 Modern Painting as a Symbol The terms modern art and modern painting are used in this chapter as the layman uses them. What I will be dealing with, to use Kuhn's term, is modern imaginative painting. Pictures of this kind can be abstract or rather non-figurative, but they need not always be so. There will be no attempt to distinguish among such various forms as fovism, cubism, expressionism, futurism, suprematism, constructivism, orphism, and so on. Any specific allusion to one or the other of these groups will be quite exceptional. And I am not concerned with an aesthetic differentiation of modern paintings, nor above all with artistic evaluations. Modern imaginative painting is here taken simply as a phenomenon of our time. That is the only way in which the question of its symbolic content can be justified and answered. In this brief chapter it is possible to mention only a few artists, and to select a few of their works more or less at random. I must content myself with discussing modern painting in terms of a small number of its representatives. My starting point is the psychological fact that the artist has at all times been the instrument and spokesman of the spirit of his age. His work can be only partly understood in terms of his personal psychology. Consciously or unconsciously, the artist gives form to the nature and values of his time, which in their turn form him. The modern artist himself often recognizes the interrelation of the work of art and its time. Thus the French critic and painter Jean Bazin writes in his notes on contemporary painting, Nobody paints as he likes. All a painter can do is to will with all his might the painting his age is capable of. The German artist Franz Marc, who died in the First World War, said, The great artists do not seek their forms in the midst of the past, but take the deepest soundings they can of the genuine, profoundest center of gravity of their age. And as far back as 1911, Kandinsky wrote in his famous essay concerning the spiritual in art, Every epic is given its own measure of artistic freedom, and even the most creative genius may not leap over the boundary of that freedom. For the last fifty years, modern art has been a general bone of contention and the discussion has lost none of its heat. The yeas are as passionate as the nays, the re-iterated prophecy that modern art is finished has never come true. The new way of expression has been triumphant to an unimagined degree. If it is threatened at all, it will be because it is degenerated into mannerism and modishness. In the Soviet Union, where non-figurative art has often been officially discouraged and produced only in private, figurative art is threatened by a similar degeneration. The general public, in Europe at any rate, is still in the heat of the battle. The violence of the discussion shows that feeling runs high in both camps. Even those who are hostile to modern art cannot avoid being impressed by the works they reject. They are irritated or repelled, but as the violence of their feelings shows, they are moved. As a rule, the negative fascination is no less strong than the positive. The stream of visitors to exhibitions of modern art, wherever and whenever they take place, testifies to something more than curiosity. Curiosity would be satisfied sooner, and the fantastic prices that are paid for works of modern art are a measure of the status conferred upon them by society. Fascination arises when the unconscious has been moved. The effect produced by works of modern art cannot be explained entirely by their visible form. To the eye trained in classic or sensory art, they are new and alien. Nothing in works of non-figurative art reminds the spectator of his own world. No objects in their own everyday surroundings. No human being or animal that speaks a familiar language. There is no welcome, no visible accord in the cosmos created by the artist. And yet, without any question, there is a human bond. It may be even more intense than in works of sensory art, which make a direct appeal to feeling and empathy. It is the aim of the modern artist to give expression to his inner vision of man, to the spiritual background of life and the world. The modern work of art has abandoned not only the realm of the concrete, natural, sensuous world, but also that of the individual. It has become highly collective, and therefore, even in the abbreviation of the pictorial hieroglyph, touches not only the few, but the many. What remains individual is the manner of representation, the style and quality of the modern work of art. It is often difficult for the layman to recognize whether the artist's intentions are genuine and his expressions spontaneous, neither imitated nor aimed at effect. In many cases, he must accustom himself to new kinds of line and color. He must learn them as he would learn a foreign language before he can judge their expressiveness and quality. The pioneers of modern art have apparently understood how much they were asking of the public. Never have artists published so many manifestos and explanations of their aims as in the 20th century. It is, however, not only to others that they are striving to explain and justify what they are doing. It is also to themselves. For the most part, these manifestos are artistic confessions of faith, poetic and often confused or self-contradictory attempts to give clarity to the strange outcome of today's artistic activities. What really matters, of course, is and always has been the direct encounter with the work of art. Yet for the psychologist who is concerned with the symbolic content of modern art, the study of these writings is most instructive. For that reason, the artists, wherever possible, will be allowed in the following discussion to speak for themselves. The beginnings of modern art appeared in the early 1900s. One of the most impressive personalities of that initiatory phase was Kandinsky, whose influence is still clearly traceable in the paintings of the second half of the century. Many of his ideas have proved prophetic. In his essay, Concerning Form, he writes, The art of today embodies the spiritual matured to the point of revelation. The forms of this embodiment may be arranged between two poles. One, great abstraction. Two, great realism. These two poles open two paths, which both lead to one goal in the end. These two elements have always been present in art. The first was expressed in the second. Today it looks as if they were about to carry on separate existences. Art seems to have put an end to the pleasant completion of the abstract by the concrete and vice versa. To illustrate Kandinsky's point that the two elements of art, the abstract and the concrete, have parted company, in 1913 the Russian painter, Kozomir Malevich, painted a picture that consisted only of a black square on a white ground. It was perhaps the first purely abstract picture ever painted. He wrote of it, In my desperate struggle to liberate art from the ballast of the world of objects, I took refuge in the form of the square. A year later, the French painter Marcel Duchamp set up an object chosen at random, a bottle rack, on a pedestal and exhibited. Jean Bazin wrote of it, This bottle rack, torn from its utilitarian context and washed up on the beach, has been invested with the lonely dignity of the derelict. Good for nothing, there to be used, ready for anything, it is alive. It lives on the fringe of existence, its own disturbing, absurd life. The disturbing object, that is the first step to art. In its weird dignity and abandonment, the object was immeasurably exalted and given significance that can only be called magical, hence its disturbing, absurd life. It became an idol, and at the same time an object of mockery. Its intrinsic reality was annihilated. Both Malevich's square and Duchamp's bottle rack were symbolic gestures that had nothing to do with art in the strict sense of the word, yet they marked the two extremes, great abstraction and great realism, between which the imaginative art of the succeeding decades may be aligned and understood. From the psychological standpoint, the two gestures toward the naked object, matter and the naked non-object, spirit, point to a collective psychic rift that created its symbolic expression in the years before the catastrophe of the First World War. This rift had first appeared in the Renaissance when it became manifest as a conflict between knowledge and faith. Meanwhile, civilization was removing man further and further from his instinctual foundation so that a gulf opened between nature and mind, between the unconscious and consciousness. These opposites characterized the psychic situation that is seeking expression in modern art. The secret soul of things. As we have seen, the starting point of the concrete was Duchamp's famous or notorious bottle rack. The bottle rack was not intended to be artistic in itself. Duchamp called himself an anti-artist, but it brought to light an element that was to mean a great deal to artists for a long time to come. The name they gave to it was Objet Ruevet, or ready-made. The Spanish painter Juan Miro, for instance, goes to the beach every dawn to collect things washed up by the tide. Things lying there waiting for someone to discover their personality. He keeps his finds in his studio. Now and then he assembles some of them and the most curious compositions result. The artist is often surprised himself at the shapes of his own creation. As far back as 1912, the Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges Brauch made what they called collages from scraps of rubbish. Mox Ernst cut clippings from the illustrated papers of the so-called age of big business, assembled them as the fancy took him, and so transformed the stuffy solidity of the bourgeois age into a demonic, dream-like unreality. The German painter Kurzfitters worked with the contents of his ash can. He used nails, brown paper, ragged scraps of newspaper, railway tickets, and remnants of cloth. He succeeded in assembling this rubbish with such seriousness and freshness that surprising effects of strange beauty came about. In Pitter's obsession with things, however, this manner of composition occasionally became merely absurd. He made a construction of rubbish that he called a cathedral built for things. Schwitter's worked on it for ten years, and three stories of his own house had to be demolished to give him the space he needed. Schwitter's work and the magical exaltation of the object give the first hint of the place of modern art in the history of the human mind and of its symbolic significance. They reveal the tradition that was being unconsciously perpetuated. It is the tradition of the hermetic Christian brotherhoods of the Middle Ages and of the alchemists who conferred even on matter the stuff of the earth the dignity of their religious contemplation. Schwitter's exaltation of the grossest material to the rank of art to a cathedral in which the rubbish would leave no room for a human being faithfully followed the old alchemical tenet according to which the sought-for precious object is to be found in filth. Andinsky expressed the same ideas when he wrote, Everything that is dead quivers, not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street. Everything has a secret soul which is silent more often than it speaks. What the artists, like the alchemists, probably did not realize was the psychological fact that they were projecting part of their psyche into matter or inanimate objects, hence the mysterious animation that entered into such things and the great value attached even to rubbish. They projected their own darkness, their earthly shadow, a psychic content that they and their time had lost and abandoned. Unlike the alchemists, however, men like Schwitter's were not contained in and protected by the Christian order. In one sense, Schwitter's work is opposed to it. A kind of monomania binds him to matter while Christianity seeks to vanquish matter. And yet, paradoxically, it is Schwitter's monomania that robs the material in his creations of its inherent significance as concrete reality. In his pictures, matter is transformed into an abstract composition. Therefore, it begins to discard its substantiality and to dissolve. In that very process, these pictures become a symbolic expression of our time, which has seen the concept of the absolute concreteness of matter undermined by modern atomic physics. Painters began to think about the magic object and the secret soul of things. The Italian painter Carlo Carà wrote, It is the common things that reveal those forms of simplicity through which we can realize that higher, more significant condition of being where the whole splendor of art resides. Paul Clay said, The object expands beyond the bounds of its appearance by our knowledge that the thing is more than its exterior presents to our eyes. And Jean Bazaine wrote, An object awakens our love just because it seems to be the bearer of powers that are greater than itself. Sayings of this kind recall the old alchemical concept of a spirit in matter believed to be the spirit in and behind inanimate objects like metal or stone. Psychologically interpreted, this spirit is the unconscious. It always manifests itself when conscious or rational knowledge has reached its limits and mystery sets in. For man tends to fill the inexplicable and mysterious with the contents of his unconscious. He projects them, as it were, into a dark, empty vessel. The feeling that the object was more than met the eye, which was shared by many artists, found the most remarkable expression in the work of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. He was a mystic by temperament and a tragic seeker who never found what he sought. On his self-portrait, 1908, he wrote, Et quid amabo nisi quod enigma est. And what am I to love if not the enigma? Chirico was the founder of the so-called Pitura Metaphisica. Every object he wrote has two aspects, the common aspect, which is the one we generally see and which is seen by everyone, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals see at moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation. A work of art must relate something that does not appear in its visible form. Chirico's works reveal this ghostly aspect of things. They are dream-like transpositions of reality, which arise as visions from the unconscious. But his metaphysical abstraction is expressed in a panic-stricken rigidity, and the atmosphere of the pictures is one of nightmare and of fathomless melancholy. The city squares of Italy, the towers and objects, are set in an over-acute perspective as if they were in a vacuum, illuminated by a merciless cold light from an unseen source. Antique heads or statues of gods conjure up the classical past. In one of the most terrifying of his pictures, he is placed beside the marble head of a goddess, a pair of red rubber gloves, a magic object in the modern sense. A green ball on the ground acts as a symbol, uniting the crass opposites. Without it, there would be more than a hint of psychic disintegration. This picture was clearly not the result of over-sophisticated deliberation. It must be taken as a dream picture. Chirico was deeply influenced by the philosophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He wrote, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep significance of the senselessness of life and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art. The dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter. It may be doubted whether Chirico succeeded in transposing the dreadful void into untroubled beauty. Some of his pictures are extremely disturbing. Many are as terrifying as nightmares. But in his effort to find artistic expression for the void, he penetrated to the core of the existential dilemma of contemporary man. Nietzsche, whom Chirico quotes as his authority, has given a name to the dreadful void in his saying, God is dead. Without referring to Nietzsche, Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiritual in Art, Heaven is empty, God is dead. A phrase of this kind may sound abominable, but it is not new. The idea of the death of God and its immediate consequence, the metaphysical void, had troubled the minds of 19th century poets, especially in France and Germany. It was a long development, but in the 20th century reached the stage of open discussion and found expression in art. The cleavage between modern art and Christianity was finally accomplished. Dr. Jung also came to realize that this strange and mysterious phenomenon of the death of God is a psychic fact of our time. In 1937 he wrote, I know, and here I am expressing what countless other people know, that the present time is the time of God's disappearance and death. For years he had observed the Christian God image fading in his patient's dreams, that is, in the unconscious of modern men. The loss of that image is the loss of the supreme factor that gives life a meaning. It must be pointed out, however, that neither Nietzsche's assertion that God is dead, nor Kittico's metaphysical void, nor Jung's deductions from unconscious images have anything final to say about the reality and existence of God or of a transcendental being or not being. They are human assertions. In each case, they are based, as Jung has shown in psychology and religion, on contents of the unconscious psyche that have entered consciousness in tangible form as images, dreams, ideas or intuitions. The origin of these contents and the cause of such a transformation, from a living to a dead God, must remain unknown on the frontier of mystery. Kittico never came to a solution of the problem presented to him by the unconscious. His failure may be seen most clearly in his representation of the human figure. Given the present religious situation, it is man himself to whom should be accorded a new, if impersonal, dignity and responsibility. Jung described it as a responsibility to consciousness. But in Kittico's work, man is deprived of his soul. He becomes a monikino, a puppet without a face and therefore also without consciousness. In the various versions of his great metaphysition, a faceless figure is enthroned on a pedestal made of rubbish. The figure is a consciously or unconsciously ironical representation of the man who strives to discover the truth about metaphysics and at the same time a symbol of ultimate loneliness and senselessness. Or perhaps the monikini, which also haunt the works of other contemporary artists, are a premonition of the faceless, mass man. When he was forty, Kittico abandoned his pitura metaphysica. He turned back to traditional modes, but his work lost depth. Here is certain proof that there is no back to where you came from, for the creative mind whose unconscious has been involved in the fundamental dilemma of modern existence. A counterpart to Kittico might be seen in the Russian-born painter, Mark Shagal. His quest in his work is also a mysterious and lonely poetry and the ghostly aspect of things that only rare individuals may see. But Shagal's rich symbolism is rooted in the piety of Eastern Jewish Hasidism and in a warm feeling for life. He was faced with neither the problem of the void nor the death of God. He wrote, Everything may change in our demoralized world except the heart, man's love, and his striving to know the divine. Painting, like all poetry, has its part in the divine. People feel this today just as much as they used to. The British author, Sir Herbert Reed, once wrote of Shagal, that he never quite crossed the threshold into the unconscious, but has always kept one foot on the earth This is exactly the right relation to the unconscious. It is all the more important that, as Reed emphasizes, Shagal has remained one of the most influential artists of our time. With the contrast between Shagal and Kittico, a question arises that is important for the understanding of symbolism in modern art. How does the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious take shape in the work of modern artists? Or, to put it another way, does man stand? One answer may be found in the movement called Surrealism, of which the French poet Antoine Boiton is regarded as the founder. Kittico too may be described as a surrealist. As a student of medicine, Boiton had been introduced to the work of Freud. Thus, dreams came to play an important part in his ideas. Can dreams not be used to solve the fundamental problems of life? He wrote, The antagonism between dream and reality will be resolved in a kind of absolute reality, in Surreality. Boiton grasped the point admirably. What he thought was a reconciliation of the opposites, consciousness and the unconscious. But the way he took to reach his goal could only lead him astray. He began to experiment with Freud's method of free association, as well as with automatic writing, in which the words and phrases arising from the unconscious are set down without any conscious control. Boiton called it thoughts dictation, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation. But that process simply means that the way is open to the stream of unconscious images and the important or even decisive part to be played by consciousness is ignored. As Dr. Jung has shown in his chapter, it is consciousness that holds the key to the values of the unconscious and that therefore plays the decisive part. Consciousness alone is competent to determine the meaning of the images and to recognize their significance for man, here and now in the concrete reality of the present. Only in an interplay of consciousness and the unconscious can the unconscious prove its value and perhaps even show a way to overcome the melancholy of the void. If the unconscious once in action is left to itself, there is a risk that its contents will become overpowering or will manifest their negative destructive side. If we look at surrealist pictures like Salvador Dali's The Burning Giraffe with this in mind, we may feel the wealth of their fantasy and the overwhelming power of their unconscious imagery but we realize the horror and the symbolism of the end of all things that speaks for many of them. The unconscious is pure nature and, like nature, pours out its gifts in profusion but left to itself and without the human response from consciousness it can, again like nature destroy its own gifts and sooner or later sweep them into annihilation. The question of the role of consciousness in modern painting also arises in connection with the use of chance as a means of composing paintings. In Beyond Painting, Max Ernst wrote, the association of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a surgical table he is quoting from the poet Le Trayement is a familiar example, which has now become classical of the phenomenon discovered by the surrealists that the association of two or more apparently alien objects on a plane alien to both is the most potent ignition of poetry. That is probably as difficult for the layman to comprehend as the comment Breton made to the same effect. The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping a tomato is an idiot. We might recall here the chance association of a marble head and red rubber gloves in Kiriko's picture. Of course many of these associations were intended as jokes and nonsense but most modern artists have been concerned with something radically different from jokes. Chance plays a significant part in the work of the French sculptor Jean or Hans Arp. His woodcuts of leaves and other forms together at random were another expression of the quest for as he put it a secret primal meaning slumbering beneath the world of appearances. He called them leaves arranged according to the laws of chance and squares arranged according to the laws of chance. In these compositions it is chance that gives depth to the work of art. It points to an unknown but active principle of order and meaning that becomes manifest in things of their secret soul. It was above all the desire to make chance essential in Paul Clay's words that underlay the surrealist efforts to take the grain of wood cloud formations and so on as a starting point for their visionary painting. Max Ernst for instance went back to Leonardo da Vinci who wrote an essay on Botticelli's remark that if you throw a paint soaked sponge at a wall in the splashes it makes you will see heads, animals, landscapes and most of other configurations. Ernst has described how a vision pursued him in 1925. It forced itself on him as he was staring at a tiled floor marked by thousands of scratches. In order to give foundation to my powers of meditation and hallucination I made a series of drawings of the tiles by laying sheets of paper on them at random and then taking graphite rubbings. When I fixed my eyes on the result I was astounded by a suddenly sharpened sense of a hallucinatory series of contrasting and superposed pictures. I made a collection of the first results obtained from these frotage and called it histoire naturelle. It is important to note that Ernst placed over or behind some of these frotage a ring or circle which gives the picture a peculiar atmosphere and depth. Here the psychologist can recognize the unconscious drive to oppose the chaotic hazards of the image's natural language by the symbol of a self-contained psychic hole thus establishing equilibrium. The ring or circle dominates the picture. Psychic wholeness rules nature itself meaningful and giving meaning. In Max Ernst's efforts to pursue the secret pattern in things we may detect an affinity with the 19th century romantics. They spoke of nature's handwriting which can be seen everywhere on wings, eggshells, in clouds, snow, ice crystals and other strange conjunctions of chance just as much as in dreams or visions. They saw everything as the expression of one and the same pictorial language of nature. Thus it was a genuinely romantic gesture when Max Ernst called the pictures produced by his experiments natural history and he was right for the unconscious which had conjured up the pictures in the chance configuration of things is nature. It is with Ernst's natural history or Arp's compositions of chance that the reflections of the psychologist begin. He is faced with the question of what meaning, a chance arrangement of a question, man and consciousness come into the matter and with them the possibility of meaning. The chance created picture may be beautiful or ugly, harmonious or discordant, rich or poor in content, well or ill-painted. These factors determine its artistic value but they cannot satisfy the psychologist often to the distress of the artist or of anyone who finds supreme satisfaction in the contemplation of form. The psychologist seeks further and tries to understand the secret code of chance arrangement in so far as man can decipher it at all. The number and form of the objects thrown together at random by Arp says many questions as any detail of Ernst's fantastic footage. For the psychologist they are symbols and therefore they can not only be felt but up to a certain point can also be interpreted. The apparent or actual retreat of man from many modern works of art, the lack of reflection and the predominance of the unconscious over consciousness offers critics frequent points of attack. They speak of pathological art or compare it with pictures by the insane for it is characteristic of psychosis that consciousness and the ego personality are submerged and drowned by floods of contents from the unconscious regions of the psyche. It is true that the comparison is not so odious today as it was even a generation ago. When Dr. Jung first pointed out a connection of this kind in his essay on Picasso 1932 it provoked a storm of indignation. Today the catalog of a well-known Zurich art gallery speaks of the almost schizophrenic obsession of a famous artist and the German writer Rudolf Kosner described Georg Trockel as one of the greatest German poets continuing, there was something schizophrenic about him. It can be felt in his work. There is a touch of schizophrenia in it too. Yes, Trockel is a great poet. It is now realized that the state of schizophrenia and the artistic vision are not mutually exclusive. To my mind the famous experiments with mescaline and similar drugs have contributed to this change of attitude. These drugs create a condition accompanied by intense visions of colors and forms not unlike schizophrenia. More than one artist of today has sought inspiration in such a drug. The Retreat from Reality Franz Marc once said the art that is coming will give formal expression to our scientific conviction. This was a truly prophetic saying. We have traced the influence on artists of Freud's psychoanalysis and of the discovery or rediscovery of the unconscious in the early years of the 20th century. Another important point is the connection between modern art and the results of research in nuclear physics. To put it in simple non-scientific terms nuclear physics has robbed the basic units of matter of their absolute concreteness. It has made matter mysterious. Paradoxically mass and energy, wave and particle have proved to be interchangeable. The laws of cause and effect have become valid only up to a certain point. It does not matter at all that these relativities, discontinuities and paradoxes hold good only on the margins of our world but only for the infinitely small the atom and the infinitely great the cosmos. They have caused a revolutionary change in the concept of reality for a new, totally different and irrational reality has dawned behind the reality of our natural world which is ruled by the laws of classical physics. Corresponding relativities and paradoxes were discovered in the domain of the psyche. Here too, another world dawned on the creation of the world of consciousness governed by new and hitherto unknown laws that are strangely akin to the laws of nuclear physics. The parallelism between nuclear physics and the psychology of the collective unconscious was often a subject of discussion between Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize winner in physics. The space-time continuum of physics and the collective unconscious can be seen, so to speak, as the outer and inner aspects of the same reality behind appearances. The relationship between physics and psychology will be discussed by Dr. M. Elphin-France in her concluding essay. It is characteristic of this one world behind the worlds of physics and the psyche that its laws, processes and contents are unimaginable. That is a fact of outstanding importance for the understanding of the art of our time. For the main subject of modern art is, in a certain sense, unimaginable too. Therefore much modern art has become abstract. The great artists of this century have sought to give visible form to the life behind things, and so their works are a symbolic expression of a world behind consciousness, or indeed behind dreams, for dreams are only rarely non-figurative. Thus they point to the one reality, the one life, which seems to be the common background of the two domains of physical and psychic appearances. Only a few artists realized the connection between their form of expression and physics and psychology. Kandinsky is one of the masters who expressed the deep emotion he felt at the early discoveries of modern physical research. In my mind, the collapse of the atom was the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly the stoutest walls fell. Everything turned unstable, insecure and soft. I would not have been surprised if a stone had melted into thin air before my eyes. Science seemed to have been annihilated. What resulted from this disillusion was the artists' withdrawal from the realm of nature from the populous foreground of things. It seemed, Kandinsky added, as if I saw art steadily disengaging itself from nature. This separation from the world of things happened more or less at the same time to other artists, too. Franz Marc wrote, Have we not learned from a thousand years of experience that things cease to speak the more we hold them up to the visual mirror of their appearance? Appearance is eternally flat. For Marc, the goal of art was to reveal unearthly life dwelling behind everything. To break the mirror of life so that we may look being in the face. Paul Clay wrote, The artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics. He does not feel so intimately bound to that reality because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process. He is more concerned with formative powers than with formal products. Pete Mondrian accused Cubism of not having pursued abstraction to its logical end, the expression of pure reality. It can only be attained by the creation of pure form, unconditioned by subjective feelings and ideas. Behind changing natural forms there lies changeless pure reality. A great number of artists were seeking to get past appearances into the reality of the background or the spirit in matter by a transmutation of things through fantasies, surrealism, dream pictures, the use of chance, etc. The abstract artists however turned their backs on things. Their paintings contained no identifiable concrete objects. They were in Mondrian's words simply pure form. But it must be realized that what these artists were concerned with was something far greater than a problem of form and the distinction between concrete and abstract, figurative and non-figurative. Their goal was the center of life and things, their changeless background and an inward certitude. Art had become mysticism. The spirit in whose mystery art was submerged was an earthly spirit which the medieval alchemists had called mercurious. He is a symbol of the spirit that these artists divined or sought behind nature and things, behind the appearance of nature. Their mysticism was alien to Christianity for that mercurial spirit is alien to a heavenly spirit. Indeed, it was Christianity's dark adversary that was forging its way in art. Here we begin to see the real historical and symbolic significance of modern art. Like the Hermetic movements in the Middle Ages it must be understood as a mysticism of the spirit of Earth and therefore as an expression of our time compensatory to Christianity. No artist sensed this mystic background of art more clearly or spoke of it with greater passion than Kandinsky. The importance of the great works of art of all time did not lie in his eyes on the surface, in externals, but in the root of all roots, in the mystical content of art. Therefore, he says, the artist's eye should always be turned in upon his inner life and his ear should be always alert for the voice of inward necessity. This is the only way of giving expression to what the mystic vision commands. Kandinsky called his pictures a spiritual expression of the cosmos, a music of the spheres, a harmony of colors and forms. Form, even if it is quite abstract and geometrical, has an inward clang. It is a spiritual being with effects that coincide absolutely with that form. The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo. In 14, Franz Marc wrote in his aphorisms, matter is a thing that man can at best tolerate. He refuses to recognize it. The contemplation of the world has become the penetration of the world. There is no mystic who in his moments of sublimest rapture ever attained the perfect abstraction of modern thought or took his soundings with a deeper plummet. Paul Clay, who may be regarded as the poet among modern painters, says, it is the artist's mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth. Which artist would not wish to dwell at the central organ of all motion in space-time, be it the brain or the heart of creation from which all functions derive their life? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of creation where the secret key to all things lies hidden. Our beating heart drives us downward, far down, to the primal ground. What is encountered on this journey must be taken most seriously when it is perfectly fused with the appropriate artistic means in visible form because, as Clay adds, it is not a question of merely reproducing what is seen. The secretly perceived is made visible. Clay's work is rooted in that primal ground. My hand is entirely the instrument of a more distant sphere. Nor is it my head that functions in my work. It is something else. In his work the spirit of nature and the spirit of the unconscious became inseparable. They have drawn him and draw us, the onlookers, into their magic circle. Clay's work is the most complex expression, now poetic, now demonic, of the thonic spirit. Humor and bizarre ideas build a bridge from the realm of the dark underworld to the human world. The bond between his fantasy and the earth is the careful observation of the laws of nature and the love for all creatures. For the artist, he once wrote, the dialogue with nature is the kundizio sine qua non of his work. A different expression of the hidden unconscious spirit can be found in one of the most notable of the younger abstract painters, Jackson Pollock, an American who was killed in a car accident in 1944. His work has had a great influence on the younger artists of our time. In my painting, he revealed that he painted in a kind of trance. When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I am doing. It is only after a sort of get acquainted period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc. because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise, there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. Pollock's pictures, which were painted practically unconsciously, are charged with boundless emotional vehemence. In their lack of structure, they are almost chaotic, a glowing lava stream of colors, lines, planes, and points. They may be regarded as a parallel to what the alchemists called the Confusa, the Prima Materia or Chaos, all ways of defining the precious prime matter of the alchemical process, the starting point of the quest for the essence of being. Pollock's pictures represent the nothing that is everything, that is the unconscious itself. They seem to live in a time before the emergence of consciousness and being or to be fantastic landscapes of a time after the extinction of consciousness and being. In the middle of our century, the purely abstract picture without any regular order of forms and colors has become the most frequent expression in painting. The deeper the dissolution of reality, the more the picture loses its symbolic content. The reason for this lies in the nature of the symbol and its function. The symbol is an object of the known world hinting at something unknown. It is the known expressing the life and sense of the inexpressible. But in merely abstract paintings, the world of the known has completely vanished. Nothing is left to form a bridge to the unknown. On the other hand, these paintings reveal an unexpected background, a hidden sense. They often turn out to be more or less exact images of nature itself, showing an astounding similarity with the molecular structure of organic and inorganic elements of nature. This is a perplexing fact. Pure abstraction has become an image of concrete nature. But Jung may give us the key to understanding. The deeper layers of the psyche, he has said, lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down, that is to say, as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, that is, in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence, at bottom, the psyche is simply world. A comparison of abstract paintings and micro-photographs shows that utter abstraction of imaginative art has in a secret and surprising way become naturalistic, its subject being elements of matter. The great abstraction and the great realism which parted at the beginning of our century, have come together again. We remember Kandinsky's words. The goal's open two paths, which both lead to one goal at the end. This goal, the point of union, is reached in modern abstract paintings. But it is attained completely unconsciously. The artist's intention plays no part in the process. This point leads to a most important fact about modern art. The artist is, as it were, not so free in his creative work as he may think he is. If his work is performed in a more or less unconscious way, it is controlled by laws of nature that on the deepest level correspond to the laws of the psyche and vice versa. The great pioneers of modern art gave clearest expression to its true aims and to the depths from which the spirit rose that left its imprint on them. This point is important though later artists who may have failed to realize it did not always plumb the same depths. Yet neither Kandinsky nor Clay, nor any other of the early masters of modern painting, was ever aware of the grave psychological danger he was undergoing with the mystical submersion in the phonic spirit and the primal ground of nature. That danger must now be explained. As a starting point, we may take another aspect of abstract art. The German writer Wilhelm Voringer interpreted abstract art as the expression of a metaphysical unease and anxiety that seemed to him to be more pronounced among northern peoples. As he explained, they suffer from reality. The naturalness of the southern peoples is denied to them and they long for a super real and super sensual world to which they give expression in imaginative or abstract art. But as Sir Herbert Reed remarks in his concise history of modern art, metaphysical anxiety is no longer only Germanic and northern, it now characterizes the whole of the modern world. Reed quotes Clay, who wrote in his diary at the beginning of 1915, the more horrifying this world becomes as it is in these days, the more art becomes abstract while a world at peace produces realistic art. To front's mark, abstraction offered a refuge from the evil and ugliness in this world. Very early in life, I felt that man was ugly. The animals seemed to be more lovely and pure, even among them I discovered so much that was revolting and hideous that my painting became more and more schematic and abstract. A good deal maybe learned from a conversation that took place in 1958 between the Italian sculptor Marino Marini and the writer Edward Roditi. The dominant subject that Marini treated for years in many variations is the nude figure of a youth on a horse. In the early versions, which he described in the conversation as symbols of hope and gratitude after the end of the Second World War, the rider sits his horse with outstretched arms, his body bending slightly backward. In the course of years, the treatment of the subject became more abstract, the more or less classical form of the rider gradually dissolved. Speaking of the feeling underlying this change Marini said, if you look at my equestrian statues of the last 12 years in order of time you will notice that the animal's panic steadily increases, but that it is frozen with terror and stands paralyzed rather than rearing or taking flight. That is all because I believe that we are approaching the end of the world. In every figure, I strove to express a deepening fear and despair. In this way, I am attempting to symbolize the last stage of a dying myth, the myth of the individual, victorious hero of the humanist's man of virtue. In fairy tale and myth, the victorious hero is a symbol of consciousness. His defeat, as Marini says himself, means the death of the individual, a phenomenon that appears in a social context as the submergence of the individual in the mass and in art as the decline of the human element. When Roditi asked whether Marini's style was abandoning the classical canon on its way to becoming abstract, Marini replied, as soon as art has to express fear, it must of itself depart from the classical ideal. He found subjects for his work in the bodies excavated at Pompeii. Roditi called Marini's art a Hiroshima style, for it conjures up visions of the end of a world. Marini admitted it. He felt, he said, as if he had been expelled from an earthly paradise. Until recently, the sculptor aimed at full sensual and powerful forms. But for the last 15 years, the sculptor prefers forms in disintegration. The conversation between Marini and Roditi explains the transformation of sensory art into abstraction that should be clear to anyone who has ever walked open-eyed through an exhibition of modern art. However much he may appreciate or admire its formal qualities, he can scarcely fail to sense the fear, despair, aggression and mockery that sounds like a cry from many works. The metaphysical anxiety that is expressed by the distress in these pictures and sculptures may have arisen from the despair of a doomed world, as it did with Marini. In other cases, the emphasis may lie on the religious factor, on the feeling that God is dead. There is a close connection between the two. At the root of this inner distress lies the defeat, or rather the retreat of consciousness. In the upsurge of mystical experience, everything that once bound man to the human world, to earth, to time and space, to matter and the natural living of life has been cast aside or dissolved. But unless the unconscious is balanced by the experience of consciousness, it will implacably reveal its contrary or negative aspect. The wealth of creative sound that made the harmony of the spheres or the wonderful mysteries of the primal ground have yielded to destruction and despair. In more than one case, the artist has become the passive victim of the unconscious. In physics, too, the world of the background has revealed its paradoxical nature. The laws of the inmost elements of nature, the newly discovered structures and relations in its basic unit, the atom, have become the scientific foundation for unprecedented weapons of destruction and opened the way to annihilation. Ultimate knowledge and the destruction of the world are the two aspects of the discovery of the primal ground of nature. Jung, who was as familiar with the dangerous dual nature of the unconscious as with the importance of human consciousness, could offer mankind only one weapon against catastrophe. The call for individual consciousness, which seems so simple and yet is so arduous. Consciousness is not only indispensable as a counter-poise to the unconscious and not only gives the possibility of meaning to life. It is also an eminently practical function. The evil witnessed in the world outside in neighbors or neighboring peoples can be made conscious as evil contents of our own psyche as well and this insight would be the first step to a radical change in our attitude to our neighbors. Envy, lust, sensuality, lies, and all known vices are the negative dark aspect of the unconscious which can manifest itself in two ways. In the positive sense, it appears as a spirit of nature, creatively animating man, things in the world. It is the thonic spirit that has been mentioned so often in this chapter. In the negative sense, the unconscious, that same spirit, manifests itself as a spirit of evil, as a drive to destroy. As has already been pointed out, the alchemists personified this spirit as the spirit mercurious and called it with good reason mercurious duplex, the two-faced dual mercurious. In the religious language of Christianity, it is called the devil, but however improbable it may seem, the devil too has a dual aspect. In the positive sense, he appears as Lucifer, literally the light bringer. Looked at in the light of these difficult and paradoxical ideas, modern art which we have recognized as symbolic of the thonic spirit also has a dual aspect. In the positive sense, it is the expression of a mysteriously profound nature mysticism. In the negative, it can only be interpreted as the expression of an evil or destructive spirit. The two sides belong together, for the paradox is one of the basic qualities of the unconscious and its contents. To prevent any misunderstanding, it must once more be emphasized that these considerations have nothing to do with artistic and aesthetic values, but are solely concerned with the interpretation of modern art and the symbol of our time. Union of opposites. There is one more point to be made. The spirit of the age is in constant movement. It is like a river that flows on, invisibly but surely and given the momentum of life in our century, even ten years is a long time. About the middle of this century, a change began to come over painting. It was nothing revolutionary, nothing like the change that happened about 1910, which meant the reconstruction of art to its very foundations. But there were groups of artists who formulated their aims in ways not heard before. This transformation is going on within the frontiers of abstract painting. The representation of concrete reality, which springs from the primal human need of catching the passing moment on the wing, has become a truly concrete sensuous art in the photography of such men as Francis Henri Cartier-Vresson, Switzerland's Werner Bischoff and others. We can therefore understand why artists continued on their own way of inwardness and imagination. For a good many of the young artists, however, abstract art as it had been practiced for many years offered no adventure, no field of conquest. Seeking the new, they found it in what lay nearest, yet had been lost, in nature and man. They were not and are not concerned with the reproduction of nature in pictures, but with the expression of their own emotional experience of nature. The French painter Alfred Manessier defined the aims of his art in these words. What we have to reconquer is the weight of lost reality. We must make for ourselves a new heart, a new spirit, a new soul in the measure of man. The painter's true reality lies neither in abstraction nor in realism, but in the reconquest of his position as a human being. At present, non-figurative art seems to me to offer the one opportunity for the painter to approach the inward reality of himself and to grasp the consciousness of his essential self, or even of his being. It is only by the reconquest of his position, I believe, that the painter will be able, in the time to come, to return slowly to himself, to rediscover his own weight, and so to strengthen it, that it can even reach the outward world. Jean Bazaine speaks in similar terms. It is a great temptation for the painter of today to paint the pure rhythm of his feeling, the most secret pulse of his heart, instead of embodying it in a concrete form. That, however, leads only to a desiccated mathematics, or a kind of abstract expressionism, which ends in monotony and a progressive impoverishment of form. But a form that can reconcile with his world is an art of communion by which man, at any moment, can recognize his own unformed countenance in the world. What, in fact, artists now have at heart is a conscious reunion of their own inward reality with the reality of the world or of nature, or, in the last resort, a new union of body and soul, matter and spirit. That is their way to the reconquest of their weight as human beings. Only now is the great rift that set in with modern art between great abstraction and great realism being made conscious and on the way to being healed. For the onlooker, this first becomes evident in the changed atmosphere in the works of these artists. There radiates from the pictures of such artists as Alfred Manassier or the Belgian-born painter Gustave Saintier in spite of all abstraction a belief in the world and in spite of all intensity of feeling a harmony of forms and colors that often attains serenity. In the French painter Jean-Lucas's famous tapestries of the 1950s, the exuberance of nature pervades the picture. His art could be called sensuous as well as imaginative. We find a serene harmony of forms and colors also in the work of Paul Clay. This harmony was what he had always been striving for. Above all, he had realized the necessity of not denying evil. Even evil must not be a triumphant or degrading enemy but a power collaborating in the whole. But Clay's starting point was not the same. He lived near the dead and the unborn at an almost cosmic distance from this world, while the younger generation of painters can be said to be more firmly rooted in earth. An important point to notice is that modern painting, just when it has advanced far enough to discern the origin of the opposites, has taken up religious themes. The metaphysical void seems to have been overcome and the utterly unexpected has happened. The church has become a patron of modern art. We need only mention here all saints sit basil with windows by Alfred Manassier. A sea church with pictures by a large number of modern artists. The Matisse Chapel at Vence and the church at Auduncourt, which has works by Jean Bazin and the French artist Fernand Léger. The admission of modern art to the church means more than an act of broad mindedness on the part of its patrons. It is symbolic of the fact that the part played by modern art in relation to Christianity is changing. The compensatory function of the old hermetic movements has made way for the possibility of collaboration. In discussing the animal symbols of Christ, it was pointed out that the light and the thonic spirits belonged to each other. It seems as if the moment had come today when a new stage in the solution of this millennial problem might be reached. What the future will yield we cannot know, whether the bridging of the opposites will give positive results or whether the way will lead through yet more unimaginable catastrophes. There is too much anxiety and too much dread at work in the world and this is still the predominant factor in art and society. Above all there is still too much unwillingness on the part of the individual to apply to himself and his life the conclusions that can be drawn from art, although he might be ready to accept them in art. The artist can often express many things unconsciously and without awakening hostility which are resented when they are expressed by a psychologist, a fact that could be demonstrated even more conclusively in literature than in the visual arts. Confronted by the statements of the psychologist, the individual feels directly challenged, but what the artist has to say, particularly in our century, usually remains in an impersonal sphere. And yet it seems important that the suggestion of a more whole and therefore a more human form of expression should have become visible in our time. It is a glimmer of hope, symbolized for me at the time of writing, 1961, by a number of paintings by the French artist Pierre Soulage. Behind the cataract of huge black rafters, there glimmers a clear, pure blue or a radiant yellow. Light is dawning behind darkness.