ABSTRACT
James Clerk Maxwell’s famous derivation of the abstract equations of the electromagnetic field in the two decades leading up to 1873 is a singular instance of methodological abstraction in physics. Piet Mondrian’s development of pure plastic or non-objectivist art 50 years later is regarded as a key episode in the emergence of abstract art. This chapter explores suggestive analogies between abstraction in physics and painting, by comparing Maxwell and Mondrian’s routes to abstract form. In both cases, I argue, abstraction is a process that strips away layers of materiality in a concrete reality in order to reveal its abstract form. I contrast this account of abstraction as a creative process with the conventional philosophical distinction between abstraction and idealisation as features of the products of this process. The conventional distinction can be given an informational gloss, in terms of noise and equivocation in a communication channel, which is insufficient to characterise the broader notion of abstraction as a process.
