Publication Details

Abstract

The roots and the „Copernican turn” of modern art in the 20th century are to be understood on the basis of the overall spiritual atmosphere at the turn of the century. In opposition to the rationalism of the natural sciences in the second half of the 19th century, the movement at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century against the outer objective given facts lays this time a one-sided accent on „pure" subject as a creator of reality. This was proclaimed in noetics and aesthetics of that period, and this brought about again a one-sided predominance of subject which can present transformed, freshly created realities, with all deforming consequences. And on that basis, elements are being brought into the conception and realization of artistic function, which are in principle extraneous to art: intellectualistic, mechanistic, abstract elements. This has led as far as the dehumanized, absurd as well as abstract art and to its isolation. At the opposite pole, the officially enforced realism wanted to build again only on the outer object, on objectiveness, on material; in such a way, the most intrinsic artistic function, its subjective-individual sight and creation has been underestimated and negated. That is why it had to get, in the same inevitable way, only to an impersonal description, to a typification, schematism, i. e., to empty and ineffective abstractions. The aim of modern art, i. e., pure poetry, pure music, the pure fine arts, is unrealizable^ since there is only one complex imagination, manifesting intself only in various materials mutually influencing each other. And the point of departure towards more synthetical and more lasting works of art is only in the regaining of a more organic correlation of subject and object, which had been artificially disjoined by abstractions extraneous to art.