Abstract
The history of 20th century painting conventionally identifies abstraction with modernism and the return of figuration with postmodernism. But abstraction ended much earlier, in a spy operation during World War II, when a British intelligence officer, in a stroke of genius, found abstract paintings to be the perfect carriers for secret messages transported across the ocean. For this purpose, he commissioned a painting to Wassily Kandinsky that included a secret message encoded – in the manner of flag signs or Morse code – into its seemingly abstract visual shapes. This anecdote explains steganography: the clever hiding of messages
 in other messages. Steganographic messages do not need to appear innocuous. At some point,
 militant jihadists were reported to run pornographic websites as a cover, using porn images for hidden communication. [...]
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