Abstraction in Contemporary Visual Culture as an Interplay between Imagination, Image and Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

Can abstraction be considered as an interdisciplinary historical condition? In what ways does it affect the definition of the abstract image? This paper answers these questions by focusing on a specific case study – Beaumont Newhall’s article “The New Abstract Vision” (1947) – that presents a relevant, and yet underrated, interplay between the artistic and scientific domains in representing abstraction. By proposing abstraction as a cultural feature of modernity and as a form of materialized epistemology, we draw up four fundamental concepts that define the abstract image nowadays: the historical relation of the abstraction with the unseen, the role of imagination in artistic and in scientific discoveries in depicting the unseen, and the popularization of abstract images in post-war modernity. The final sections of the paper are dedicated to a wide reflection on contemporary philosophers and scholars in visual studies who, like Newhall did almost forty years before, insist on the necessity of a new iconology for abstract pictures and images.