`Matisse--- colour, Picasso---form. Two great signposts pointing towards a great end. (Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912)

That emotional response can be said to be even conventionally spiritual -- specifically in the case of Matisse -- to the degree to which a given work expresses "a melodic quality that is raised from time to time to a summit above the clouds (Kandinsky 39 ) as though the artist and observer are lifted simultaneously merely through the liberation of vision nad technique displayed in successful modernist works

It is certainly plausible to suggest that the liberation of the world of forms and the world of color which are displayed in modernist

works such as those produces by Matisse and Picasso are meant to indicate also , the liberation of the corresponding emotional and aesthetic responses which modernist works uniquely incite . In this way , the modernist lays claim to the gift of "divining the internal life in everything (Kandinsky 36 ) and where this divining concerns humanity , a divination of depths of latent emotional and spiritual responses indicated . In to represent the divine in the everyday world , the modernists "de-constructed " previously perceived ideas of "truth " in the objective world . In doing so , an implied liberation of human perception and emotional capacity was implied and hoped for by modernist artist . To convey the liberation of perception and emotion , the modernist needed nothing more than "the subject to be painted (human being or whatever it may be ) and means that belong to painting alone color and form (Kandinsky 36 that is , the modernist eschewed any standing metier or aesthetic principle for the sake of principle alone Just as form dictates , to some degree , the rational aspects of a given painting , color helps to define and generate emotional resonance Matisse realized that in to articulate spiritual resonances "we should put our colour-sensations in " -- in fact , by dis-ing them -- and similarly , Picasso while deconstructing...