The Panofsky-Newman Controversy: Iconography and Iconology Put to the Test of "Abstract" Art

Starting from Erwin Panofsky’s well-known polemical exchange of letters with Barnett Newman, and taking into account some few hints to contemporary artists which can be found into the Princeton Professor’s private correspondence, this essay deals with the theoretical reasons why one of the most original and influent art historians of the whole 20th Century has never really come to terms with even the notion of “abstract” art. It then focuses on the seemingly paradoxical concept of “abstract sublime” as proposed by Robert Rosenblum and further developed by Jean-François Lyotard in order to show how iconographic-iconological analysis could be fruitfully applied to non-figurative works of art.