In his book God in the Gallery, Daniel Siedell argues that iconography has been an influence of the development of Modern Art citing Vassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich and Mark Rothko as his key examples.
Following up on this line of thought, I've been reading articles by the contemporary icongrapher, Aidan Hart, in which he makes the same claim citing Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh and Cecil Collins among others in addition to those cited by Siedell.
Hart's argument has three main aspects. Firstly, positive comments made by these artists regarding key aspects of iconography. Secondly, the adoption in Modern Art of many of the main stylistic techniques of icongraphy such as flatness, inverse perspective, multi-point perspective, isometry, radience etc. Thirdly, the use of abstraction as a language to express objective metaphysical truth, the essence of things.
Brancusi is Hart's key witness for his Rumanian Orthodox upbringing and practice and for his aphorisms on the role of the artist such as, "The artist should know how to dig out the being that is within matter and be the tool that brings out its cosmic essence into an actual visible essence."
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