Introduction

This Introduction explains the author’s longstanding fascination with abstraction as a keyword both in critical thought and as a mode of modernist art. In posing the question, ‘what do we want from abstraction?’, it explains the need for an approach that collapses the conventional distinction between abstraction as thought and as art, and that is informed by the logic of the case study and juxtaposition rather than that of a linear intellectual history. To examine abstraction in modernism and modernity, it proposes, is to observe the term’s ceaselessly shifting and contradictory work, and a dialectic between reproach and affirmation. The Introduction proceeds to survey the aims and contents of each of the succeeding chapters as they move towards delineating abstraction’s mediation of the values of human and inhuman, and its figuring through modernism of a mode of intellectual work beyond existing inequalities of class, literacy and education.