Modern painting as a symbol

The chapter frames modern imaginative painting as a historical-psychological phenomenon rather than an aesthetic school. Artists are cast as spokesmen of their time, provoking fascination and hostility because their works stir the unconscious. Modern works seek inner, collective expression beyond the concrete and the individual, requiring viewers to learn a new visual language.

Setting two poles after Kandinsky—great abstraction and great realism—the text highlights Malevich’s Black Square and Duchamp’s readymade as emblematic extremes. The “secret soul” of things emerges via objets trouvés, collage, and Schwitters’s exaltation of rubbish, unconsciously echoing alchemical reverence for matter and projecting abandoned psychic contents onto objects. De Chirico’s metaphysical vistas dramatize the “void” and faceless manichini, while Chagall, grounded in Hassidic piety, exemplifies a healthier balance with the unconscious.

Surrealism (via Breton) seeks reconciling dream and reality but overrelies on automatic methods, neglecting consciousness’s evaluative role. Chance procedures (Arp’s arrangements, Ernst’s frottage) reveal a “secret order,” with circular motifs compensating chaos as symbols of wholeness. The chapter notes affinities with psychosis and drug-induced visions, cautioning that unchecked unconscious floods can overpower ego and meaning.

Scientific developments deepen the reading: nuclear physics dissolves matter’s solidity, paralleling depth psychology’s discovery of collective layers. Abstraction becomes a form of mysticism pursuing “pure reality” (Mondrian) or the “primal ground” (Klee), while Kandinsky’s spiritual harmonies and Pollock’s trance paintings mirror alchemical prima materia. Paradoxically, pure abstraction often resembles microstructures of nature, unconsciously reuniting the century’s split between abstraction and realism under deeper, law-like patterns.

Finally, the chapter situates abstraction as refuge amid modern anxiety (Worringer, Klee, Marc) and illustrates cultural despair through Marini’s increasingly panic-stricken horse-and-rider, symbolizing the decline of the heroic individual and consciousness. Without conscious counterbalance, the chthonic spirit (Mercurius duplex) turns destructive; with it, nature’s creative depths can be integrated. Jung’s remedy is individual consciousness, exposing projected evil and restoring meaning. Modern art thus bears a double face: profound nature-mysticism and potential nihilism—both emblematic of our time.