The religious work in these previous contexts presented becomes work that explores spiritual topics, rather then work that comes from direct interaction with the spiritual realm.
What I have presented here in the contact of religious painting can also be said about work not rising from an institutionally religious context.
Let us take Kandinsky for example, and his work. Kandinsky aimed to represent a spiritual dimension, a dimension of existence that he believed could not be represented in pure representational images.
When writing about the spiritual and his work, Kandinsky noted:
When religion, science and morality are shaken, the two last by the strong hand of Nietzsche, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself.x
Looking at the work of Kandinsky (like this piece called Several Circles from 1926) and works of others such as Piet Mondrian, there is a force of a presence and an energy that is aiming to represent the spiritual. It is not doing so by using human form or discernible objects - but rather moves away from direct representation and focuses on the internal experience when confronted with the piece.
What I am suggestion here is not a new idea as an angle to see these creators. Rather the opposite. This was the focus of a well received show The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986.
In the article describing this event, we find stated: Drawing upon a body of research that has been growing steadily during the last 25 years, the exhibition sets out to prove, in the words of its curator, Maurice Tuchman, that the ''genesis and development of abstract art were inextricably tied to spiritual ideas current in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.1
What we could see not just in this show but when dealing with the abstract painters on the early 20th century is that they do own up and state that what they are representing (or rather not-representing) in the otherworldly, the spiritual, divine.
However, there is still one aspect that we need to consider - and that is that, even though these men were dealing with this topics trough varied approaches, they were still simply investigating these topics in creating work.
Interesting enough, at the same time these men were doing this, we have a similar yet utterly opposite approach in the work of several women creators.