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During the nineteenth century, in the wake of the Enlightenment, religious dogmas had increasingly to contend in the industrialized West with the growth of secularism and positivism. In the twentieth century dreams and “the varieties of spiritual experience” (to paraphrase William James), having lost the privilege of transcendence, received psychological interpretation in terms of physiological desire and emotional need. The formless and chaotic underworld of the unconscious as represented in depth psychology has become the last refuge for an irrationality continually subjected to scientific examination. Some of the subtlest artists of our century have created images engaging this tension on the borderline between order and chaos. A major example is Klee's painting The Limits of Understanding.1 (Illustration 1)
This paper will discuss in detail the implications of this painting both iconographic — the gap between a lower terrestrial and an upper celestial region (the sun) and the apparent bridging of the gap by a ladder, and formal—the contrast between irregular and regular figures, and between the open rectilinear texture and the flat opaque disc of the sun. Klee, like Masson and others wrestling with Cubist spatial and figural complexity, constantly painted delicately tinted grounds suggesting real spaces viewed telescopically or microscopically, over which he would superimpose sharply defined linear elements suggesting abstraction. As he remarked in 1920:
Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and
Page 479that there are many more other, latent realities … A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision