or alien those ideas may look to us today" the paintings need to be viewed historically, if not aesthetically, in the context of the painter's thought and the setting in which it was formed (3).
The first decades of the twentieth century were a time of revolutions in politics and the arts. The Russian Symbolist movement of the 1890s was interested in new mystical ideas and had already gotten Kandinsky interested in looking "beyond the boundaries of naturalism and materialism for the foundations of his art" (Kramer 4). The rationalism of the nineteenth century was, in the view of many artists and thinkers, being replaced by a new freedom marked by spirituality and the expression of individual feeling. Even in the sciences, "the value of the intuitive as against the purely experimental" was being stressed as scientists like Werner Heisenberg questioned "the inherent limitations of quantitative observation" (Selz 311). In philosophy, the achievement of the intellect was sometimes seen as being limited to rational action and the creation of art was viewed as an alternative activity in which the artist sought to escape conventional ideas and bring people in closer touch with basic realities by making them see them in a new way (Selz 311). In politics, the reformist spirit of communism and socialism were being directed against the successful rationalists of the Industrial Revolution and corporate capitalism. In the general atmosphere of social and artistic upheaval, Munich was a center of "avant-garde activity that devalued any abject dependence on t
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