The canonical histories of modern and contemporary art have been written largely without serious consideration of religion. This does not mean that religion has been absent or irrelevant. Indeed, once one begins looking for it, one finds religious references, concepts, and influences woven throughout these histories. But for various reasons these references, concepts, and influences became hermeneutically inaccessible in the dominant discourses about art made in the past 170 years or so. This creates a strange situation: Even as religious traditions have shaped many major twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists and artworks (and the sociocultural contexts in which they are received and circulated), when one turns to the art-historical scholarship about these periods, one finds religion playing little or no constructive role in the writing about these artists and artworks.
     This situation has been shifting in recent years. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a marked increase in attention to religion and spirituality in contemporary art, among artists and scholars alike. This attention tends to be dispersed across radically different interpretive priorities and vocabularies, often lacking a sustained interdisciplinary discourse that holds up well both as scholarship of art and as scholarship of religion.
     This book is a study of this situation and an adjustment to it, offering a detailed rethinking of the historical and theoretical contexts in which the current discourses of religion and spirituality in contemporary art are operating, and an argument for why and how these discourses require more concentrated critical study of the (often implicit) theologies in play in the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art. An especially strong secularization theory within the scholarship of twentieth-century art has obstructed vital understandings of modern and contemporary art histories, but it is also still subtly governing current inquiries into religion and spirituality in those histories. The following chapters thus provide a much-needed critical field guide to a difficult, controversial topic, and they open new lines of inquiry within this field by theorizing and exemplifying ways of writing art history and criticism in more rigorous dialogue with theology and religious studies, both critically and constructively.
     At the center of this book, therefore, is a series of interlocking questions about how the history of modern and contemporary art has, over the past five decades, been thought (and unthought) in relation to religion, spirituality, and theology. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century art is deeply enwoven with religious contexts, spiritual concerns, and theological conceptualities, but these various threads remain extremely underinterpreted in the scholarship of modern and contemporary art—to the extent that they are often functionally invisible in this scholarship. This book seeks to understand and revise the ways these dynamics of (in)visibility work.