https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8430-4674
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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.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 This paper has been written in collaboration by Alessandro Ferraro and Marco Tamborini. Ferraro wrote the first three sections – “Introduction”, “The New Abstract Vision” and “Popularizing the New Abstract Vision”. Marco Tamborini wrote the Abstract, “Issues in Historicizing and Defining Abstract as Image in Interdisciplinary Contexts” and the Conclusions. We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful hints and suggestions.
2 Ad Reinhardt, “Museum Landscape,” Transformation: Arts, Communication, Environment 1, (1950): 30–1.
3 Lynn Gamwell, The Invisible. Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002): 149–63.
4 The photography could be conceived as a complex example in relation to the idea of the abstract, given its normative understanding as having a truth or evidentiary status. The early photographic experiments conducted by the French doctor and parapsychologist Hippolyte Baraduc (1850–1909), with the help of the renowned French photographer Nadar, are clear examples of the effort to “make visible something” through photographical images intentionally following a para-scientific research methodology. Through all his life Baraduc tried to depict visually what constitutes us as human beings – namely, emotions such as joy, anger, grief, piety and the so-called psychicon, Baraduc’s thoughts made visible. In his essay “The Human Soul” (originally published in 1896, with a posthumous reprint in 1913), he theorizes the existence of the human soul and the so-called fluidic body with the help of photographic proofs. It is useful to quote a passage from his own essay: “I have, however, found a method to show the existence of the fluidic Invisible, as the microscope shows the infinitely small material particles, and beyond a doubt, I have experimentally opened up the path to the second plane, that of integral life and spontaneous determinism in movement.” Hippolyte Baraduc, The Human Soul. Its Movements, Its Lights, and the Iconography of the Fluidic Invisible (Paris: G. A. Mann Éditeur, 1913), 12.
5 Concerning this topic, it is useful to consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s picture theory.
6 Michele Cometa, Cultura Visuale (Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2020), 297–306; Krešimir Purgar, “Introduction: Do Abstract Images Need New Iconology?,” in The Iconology of Abstraction. Non-figurative Images and the Modern World, ed. Krešimir Purgar (New York: Routledge, 2021), 1–18. It is relevant to note that nowadays there are several efforts to reformulate the global visual canon and, specifically, the history of abstraction, with the aim of including in its own peculiar story the non-figurative examples from aboriginal arts or non-Western authors. By exhibiting non-Western abstract artists such as the Moroccan painter Mohamed Hamidi (b. 1941) or the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland (1931–2019), the group show Histoires d’abstraction. Le cauchemar de Greenberg (Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, 2021–2022), curated by Marjolaine Lévy, is a lucid example of the new trend of the contemporary curatorial approach towards the definition of the abstraction in visual arts. For further readings see Pepe Karmel, Abstract Art. A Global History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2020). As the authors of this paper, we position ourselves very far from the idealistic concept of Clement Greenberg’s abstraction canon as a pure expression of the Western world.
7 Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 20–45.
8 For further readings about this topic, in addition to Purgar’s edited volume previously mentioned, see Gean Moreno, ed., In the Mind but Not From There: Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art (London: Verso Books, 2019).
9 Charles Tappan Haviland, “The Result of Abstraction in Science,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1879, 825–32. It is useful to quote from his article: “Abstraction is necessary to all knowledge. As soon as we advance at all beyond the knowledge of concretes – as soon even as we begin to compare one thing with another, and note their resemblances and differences – so soon we commence the process of abstraction and generalization. This mental act is not only the foundation of all conscious classification, but it is itself the infancy of consciousness. The earliest perception of resemblance in two objects which, next to the perception of difference, is the lowest term to which consciousness can be reduced, and which probably appeared contemporaneously with organized matter, was the result of incipient abstraction” (p. 827).
10 With the term “visual modernity” we refer to the idea proposed by recent visual studies theories. Michele Cometa, Cultura Visuale, 7–14. In a broader context, see Jed Rasula, History of a Shiver. The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 200–48.
11 Georges Roques, Qu’est-ce que l’art abstrait? Une histoire de l’abstraction en peinture. 1860–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 191–205. For further readings about the definitions of abstraction, see Maria Lind, ed., Abstraction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
12 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, 40 (1992): 81–128.
13 Beaumont Newhall, “The New Abstract Vision,” Art News Annual 1946–47 (1947), 57.
14 As it was meant during the 1940s and 50s, see György Kepes, The New Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944) and The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956).
15 Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (New York: Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, 1947), 36–8. The picture of the Hercules constellation is taken from Simon Newcomb’s and Rudolph Engelmann’s Populäre Astronomie (Leipzig, originally published in 1881, reprinted in 1921); the other pictures are taken from the volumes of Die Kultur der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1906–1926). It is relevant to compare these suggestions with James Elkins’ idea of “informational images”: James Elkins, The Domain of Images (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–25.
16 Beaumont Newhall, “The New Abstract Vision,” 58.
17 Robert Hunt, The Poetry of Science or Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature (London: Reeve, Benham & Reeve, 1848), 23.
18 Significantly, almost twenty years after Hunt’s essay, John Tyndall remarked on the key role of imagination in fulfilling the material absence of scientific data for the elaboration of a scientific theory. John Tyndall, Essays on the Use and Limit of Imagination in Science (London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 16–52. In the following extract the author insisted on the relationship between image and imagination: “Now philosophers may be right in affirming that we cannot transcend experience. But we can, at all events, carry it a long way from its origin. We can also magnify, diminish, qualify, and combine experiences, so as to render them fit for purposes entirely new. We are gifted with the power of Imagination – combining what the Germans call Anschauunfsgabe [sic] and Einbildungskraft – and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses” (16).
19 Beaumont Newhall, “Dual Focus,” Art News 45, no. 4 (1946): 36–9.
20 Beaumont Newhall, “Photographing the Reality of the Abstract,” New Directions 15 (1955): 161–71.
21 Laure Albin-Guillot, Micrographie Décorative (Paris: Draeger Frères, 1931), 2.
22 Laure Albin-Guillot’s plate has been displayed in the photomicrography section of the exhibition among Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories’ photos, and the works by A. E. Smith and Francis F. Lucas.
23 Beaumont Newhall, “Photographing the Reality”, 163.
24 Editors, “Visioni dell’astratto e dell’attimo fuggente,” Sapere 306 (1947): 270–3.
25 Ward Pease, “Ward Pease on Pictures for the Home”, Popular Photography 24, no. 3 (1949): 10.
26 John Lynch, “How to Make a Christmas Mobile,” Popular Science, December 1954, 197–200. For further readings see John Lynch, How to Make Mobiles (New York: Studio Publications, 1953).
27 André Masson, “Feuillets noirs,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 82 (1959): 654. Translation by Alessandro Ferraro: A New York art magazine once published a series of microphotographs under the title The new abstract vision, under which one could easily put the name of a painter of the so-called abstract tendency. The whole spectrum, from agonising geometric abstraction to nascent abstract expressionism, was displayed. The “motifs”: uranium fission, molecules of a pyrite crystal, zinc oxide fumes, magnesium… The masterpiece was the electronic microphotography of dye particles! Twenty-five thousand times magnified. The author: Radio Corporation of America Laboratories.
28 Krešimir Purgar, “Introduction,” 2.
29 An important reflection concerning imagination and scientific evidence can be found in work of Philip Ball, who recalls John Tyndall’s theories. Philip Ball, Invisible. The Dangerous Allure of What Is Not Seen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 182–83.
30 Bob Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (London: Phaidon, 2014), 5–11.
31 In his famous collected essays, while considering the contemporary idea of representation and reality, Peter Halley directly refers to the famous art critic Meyer Schapiro who tried, in the first half of the twentieth century, to define what an abstract image really meant for art history and visual culture. Peter Halley, “Notes on Abstraction,” Arts Magazine 61, (June 1987): 35–39. See also Isabelle Graw, “The Double Abstraction of the Art Commodity. On the Interference Between Symbolic and Market Values,” Texte Zur Kunst 69 (2008): 154–62; and Sebastian Egenhofer, “Four Theses on Abstraction,” Texte Zur Kunst 69 (2008): 139–45.
32 “The formula ‘photography of the invisible’ circumscribed a unique space of knowledge. It was regarded as the infallible inscription of real phenomena, but it did not indicate which phenomena were in play in each instance. … The pictures may figure as evidentiary material or indispensable illustration in a demonstration, but their existence as such is not already proof ‘that something invisible may really exist.’ Their function more closely resembles that of a model.” Peter Geimer, Inadvertent Images. A History of Photographic Apparitions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 146.
33 Diarmuid Costello, “What is Abstraction in Photography?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 58, no. 4 (2018): 386. Concerning the dialectic between visibility and invisibility in photography, see Dawn Wilson, “Invisible Images and Indeterminacy: Why We Need a Multi-stage Account of Photography,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79 (2021): 161–74.
34 Gean Moreno, In the Mind, 19.
35 Thomas Ruff’s photographic series ma.r.s. (2008 and on going, in collaboration with NASA and specific optical instruments such as the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) is one of the most famous artistic examples that deals with the notion of truth, photography, abstraction and scientific astronomical pictures. For further readings, see Lotte Philipsen and Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard, eds., The Aesthetics of Scientific Data Representation. More Than Pretty Pictures (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Milena Ivanova and Steven French, eds., The Aesthetics of Science. Beauty, Imagination and Understanding (New York: Routledge, 2020).
36 Krešimir Purgar, “Iconology as Cultural Symptomatology. Dinosaurs, Clones and the Golden Calf in Mitchell’s Image Theory,” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Image Theory. Living Pictures, ed. Krešimir Purgar (New York: Routledge, 2017), 82–3.
37 Norton Wise, “Making Visible,” ISIS 97, no. 1 (2006): 81–2.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alessandro Ferraro
ALESSANDRO FERRARO, art historian, is currently a PhD candidate in Contemporary Arts and Media Studies at the University of Genoa, Italy. After a curatorial master’s degree at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, he worked at the curatorial department of the GAM in Turin and in contemporary art galleries. In 2017 he received a research fellowship at the Stiftung Hans Arp in Berlin and in 2022 he obtained a research grant at the C. M. Lerici Stiftelsen (Stockholm) and at the Hilma af Klint Archive (Moderna Museet, Stockholm). His research focuses on the impact of contemporary theory of abstraction in contemporary art and visual studies (PhD thesis: “Abstraction as a Historical Condition: A Historiographical and Critical Approach to the History of Abstraction”). From 2019 he has taught the history of exhibitions and curatorial practices at the University of Genoa and, since 2022, has held a course entitled “Arts, Technologies and Anthropocene” at the University of Pisa. [email protected]
Marco Tamborini
MARCO TAMBORINI teaches history and philosophy of science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and is member of the Junge Akademie | Mainz -– Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz as well as a fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy. His research focuses on the history and philosophy of biology, technoscience and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. His current book project, entitled The Architecture of Evolution: The Science of Form in Twentieth-Century Evolutionary Biology (under contract with University of Pittsburgh Press) narrates the neglected contributions of the science of form to the recent development of evolutionary biology – and in particular, to the field of evolutionary developmental biology. He has received the 2017 Everett Mendelsohn Prize, and in 2020 an honorable mention from the Italian Society of the History of Science. [email protected]