"The Myth of Meaning" :

Aniela Jaffe, "The Myth of Meaning" :
"Artists were among the first in our century to risk an encounter with the unconscious and its indefinable background. In the early decades they tried, each in his own way, to get behind the façade of the phenomenal world. “Appearance is eternally flat, but a daemon impels us artists to look between the cracks of the world, and in dreams he leads us behind the wings of the world’s stage.” Thus Franz Marc formulated the longing for an existential reality behind appearances. Driven by fate, a whole crowd of artists followed the way within; in their work they sought to express a “higher and profounder condition of being” (Carlo Carrà). Kandinsky, perhaps the most important theoretician among those artists, demanded: “The artist’s eye should always be turned in upon his inner life, and his ear should always be alert for the voice of inward necessity.” With the evocation of the “inner life” the unconscious debouched into art: the unfathomable, invisible background of the living world is the “secretly perceived that has to be made visible” (Paul Klee). After an epoch of concentration on form and nature in the realism and impressionism of the nineteenth century, this was indeed a bold departure, a new and unprecedented interpretation of the theme of art. It was a turning-point that had its parallel in the natural sciences, which about that time began to get over the materialism of the nineteenth century.
Gripped by their inner vision and endeavouring to give shape to “that secret ground where primal law feeds growth” (Klee), to capture the “metaphysical aspect of things” (Chirico), the “changeless reality behind changing natural forms” (Mondrian), artists turned their backs more and more on the reality of the external world. Their pictures became non-objective, abstract, imaginative, or else the object was transmuted in terms of subjective inner experience, sometimes lifted into the archetypal realm, sometimes perverted into absurdity. Their countless attempts to outline in manifestoes their pictorial goal show clearly that what was at stake was far more than a new style or a new formal or aesthetic technique. They were attempts to penetrate to the hidden spirit of nature and of things, to disclose the background of life, to portray an inner reality, to express the irrational, so as to gain access to a new, vital centre. Artists were seized by the numinosity of the unconscious, art had become mysticism. They were trying to “express the mystic vision”, as Kandinsky put it. Like the scientists, they were brought face to face with the religious question, the question of an active, transcendental spirit."
Jaffé, Aniela (2012-07-27). The Myth of Meaning (Kindle Locations 899-919)