Abstract Art and Imagination

Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colors in a non-representational or subjective way. In the very early 20th century, the term was more often used to describe art, such as Cubist and Futurist art, that depicts real forms in a simplified or rather reduced way - keeping only an allusion of the original natural subject. Such paintings were often claimed to capture something of the depicted objects' immutable intrinsic qualities rather than its external appearance.
The abstraction in art that came across so prevalently in the twentieth century angered many of the staid and stuffy bourgeois who thought art must be pleasing, pastoral, and/or biblical. But abstraction in art has been around for centuries. Jewish and Islamic cultures developed abstraction and symbolism in their decorative arts. Wassily Kandinsky posited that modern science dealt with dynamic forces and revealed that matter was ultimately spiritual in character. So then, art should display the spiritual forces behind the spiritual world.