Sigfried Giedion quotes:

Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted...

Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.

Art, indeed, began with abstraction.

Even when dead, the hog largely refuses to submit to the machine,

It was only since the turn of the century that one returned to the immense role that abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials.

The sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon,