Images of Primordial and Mystic Beauty

Frithjof Schuon said this about his paintings: “What I seek to express … is the Sacred combined with Beauty, thus spiritual attitudes and virtues of soul. And the vibration that emanates from the paintings must lead inward.” Schuon knew from the depths of his soul that man lives by Truth and Beauty and his voluminous writings reveal this on every page. It was only relatively late in his creative career that Schuon – widely recognized for his metaphysical writings – became known as a painter of great skill and unique insight. This volume presents for the first time 125 full color plates of Schuon’s work, plus many more in black and white. The subjects here are predominantly taken from the fascinating world of the American Indians. Also included, however, are many canvases concerning the mystery of celestial and human femininity. The main features of Schuon’s art are the nobility of the subject, the precision of the drawing and the “impressionistic” vibration of the surface or colors.

Frithjof Schuon was not a painter who was interested in metaphysics – he was a metaphysician who from time to time produced a painting. This distinction is essential because his fundamental vocation was the perennial wisdom as it is expressed in his written works, whereas his art appears rather as an expression of the aesthetic, psychological or moral dimension of the Philosophia Perennis. In other words, Schuon was interested not only in metaphysical principles, but also – by way of consequence – in their cosmic and human radiation; which means, not that he intentionally put this or that archetype or symbolism into a painting – which, in fact, he did not – but simply that his spiritual insight, or let us say his contemplative mind, manifested itself in his artistic productions.

The subject of Schuon’s art is on the one hand the Plains Indian world, and on the other hand the mystery of cosmic and human femininity, recalling Goethe’s “Eternal Feminine” (das Ewig-Weibliche) or the Hindu Shakti. The first subject of his art has its roots in Schuon’s affinity with the fascinating world of Red Indian heroism and mysticism; the second subject of his art – sacred femininity – has its roots in metaphysics and cosmology; one could also say, in a more relative sense, that it comes from Schuon’s affinity with Hinduism. In fact, his representations of the Virgin Mary are not intended to be Christian icons; they universalize the celestial Virgin in a manner which makes one think of Hindu and possibly Mahayanic art.

Towards the end of this collection, the reader will find a number of images which are not Red Indian; some of them represent the Virgin Mary seen in an esoteric light, some others represent the Hindu mystics Akka Mahadevi and Lalla Yogishwari, or other women saints of the same type, both subjects being connected with the tantric mystery of sacred nudity. This last remark also applies to the images of the White-Buffalo-Cow-Woman who brought the Sacred Pipe to the Lakota Indians; we may add that the headdresses she wears in some of Schuon’s paintings, or other details, have a symbolic import and do not mean that the heavenly person actually appeared in that way. In this context, let us repeat here an opinion of a French author: the feathered crown of the Red Indians is the most majestic headdress that human genius ever conceived. In fact, the Plains Indian genius is like a combination of the buffalo, the eagle and the sun, symbolically speaking – earth and heaven, and between them the messenger of the gods.