I have been thinking back on the *why* of the abandoning of spiritual ideals in Modern art. I first thought it might be traced to the rise of the philosophy of Pragmatism, and that of Friedrich Nietzsche, then Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. And with the advent of phenomenology—most noticeably that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. I recall reading about the strong impact Henri Bergson’s theory of vitalism had upon Henri Matisse and other Modernists (including the Cubists) with the release of his book Creative Evolution in 1907.
Then I recalled that the Symbolists’s spiritualist interests were focused on the possibility of combining and superimposing symbol systems into a *universal symbolic language*. When the universal symbolic language flopped with boring and vapid Modernist conceits, symbolist spirituality was clearly abandoned. But it occurs to me that a scientific spirituality has never been sought after in art.
