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

Can abstraction be considered as an interdisciplinary historical condition? In what ways does it affect the de!nition of the abstract image? This paper answers these questions by focusing on a speci!c case study – Beaumont Newhall’s article “The New Abstract Vision” (1947) – that presents a relevant, and yet underrated, interplay between the artistic and scienti!c 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 de!ne the abstract image nowadays: the historical relation of the abstraction with the unseen, the role of imagination in artistic and in scienti!c discoveries in depicting the unseen, and the popularization of abstract images in post-war modernity. The !nal sections of the paper are dedicated to a wide re"ection 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.