Painter Wassily Kadinsky complained about the materialism of modern life: “Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. The nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul.”

Kadinsky’s solution was to move toward abstraction. As Begbie explains, “Physical forms must be isolated from their everyday contexts and treated with a high level of abstraction so that their inner nonphysical meaning may shine forth, so that their physicality and particularity can be transcended . . . . Reality’s deepest life can be expressed only if we relinquish the desire to depict objects, to represent the material world in its external, perceivable features.”

Here is modernist abstraction, motivated not by “rationalism” but by a mystical desire to transcend and surpass the material world.