originally been published in German in 1912). Kandinsky believed that art belonged to the spiritual realm, that form and colour were central, and that there was a link between so-called "primitive art" and the spiritual. He was not alone. His views were echoed in the art of his contemporaries: in the paintings of the Post-impressionists; in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, which had its premiere in Paris in 1913; and in The New Science of Colour by New York poet, Beatrice Irwin. 

Producer: Ian Willox
Executive Producer: Alan Hall

A Chrome Radio production for BBC Radio 3.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Jane Shaw on a renewed interest in mysticism from the late 19th to the early 20th century.

Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, explores the revival of interest in mysticism and religious experience generally - at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century

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