SPRITUALITY IN ABSTRACT ART
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After defining the immediate origins of abstract art as lying in Fauvism and Cubism, and having found one of its incidental causes to be in the change of the social milieu thanks to the growth of mechanisation and science, closer attention must be given to the problem itself in order to see what went on in the minds of its main pioneers at the time when they were passing from figuration to abstraction. One of the ways in which this can be done is through re-reading what they wrote at that time. A surprising fact then comes to light, which is that in most of them the need for abstraction was based on an acute hunger for spiritual values. It looks as though, after a century of materialist philosophy, the artists' own intuition stressed an urgent need to re-charge the spiritual centres. A new humanism then emerged, one which was very different from that of the Renaissance, amounting in this case to a kind of inner humanism, the only form of it that could possibly understand real equality because it brings man face to face with that share of the infinite which he carries within himself, and which seeks its reflection in his fellow-men. Thus a kind of brotherhood of summits is created, for every man is a summit at certain moments and in certain conditions, every man being, when considered in the absolute, the centre and summit of the world.
Spirituality in art, the title Kandinsky gave to his first book, was highly significant. In his conclusion he proclaimed a new era of the spirit, a period of intense spirituality which was to find its direct expression through art.
In Mondrian's unpublished notebooks I found the words "It is the internal life, its strength and joy, which determines form in art." On another page I read "Art has no meaning except in so far as it expresses what is non-material, for it is this that enables man to transcend his own being."
I find the same tendency, though less consciously expressed, in Robert Delaunay's paintings of 1912 and 1913. They contain a semi-mystical exaltation of light. Delaunay remarked to me one day that "Most painters are only peeping-Toms, whereas what they really should aspire to is to be Seers."
It might be asked whether, intellectually, it is just an easy way out to see this unexpected emphasis of spirituality in art, or at least in early abstract art, as an intuitive agreement with Bergson's attempts at revalorizing mind, in the broadest yet deepest sense of the term, after a hundred years of positivism and historical materialism. Creative Evolution, the first landmark in this change of values, appeared in 1906. In his remarkable lecture Consciousness and Life, published in 1914, I find the following remarks which could perfectly well be applied to the first generation of abstract painters: "Great men of integrity, and more particularly those whose sheer inventive heroism clears new paths for human virtues, serve to reveal metaphysical truth. Though they stand at the highest point of evolution, yet they are closest to the origins of things and make us conscious of that impulse which arises from the very depths." Yes, the impulse rising from the depths and which is nearest to the fundamental truths and to the naked origin of things, surely that is what we expect of art in general and what abstract art appears most fitted to reveal to us, without being hindered by material objects whose presence is no more than an agreable distraction from our main objective, which must be the mind or spirit.
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