In 1913, in “Reminiscences/Three Pictures,” Wassily Kandinsky described an experience that “shook me to the depths of my being”: “previously I had known only realistic art,” but “suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture”— “The Haystack by Claude Monet.”  “That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me.  I didn’t recognize it…I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking in this picture...And, albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture.”  In 1935, in a “Conversation,” Pablo Picasso famously stated: “A picture used to be a sum of additions.  In my case a picture is a sum of destructions.” While Barnett Newman opined, “The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty”.

Taken together, these remarks epitomize avant-garde art’s hatred of traditional art, more particularly of representational art—art that engages objects in external reality rather than feelings in internal reality, to use Anna Freud’s distinction.  The more disturbing the feelings—what begins with Cézanne’s disquieting anxiety ends in Van Gogh’s self-destructive torment--the more authentic the art.  As Harold Rosenberg wrote, the foundation of avant-garde art was laid by the School of Paris, the School of New York building upon it, institutionalizing what he called “the tradition of the New,” which replaced what Baudelaire called the “great tradition,” that “habitual, everyday idealization of ancient life” and the “gravity” accorded “each individual.”