Their ambition is to convey a lived experience of the human body, more broadly, a sense that the body is the first ego, as Freud said, giving it a certain mythical importance, making it the most privileged of all objects, and with that to re-humanize art.

“Expressionism and surrealism is always fake, art as something else is always fake,” Reinhardt wrote, but his abstract art is paradoxically and subliminally expressionistic and surrealistic, which doesn’t make it fake.

The sale in March of Paul Gauguin’s “When Will You Marry?” (1892) to an anonymous buyer for $300 million—the highest price ever paid for a work of art, according to The Economist (April 4, 2015)—brings to mind two of Gauguin’s remarks, both relevant to any discussion of so-called protest art.

Writing in 1967 about “the hidden order of art,” that is, its unconscious order, Anton Ehrenzweig notes that “the seemingly chaotic structure of handwriting conceals some hidden unconscious order, such order is destroyed as soon as it is imitated by a conscious effort.