In art, especially in painting, we have today striking richness of form which shows the immense striving that is going on.
To adhere stubbornly to one form is to travel a lane that has no outlet.
Many call the present state of painting “anarchy,” and so they say of music, but this appearance of anarchy, of lawlessness, is due to the workings of spiritual forces that cannot be expressed in old forms, but demand new manifestations.
It is one thing to reproduce on canvas an accurate representation of an object, but such a representation is no more than the outer shell; to find out whether the picture has any real, any spiritual value one must get rid of this outer shell. Step by step the “objective,” the photographic elements are eliminated until in the end there may be no trace of any object, and with this elimination the spiritual content becomes plainer and plainer. The steps are:
Abstraction—reality.
Objects need not necessarily be eliminated from a picture, but they should be used not for the sake of forcing their photographic likenesses upon the observer, but solely to more perfectly express the inner, the spiritual significance of the work.
If a painter introduces a suggestion of a landscape or a bit of still life it should be for the purpose of making his meaning, his inner feeling plainer to the beholder, and not for the purpose of making a colored photograph of a field or flowers.
Therefore it does not matter whether actual or abstract forms are used by the artist, so long as both are used to express spiritual values. The sole question regarding form the artist should put to himself is, “Which form, or combination of forms, shall I use in this case to express most fully and plainly my spiritual mood?”