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Jack the Dripper, the king of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement author Tom Wolfe didn't hold in high regard
You will be hard-pressed to find a more lively, wittier book on the phenomenon of modern art than Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, a 100-page romp through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s where the author jabs his sharp satirical needle with signature debunking flare into Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
And that’s 'Painted Word’ as in Wolfe’s epiphany while reading an article in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section. Ah, reflected Tom: “Modern Art has become completely literary: the painting and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”
To put it another way, Tom realized, regarding modern art, all his previous trips to museums and galleries to view the work of painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were uninformed since he neglected a critical first step – understanding the theory revealed via the text, those oh-so-important words. Oh, rats, Tom fumed, all my hours squinting and starring at unintelligible paintings and I never comprehended those massive cutting-edge, avant-garde canvases were based on ideas and philosophies outlined by hyper-perceptive, authoritative art theorists.
For the Abstract Expressionists, Clement Greenberg was the first to expound the theory. Wolfe writes, “In Greenberg’s eyes, the Freight Train of Art History had a specific destination...It was time to clear the tracks at last of all the remaining rubble of the pre-Modern way of painting. And just what was this destination? On this point Greenberg couldn’t have been clearer: Flatness.”
Nope, none of that old-fashion three-dimensional representation – paintings of portraits, landscapes, bowls of fruit, even if painted in cubes or dots, no, no, no, no. “What was needed was purity – a style in which lines, forms, contours, colors all became unified on the flat surface.” Now, attending an art event armed with Greenberg’s theory, all those Pollocks and Rothkos make abundant sense.
Then as Tom Wolfe points out, a second major theorist, Harold Rosenberg, added another dimension. “Rosenberg came up with a higher synthesis, a theory that combined Greenberg’s formal purity with something that had been lacking in abstract art from the early Synthetic Cubist days and ever since: namely, the emotional wallop of the old realistic pre-Modern pictures.” And then Wolfe quotes Rosenberg directly: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an area in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Oh, Wolfe proclaims, now I get it – understood as pure action painting, all those Pollocks really, really make sense!
As Wolfe continues: “A Promethean artist gorged with emotion and overloaded with paint, hurling himself and his brushes at the canvas as if in hand-to-hand combat with Fate. There!...there!... there in those furious swipes of the brush on canvas, in those splatters of unchained id, one could see the artist’s emotion itself – still alive! – in the final product.”
And after Abstract Expressionism, its Warhol and Pop Art, Bridget Riley and Op Art, Frank Stella and Minimalist Art, Lawrence Weiner and Conceptual Art, all on the receiving end of the author’s cynical, caustic barbs.
And what do I myself think of Tom Wolfe on the subject of modern art? Permit me to answer by way of an experience: When I was twelve-years old I accompanied my mother when she took a summer workshop at a local college for Sunday school teachers. She took me to the college bookstore and told me I could pick out any book I wanted. Ah, my very first book, ever! I scanned the bookshelves; there was a series of small books on various types of art and I chose a book with a cover that fascinated me on two counts: first, the picture – a combination of colors and shapes arranged geometrically - orange circles, black half circles, purple and cream rectangles, large dark green squares and a black square in the middle; second, two words on the cover: Abstract Art. ‘Abstract' resonated with me, a word starting with that bold ‘A’ and having such an otherworldly sound, a word with an ‘A’ matching the ‘A’ in art.
Back at the dormitory where I was staying, I turned the pages, both fascinated and mesmerized by all the paintings. The next day I played sick so I wouldn't have to go to the kid’s workshop class. I remained in my room with paper and crayons doing my best copying the art in the book. By the end of the day, when one of the Sunday school teachers returned to the dormitory, I proudly showed her my drawing and my book. She promptly belittled my efforts: "You don't have this black spot in the right place." “Your colors don't match what's in the book at all." She was furious I did what I did. My response to her fury was not to be upset, but to be pleased. I enjoyed being transported to this special, new world of art and how this art could trigger such a violent emotional reaction in an adult.
In retrospect, I can only smile at the encounter - a boy's entering into the world of abstract art and communicating his love to a Sunday school teacher. Now wonder she was so mad! And, predictably, she countered with all the judgment and outrage she could muster as spokeswoman for the conventional, average, bland, mundane world. On reading The Painted Word, I can't help but wonder how much Tom Wolfe has in common with that Sunday school teacher.
