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

Leonardo, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 210-212, 1981 Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/8 1/0302 10-03$02.00/0 Pergarnon Press Ltd. A COMMENTARY ON HAROLD OSBORNE‘S BOOK ABSTRACTION AND ARTIFICE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURYART Ralph A. Smith* 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 [I]. 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 ofartists 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 ~ 210 *Teacher of cultural and educational policy. Dept. of Educational Policy Studies, 360 Education Building, University of Illinois. Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A.(Received 25 April 1980) picture semantic theme and syntactical composition unite inextricably to convey an expressivecharacter of Arcadian joy and light-heartedness which neither the theme alone nor the composition alone could achieve. The prestige which has attached to this picture depends upon its successful use of decorative or aesthetic abstraction to unite semantic and syntactical information into an expressive continuum. In it the artist has achieved a very closely knit amalgam of semantic, syntactical, and expressive features’ (p. 13). Then on Futurism: ’ ...it is hardly open to doubt that the concern of the Futurist artists for rendering dynamic movement extended both semantically to the choice of subject-matter (speeding objects) and syntactically to the organization of their compositions-though they did not succeed in distinguishing the two’ (p. 83). And, finally, on the cubists: ‘In all these styles the interest in producing an aesthetic composition with “syntactical” appeal came to be as strong as, or even stronger than, the semantic interest in depiction. As may be seen particularly clearly in some of the major works of the Vorticists, the distinction between semantic abstraction and non-ionic abstraction was unimportant and the main interest lay in producing a characteristic composition of forms’ (p. 100). These examples also indicate the extent to which the concept of expression pervades Osborne’s study. An analysis of expression is set out in Chapter 2 where...