Searching for the Self: Classic Stories, Christian Scripture, and the Quest for Personal Identity

by Adrian T. Smith

A few years ago, a well-known shampoo manufacturer designed their bottles to resemble a Mondrian painting. Art critic H. R. Rookmaaker describes his style: “Pictorial elements were reduced to their simplest and most rigid terms: black horizontal and vertical lines, white, red, yellow and blue colour[sic]—and nothing else.”153 What drove the abstractness of modern art? A quest for the transcendent, the universal, the absolute.154 However, previous generations of artists had abandoned the themes and subject-matter of classical narrative—the traditional house of the transcendent.155 Accordingly, twentieth-century artists turned to ever-increasing compositional abstraction as a gateway to the transcendent. Unsurprisingly, their quest failed, and their work degenerated into ever-increasing assertions of the absence of meaning.156