The Mother as an Artist

Online Exhibition

The online exhibition ‘The Mother as an Artist’, has a dual purpose, that of inaugurating the Exhibition House website along with its online platform and also as a precursor to the onsite exhibition scheduled for February 2025. Both these exhibitions (online and onsite) base themselves largely on the second edition of the book, ‘The Mother as an Artist’ scheduled to release in 2025.

Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), largely known to the world as a spiritual teacher and lovingly called The Mother at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, was also an accomplished artist. Though she never gave importance to her artistic ability, as for her art was not an all-absorbing occupation, but one aspect of the many-sided growth of inner consciousness and a manifestation of beauty in the world. For her, “True art means the expression of beauty in the material world”, and further “must be the expression of a divine world brought down into this material world.”

The spirit in which she studied art may be inferred from what she said later about the relationship between art and Yoga, “The discipline of Art has at its centre the same principle as the discipline of Yoga. In both the aim is to become more and more conscious; in both you have to learn to see and feel something that is beyond the ordinary vision and feeling, to go within and bring out from there deeper things.”

1. Artistic, Vital and Mental Development

Born in Paris, Mirra Alfassa grew up in an era of great artistic creativity in France. At that time Paris was the cultural capital of the Western world, home to a vibrant and diverse community of painters, sculptors, musicians, actors and writers. In the world of art it was a period of intense innovation in which artists strove to find new modes of visual expression. The new movement, whose artists were dubbed les impressionnistes in 1874 by the French art critic Louis Leroy, marks the beginning of the history of modern art. Mirra, who grew up in a conventional upper-middle-class household, imbibed this new atmosphere and the artistic freedom of the Paris art circles.

From childhood she was drawn to the realm of art. She began drawing at the age of eight and by ten she had learned to paint with oils. By age twelve she was doing portraits. When she was fourteen, one of her charcoal drawings was exhibited at the International Blanc et Noir Exhibition in Paris. Upon completing her regular schooling at the age of fifteen, she joined the Académie Julian, an art studio in Paris, where she studied for four years, until 1897.

The Mother in 1903 (age 25), holding a painting palette. This is a crop of a larger group photograph that appeared in Femina magazine on 15 June, 1903.

FIGURE 5. Woman in a Diaphanous Dress.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated: Mirra Alfassa/1895.
59 x 44.5 cm. 1895. France.

FIGURE 7. Woman in Back Profile.
Oil on canvas.
54 x 44 cm. c.1895. France.

Immediately after the art school, at nineteen, Mirra Alfassa married the artist Henri Morisset. Eight years older, he had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts with Gustave Moreau, the Symbolist painter who taught Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault and others around the same time. It was a stimulating period for Mirra in Paris amongst artists, painting and writing reviews that were published in Les Tendances Nouvelles – New Trends.

Six of her works were exhibited at the prestigious Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1903, 1904 and 1905. Her marriage with Henri Morisset lasted until 1908, it was one in which art had a prominent place in her life in spite of her increasing preoccupation with her inner quest. She looked back on these years as a time when the cultivation of the vital being and the aesthetic consciousness still predominated from the standpoint of the active outer nature. Most of the Mother’s paintings were done during this period, but the dating of these works is often approximate and many of them have simply been lost.

FIGURE 22. Woman on a Staircase The interior of Manoir de Cantepie, a manor house in Cambremer, Normandy.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated: MirraAlfassa/03.
50 x 44.5 cm. 1903. France.

FIGURE 42. Musician’s Room A room in the house of the musician Camille Erlanger.
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated: Mirra Alfassa / 04.
58.5 x 71 cm. 1904. France.

FIGURE 25. Brass Urn, Vase and Statues
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated: Mirra Alfassa /03.
45.5 x 62 cm. 1903. France.

FIGURE 29. Decorative Urn on a Table
Oil on board.
14.5 x 20.5 cm. c.1897–1908. France.

FIGURE 38. Chair near a Staircase
Oil on canvas.
Signed: Mirra Alfassa. 21 x 13 cm. c.1897–1908. France.

2. Ladder of Consciousness

From a very young age, of twelve, The Mother started doing what we might term Yoga along with the practice of occultism. Experiencing a sense of identity and “a conscious and constant union with the divine Presence”.

Being married and amongst artists didn’t deter her inner pursuits that lay in understanding the inner regions of consciousness and their subtle links. In 1904 to perfect her occultism, she joined the Groupe Cosmique , whose members were instructed by a Polish Jewish Kabbalist and occultist Max Theon. Already familiar with Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga and the Bhagavad Gita, the Mother found it easy to adapt with Theon’s well-formulated system, that were based upon the ancient esoteric traditions of India and Chaldea. Her association with Max Theon and his wife Alma Theon continued until 1908. She also sperated from Henri Morisset during the same period.

It was during this phase, in 1905 that the Mother had a mysitcal experience in one of her friends garden, which was the connection between the subtle-physical and the most material vital. Years later, while reminiscing about this period to one of her disciples she shares the experience of identification with earth.

“Now, in that garden was a lawn…where there were flowers and around it some trees. It was a fine place, very quiet, very silent. I lay on the grass, like this, flat on my stomach, my elbows in the grass, and then suddenly all the life of that Nature, all the life of that region between the subtle physical and the most material vital, which is very living in plants and in Nature, all that region suddenly became, without any transition, absolutely living, intense, conscious, marvellous.”

FIGURE 23. A Friend’s Garden The garden may be that of Louis and Claire Thémanlys in Courseulles, Normandy.
Oil on board.
13.5 x 18 cm. c.1905. France.

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