I saw an unexpected treasure last Friday night at The Rubin Museum of Art – The Red Book of C.G. Jung.

I felt as if I was looking at  Dr. Strange’s book of the Vishanti and the Rubin Museum, with it’s glass ceiling, 6 stories and the basement – become Strange’s residence, the Sanctum Sanctorum, but …. we’re talking C.G. Jung (who actually died in 1961, and spent a lot of his time painting The Red Book, and other artwork that helped in his quest for self realization).

According to the program notes:

This unprecedented exhibition marks the first public presentation of the preeminent psychologist C. G. Jung’s (1875-1961) famous Red Book. During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation. It is possibly the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. More than two-thirds of the large, red, leather-bound manuscript’s pages are filled with Jung’s brightly hued and striking graphic forms paired with his thoughts written in a beautiful, illuminated style. Jung was fascinated by the mandala—an artistic representation of the inner and outer cosmos used in Tibetan Buddhism to help practitioners reach enlightenment—and used mandala structures in a number of his own works.

The New York Times has an article on The Red Book of C.G. Jung published about 6 weeks ago …

“…a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.”

“…Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

Well … I don’t know.  I saw the art work, paintings and water colors that proceeded the Red Book, and honestly, within spirituality, there is often an element of the “psychotic”, in my opinion.   I don’t think C.G. Jung would have every become known as an artist, nor did he seek to be, yet his work was very technically proficient and expressive.

I’ll have more to say when I’ve had more time to spend with The Red Book – but I will say now, you have about 2 months to go see it before the show comes down, sometime in January 2010.

I have to hand it to the Rubin Museum of Art for putting on fantastic shows – and this one, C. G. Jung’s Red Book, is as rare and unusual, as a show can get.