“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see”
In the most ordinary sense of the word, a thing is called ‘abstract’ when it is separated from the reality to which it belongs. Abstraction thus refers to the process whereby, in ceasing to envisage this reality in terms of all of its characteristics, one retains only some of them in order to consider them separately. With respect to a tree, one might only take account of the ‘greenness’ of its foliage or the ‘hardness’ of its wood. Whether it is real or only ideal, this process marks an impoverishment and extenuation, since it only takes up one part of the internally connected properties. Only their internal connection in a coherent whole can constitute a concrete reality, that is to say, a reality subsisting on its own.
Michael Henry, French philosopher
“When religion, science and morality are shaken and when outer supports threaten to fall, the man withdraws his gaze from externals and turns it inwards. Literature, music and art are the most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what was at first only a little point of light noticed by the few. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but they turn away from the soulless life of the present toward those substances and ideas that give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul. (Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art)