A Commentary on Harold Osborne's Book "Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art"

Abstract

In this new interpretation of 20th-century visual art, Harold Osborne forsakes historical and sociological criticism in favor of an approach in which he examines the problems that artists themselves say they faced [1]. To this end a wealth of commentary by numerous artists is cited, that documents, with varying degrees of clarity, the whys and wherefores of their efforts. This, I take it, is what Osborne means when he says he has interpreted 20thcentury art in a way that has not been tried before. I further take it to be distinctive of his interpretation that he brings to bear on his subject a considerable knowledge not only of the visual art produced in the period he covers (roughly the 100 years from 1879 to 1979) but also of philosophical aesthetics and the psychology of perception. Indeed, Osborne's use of theoretical aesthetics should resolve any doubts regarding its relevance for understanding historical developments in contemporary visual art, and art historians who make a point of saying aesthetics does not figure in their studies would do well to ponder his accomplishment. The plan of attack on the two main themes of his study -abstraction and its various modes and the repudiation of artifice-first sets out his reasons for using concepts from information theory to discuss these tendencies. The principal reason derives from the belief that from among the functions that works of art have performed throughout the history of art the desire of artists to communicate with others has remained basic and perennial. The question thus turns on the kind of information artists have been conveying and on the shape and style of their messages. Osborne finds it convenient to appropriate from information theory the notions of semantic information (information about a work's representational references to external reality), syntactical information (information about a work's interrelations or formal structure) and expressive information (information about a work's physiognomic, emotional and aesthetic qualities). My first impulse upon noting the use of information theory was scepticism because of the trouble its concepts have given some aestheticians. I was pleased to discover, however, that the terminology works rather well. And it is the terminology that is borrowed, not the highly technical analyses one associates with the application of information theory. The following are a few examples of how the concepts are used by Osborne. On Matisse's 'The Joy of Life' (1905-06): 'In this