For me, the province of art and the province of nature thus became
more and more widely separated, until I was able to experience both
as completely independent realms. This occurred to the full extent
only this year.
—Vasily Kandinsky, in 1913

The birth of abstract art—art that makes no direct, immediately
discernible reference to recognizable objects—has long been
recognized as a fateful event in the history of art. Yet the
intellectual origins of this event, which promptly established
abstraction as one of the central traditions of twentieth-century
painting and sculpture, have remained a vague and little-understood
subject for the vast public that now takes abstract art for granted
as part of the familiar scenery of modern cultural life. That the
emergence of abstraction early in the second decade of this century
represented for its pioneer creators a solution to a spiritual
crisis; that the conception of this momentous artistic innovation
entailed a categorical rejection of the materialism of modern life;
and that abstraction was meant by its visionary inventors to play a
role in redefining our relationship to the universe—all of this,
were its implications even dimly grasped, would
come as a shock to many people who now happily embrace the history of
modern art as little more than a succession of styles, or art
fashions, that may have something to do with the history of taste but
do not have much to tell us about life.

As for the academic study of modernism, Professor