Further reading in the history of abstract art revealed the opening up of a new world of possibilities in modern art as the era of representational art dimmed. Also as new scientific discoveries were made, abstract art flourished in a parallel universe. Not representing, in an illustrative way, the discoveries, but an opening up of the mind of the artists.
In "Painting in the 20th Century" Werner Haftmann writes "... abstract painting offered possibilities of expressing in pictorial terms the spontaneous processes which take place within the personality. It also provided the associations and suggestions with which an inner experience of reality could be made visible. This pervasive preoccupation with the possibilities of abstract painting resulted in the fact that each painter undertook for himself a fresh speculative examination of pictorial means and formal processes. Meditation and speculation became for the contemporary painter closely related forces which held his creative work in a state of tension."
He also stated that "The inevitable effect of these reflections was that the painters perceived much more clearly the astonishing correspondences between contemporary intuitive and scientific experiences of the world and nature. The complex structure of matter, the concept of mass as dynamic energy, the concept of the magnetic field, the overlappings of time and space, of the finite and infinite, were now seen by the artist for what they really were: parallel manifestations of a more abstract experience of reality, an experience which was fully active in himself also."
Art, in this new way of thinking exploded all over the western world.