In an adjacent gallery, ‘Art After Catastrophe’, a sign reads ‘In the middle of the 20th century, artists were asking how to keep making art in an era of suffering and violence’. This self-indulgent explanation says more about the morbidity of the modernists than the uniqueness of the times. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, or Raphael, hardly lived lives in Edenic societies untouched by violence and suffering, yet they produced works touched by transcendent beauty.

They have Yamashita Kikuki’s Deification of a Soldier (1967) and Yves Tanguy’s 1951 painting The Invisibles, of ‘biomorphic beings set in strange landscapes’ that are ‘partly mechanical, partly organic’. Take a look around the Tate Modern. There you can find the International Surrealists, roughly contemporary to Jung, with their nightmarish, disembodied parts, monstrously tacked together, clawing as they try to excavate the subconscious. A couple of years ago, an Italian artist sold an ‘ invisible’ – yes, non-existent – sculpture for £12,000. Responding to the assertion that ‘part of an artists’ function is to make beautiful….something that nobody thought was beautiful up until now’ the late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton dryly replied ‘ right, like a can of shit’. Indeed. Piero Manzoni, who produced ninety cans of Artist’s Shit in 1961, wrote to a fellow artist ‘I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their own shit in cans’.

Jung was writing in 1957 and one wonders what he would have thought of the destruction of art in 2023, a world in which Oxford City Council have their eye on selling off Biblical and classical paintings no longer deemed ‘appropriate’ in a diverse society. In New York, meanwhile Brooklyn Museum is preparing to hold its summer exhibition, ‘Pablo-matic’, which will focus on what a naughty boy Picasso was. Art ‘productive of fear’, fit for the ‘epoch of the great destroyer’. Art that ‘heralds and eulogises’ the ‘glorious rubbish heap of our civilization’. Everything consists of debris, unorganised fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill’. Their pictures, ‘abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their “meaninglessness” as much as their deliberate aloofness from the spectator’.Īrtists ‘have immersed themselves,’ wrote Jung, ‘in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. His contemporaries, he said, had ‘taken as their subject the disintegration of forms’. In his curious little book about Flying Saucers, Carl Jung took an interesting detour into the psychology of modern art.

Flying saucers carl jung