Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience — intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.
A modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he paints in relation to none of them, though he longs for the audience of other modern painters.
Plastic automatism…. as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miro, [both artists of Surrealism] and Picasso, is actually very little a question of the unconsciousness. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century greatest formal inventions.