Re-reading some of my favorites by the late Tom Wolfe. This book is still painfully, awesomely funny.

Tom Wolfe takes on the art world! Tom Wolfe critiques the leading theories in contemporary art! Tom Wolfe tells you all about the different stages of being an artist, from the Boho Dance to the Consummation which ensures critical success! Tom Wolfe takes on the mysteries of abstract art! You can imagine him, can’t you, in his pristine white suit, squinting close at an abstract canvas up on the wall of some Seventh Avenue gallery uptown, one of those galleries that doesn’t want to look like they’re trying too hard, that serves cheap box wine at show openings and has little cheeseballs on platters, and those little one-bite brownies that the receptionist ran out to get at Whole Foods on her lunchbreak. Delicious! The receptionist is one of those girls you see at practically every gallery, the fine-boned, sleek, mini-skirt wearing type, just out of college with a B.A. in Art History; ready to conquer the art world! Wolfe has her sized up right away-she flirts a little with the male customers, but just enough to make them confused as to if she’s actually flirting or not. They can never tell, so they keep coming back for more! And she’s eagerly solicitous of the female customers, dropping little tidbits from her daily life into her conversations with them to make her seem “relatable,” “friendly,” and not a “husband-stealing bitch.” Wolfe keeps staring at the painting, and suddenly, WHOMP! He sees it! He wonders to himself, why is it so damn flat? Why isn’t there any pigment visible on the canvas? I’m looking at a painting, but why can’t I tell that it’s a painting? It’s the damnedest thing! So he walks out of the gallery, with his hat and his walking stick, and he ponders. He makes his way to the nearest bookstore and finds their art section. He starts reading criticism. He reads Clement Greenberg, the patron saint of Abstract Expressionism. And then he learns about flatness! The sacred integrity of the picture plane! Wolfe becomes determined to peel the layers of the onion that is contemporary art.

That’s not actually the way it happened, of course.

In his 1975 book The Painted Word Tom Wolfe, America’s favorite white-suited New Journalist, examined the New York City art scene and the leading critics of the past 30 years. The Painted Word is a slim little volume, just 100 pages in my Bantam reprint paperback, but the book packs quite a punch. In the opening pages of the book, Wolfe tells us how he got interested in writing about art theory. He was reading The New York Times on April 28, 1974, when he read an article by Hilton Kramer that basically said, in Wolfe’s words, “In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.” (p.2) Wolfe naturally wondered how modern art had arrived at this point. Wolfe focuses most on the theories of the three leading art critics of that era: Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Greenberg was the most influential of the three, and his mantra about the “the integrity of the picture plane” led to his endorsement of Abstract Expressionist painting. And not much else, at least, not until Post-Painterly Abstraction came into vogue in the mid 1960’s. Greenberg didn’t have much time for art that didn’t conform to his formulas about what great art should be. Pop Art? Meh, it was too figurative, too literal. And those artists were getting their ideas from pop culture and comic books! It couldn’t be serious art! Serious art came from deep inside your soul! And the way they made their art-using commercial art techniques like silk screening! Horrors!

One of Wolfe’s theories that he posits in The Painted Word is that artists, consciously or unconsciously, begin to change their styles to conform to what is popular with art critics. This theory did not exactly endear Wolfe to artists. But was he right? It’s impossible to say, since no artist would probably own up to being overly influenced by the critical mood of their time. But, as Wolfe points out in the book, many of the leading Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman all started out as figurative artists before moving to abstraction in the late 1940’s. Was that just the way their work was naturally headed, or did ideas from critics like Clement Greenberg influence the direction of their work?

Wolfe was quite right to focus his book on Clement Greenberg’s influential role in the criticism of this period. Back in college when I was taking an Art History class about Contemporary Art from 1945 to the present, I thought that it could easily be retitled, “Clement Greenberg’s Influence on Art and the Reaction to it.” Most of the “important” American painting of the 1945-1975 period was either clearly expressing his theories about art or rejecting them. Of course, it’s not as though artists were sitting around saying, “How can I express my rejection of Clement Greenberg’s ideas?” Pop Art was certainly a reaction to the dominant strain of Abstract Expressionism that was then fashionable. Abstract Expressionism was deeply serious, and scornful of any kind of pop culture influences. But artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, two artists whose works were important precursors to Pop Art, started to create work in the mid 1950’s that was clearly influenced by the outside world. Johns and Rauschenberg seemed to be saying, we’re not ascetic monks locked away in our downtown lofts working away at our version of an illuminated manuscript. We’re real people who drink Coke and read the newspaper. Even Johns’ seemingly simple paintings of flags and targets were painted over newspapers, leaving traces of the writing visible underneath the surface image. Johns and Rauschenberg were important influences on Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who both started creating paintings based on comic strips and newspaper photographs. Warhol and Lichtenstein married high and low culture in their Pop Art paintings and silk screens in a way that was abhorrent to most of the Abstract Expressionists.

The Painted Word follows American art through the dominant movements from 1945 until 1975: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Op Art, Color Field Painting, and Post-Painterly Abstraction, to the beginnings of Earth Art. Wolfe shows how art critics constantly shifted their theories so that the new work would still fit into Greenberg’s obsession with flatness. Leo Steinberg had to do some rhetorical backflips to make Jasper Johns fit into the flatness box. He basically said that it was all okay because Johns had picked objects to paint like flags and targets that were already flat to begin with! Perfect!

In one of the most brilliant parts of the book, Wolfe writes about how critics had to be constantly ahead of the game: “In an age of avant-gardism, no critic can stop a new style by meeting it head-on. To be against what is new is not to be modern. Not to be modern is to write yourself out of the scene. Not to be in the scene is to be nowhere. No, in an age of avant-gardism the only possible strategy to counter a new style which you detest is to leapfrog it. You abandon your old position and your old artists, leaping over the new style, land beyond it, point back to it, and say: ‘Oh, that’s nothing. I’ve found something newer and better…way out here.’” (p.68)

What Wolfe correctly sees is that if you have to keep moving farther and farther out to be on the leading edge, eventually you’re going to fall off the edge. And that’s what happened to painting during the time period he examines. How flat can you get? How abstract can you get? How many traditional pictorial elements can you completely eliminate from your work and still have a painting? Robert Rauschenberg beat the Minimalists at their own game a decade before they came on the scene: he was painting all-white canvases as early as 1951! You can’t get more Minimalist than that! The only thing you can see on those all-white canvases of Rauschenberg’s is the reflection of the gallery: he’s really letting the outside world in, as you focus on all those other people who are absorbed in the act of looking at art.

At the end of the book, Wolfe shows us the only logical conclusion to these theories: there’s not even an art object anymore, it’s just a set of instructions about how to make an art object. In this way, Wolfe says, the game has come full circle: by trying to rid itself of “literary” references like people and landscapes, modern art has ultimately become literary, as there are only words to describe it, and not an actual physical object like a painting or sculpture!

The Painted Word caused a great critical furor when it was released, and critics of all stripes attacked Wolfe. He discussed the reaction to the book at length in his 1991 interview in The Paris Review:

“It was the most vitriolic response I’ve ever had anywhere, much more so than Radical Chic or Bonfire of the Vanities. The things that I was called in print were remarkable. In fact, there were so many, I started categorizing them. One was ‘psychiatric insults’—the usual thing, this man is obviously sick. Then there were the ‘political insults’—usually I was called a fascist but occasionally a communist, a commissar. And then there were the curious round of insults I called the ‘X-rated insults,’ all taking the same form which was, This man who wrote the book is like a six-year-old at a pornographic movie; he can follow the motions of the bodies but he cannot comprehend the nuances. I always thought it was a very strange sort of insult because it cast contemporary art as pornography and I was the child. In various forms this metaphor was repeated by several different reviewers. Robert Hughes used it. He had the full image, the six-year-old, the grunts and groans, the pornographic movie and the rest of it. In the Times John Russell referred to me as a eunuch at the orgy. I think he was afraid that too many of his readers would be overstimulated by the thought of a six-year-old at a pornographic movie. So I became a eunuch at an orgy. Because of the similarity of the sexual metaphors, I was curious about this and was told later on that there had been a dinner in Bedford, New York, shortly after The Painted Word came out . . . a number of art world figures, including Robert Motherwell, in somebody’s fancy home. The subject of The Painted Word came up and Motherwell supposedly said, You know, this man Wolfe reminds me of a six-year-old at a pornographic movie. He can follow the motion of the bodies but he can’t comprehend the nuances. If it’s true, it shows what a small world the art world is. Actually that was one of the points I was trying to make in The Painted Word—that three thousand people, no more than that certainly, with roughly three hundred who live outside of the New York metropolitan area, determine all fashion in art. As far as I can tell, it was Motherwell’s conceit; he is an influential, major figure, and it spread from this dinner table in Bedford overnight, as it were.”

Wolfe coined the term “Cultureburg” to refer to the denizens of the New York art world, and he estimates that about 10,000 people around the world make up the art world. (p.21) In the same Paris Review interview, Wolfe explains why he thought the book made them so upset:

“Now maybe I’m flattering myself, but I think what made a bigger impact than the usual diatribe was that what I wrote was a history; there’s not a single critical judgment in the piece. It’s a history of taste, and I think that approach—it’s pitted on the level of a history of fashion—was infuriating. The art world can deal very easily with anybody who says they don’t like Pollock or they don’t like Rauschenberg, so what if you don’t. But to say these people blindly follow Clement Greenberg’s or Harold Rosenberg’s theories, which is pretty much what The Painted Word is saying, and that a whole era was not visual at all but literary, now that got them.”

Wolfe probably should have anticipated some of the criticism he received, since he was essentially an outsider to the fields of art history and art criticism. Wolfe didn’t establish his bona fides for being an art critic, and I think this was a big reason why critics were so hostile to the book. Wolfe appeared on William F. Buckley’s television show Firing Line in July of 1975 to discuss The Painted Word, and in his introduction of Wolfe, Buckley hit upon a major flaw of the book:

“Some of the critics have sworn an eternal hostility to him. In their criticisms they would appear to score on one point. I say they would appear to score because it is true that there is no internal evidence in The Painted Word that Tom Wolfe is himself a connoisseur of art or that he has read deeply into art history, though he may have done so and decided for editorial reasons not to encumber his thesis with that knowledge.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.73)

Like Wolfe’s later book on architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, which I reviewed last year here, The Painted Word commits a cardinal sin for a non-fiction book: it has no footnotes and does not cite any of its sources. As Buckley said, we don’t know what Tom Wolfe has read about art history and art criticism. We don’t even know where the quotes he’s using are coming from! It always amazes me that an editor or publisher wouldn’t demand to have quotations cited in a non-fiction book.

Wolfe does not tell us what art he likes and what art he doesn’t like in The Painted Word, and on Firing Line he explains why:

“The book is really a social comedy…and to me it really wasn’t necessary to like or dislike a single work of art or a single artist in order to point this out. And I think in a way this is what has gotten under the skin of more critics and art historians than anything else. The one thing they’re not prepared to deal with is the process by which art becomes serious, the process by which it becomes praised, and so on.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.74)

Wolfe’s signature flamboyant writing style is evident throughout The Painted Word. The first exclamation point comes at the end of the second sentence in the book. Wolfe’s engaging style makes the book a pleasure to read, and I enjoyed it more than From Bauhaus to Our House. I think Wolfe makes some valid points about art critics of that time being too influential. If you’re interested in American art from 1945-1975, The Painted Word will no doubt bring forth strong emotions.

If you approach Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word, skeptical as to why an accomplished writer would write a critic of Modern Art, then your likely to still be asking that question when you finish. Wolfe’s premise is that Modern Art or Abstract Expressionism, which became popular after World War 11, is incomprehensible, hard to look at, and produces anxiety. He says the essential principal of this art is flatness and that three-dimensional effects are pre-modern having been around since the Renaissance. He says that flatness becomes a goal diluting meaning and message.

Wolfe claims his righteous indignation was the result of what was his reading in the Sunday New York Times in April 1974 when he was surprised to find this paragraph:

“Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with the works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial- the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

This may be the reason he wrote the book, but it looks a lot like a bandwagon that came by and he jumped on to tell the world that the modern artists really don’t have anything to say and, of course, the best and meaningful message is from the writers.

Wolfe refers to the well-educated people who appreciate the arts, saying this smug elite group have made the decision as to what art is for everyone. This is disturbing to him because he sees it changing a world order that he prides himself in understanding, and believes that the contemporary artists, conspiring with the elites, are changing things for no definable reason.

Tom Wolfe’s message is to critique Abstract Expressionism, which he says evolved to Minimalism and then to Conceptual Art. His real message may be just an approach to satire the social life and radical politics of the art world, and of course to tell us how smart he is. More on this book at www.connectedeventsmatter.com

A clear and concise easy to read book about why the contemporary art world is what it is. The author claims that contemporary visual art no longer speaks for itself, but needs an interpreter and justifier to speak for it, something like the Emperor'S New Clothes fable. Why is the intellectualization and vocalization about a work of art more important than the work itself? Why has "the words" used to communicate about an artwork become more important than the visual cues used to communicate in the work itself? A must read for any thinking artist.

This is a quick zoomer of a read that sums up the modern art movements from the '20s through the late '60s. It contains black-and-white reproductions of some of the art he references so the reader can get a grip and hang on for a few more pages.

Wolfe's sardonicism is awesome and hilarious in this one. I liked that he wasn't too serious, but that he treated the history seriously.

Recommended for people who think art is nice but don't have the time for it.

Tom Wolfe—as lofty, mocking and condescending as he can be, he is at least never boring.

In The Painted Word, Wolfe takes his sharp and keen eye into the art world. In a Paul Revere-like-way, Wolfe implicitly warns in this long-form essay that “the art world has gone mad!” He observes artists, and the culturati surrounding them, prostrating to a new all-powerful God, Theory—without which, it is all but impossible to understand any piece of art. All the -isms, Wolfe says, like Surrealism, Cubism, Abstract Expression, or Late Modernism, all haul with them their own individualized Theory to subtly apotheosize the art to the status of divine enigma and thus proportionally elevate its market value.

He covers a lot of history in a little amount of time, which can be head-spinning at times, but also brings a level of excitement and motion to a topic that people without much knowledge of art like me need to keep reading.

This is a great little work of critique and history of contemporary art which serves as a proper introduction to a deeper learning about the relationship between art and theory. Wolfe’s opinions are entertaining and as always, an exemplar of fine non-fiction writing, but I, of course, want to form my own.

While I agree that the art world is a closed community, and presents art to the public as a fait accompli and his other social criticisms are often poignant. I do disagree with the central thesis in that most modern art is not anymore reliant on theories than most “representational” art of the previous few centuries. I also don’t believe that modern art and its theories are inaccessible or unrelatable to the public or at least more so than past painting styles. Many people who have experienced a Rothko have been moved by it with a complete lack of any underlying theory. The writing is good though and I would recommend since it’s quite short.

3.25

It's easy to see why The Painted Word has lingered in the public consciousness. There's something wonderful about a sharp wit pointed at inflated egos and hollow temples. On that level, Wolfe hits his mark, holstering his pistol in his final line: "With what sniggers, laughter and good humored amazement they will look back upon the era of the Painted Word" -- in other words, the era in which the quality of art was reduced to the quality of its theory.

But the small book is also kind of a slog. It's almost like being corned at a party by a smarmy, somewhat sexist guest who's only just too happy to tell you why he's smarter than all the other guests ... and the hosts, too. It's fine to jeer the self-appointed keepers of "Cultureberg," but the art produced at the time still has merit and value. The conceptualists reaction against representational art was, at the very least, understandable. It's possible that the public had to be "talked into" appreciating it, sure, but I can imagine that the public had to be "talked into" enjoying centuries of commissioned representational art, too. Wolfe doesn't seem interested in these points, or really anything that will keep him from sharpening his barbs and feathering his cap.

Tom Wolfe rips the pish out of art critics using their own chosen weapon - the word.
This was probably about round 6 of a 12 rounder between painting and theory. Up to this pont Theory had been winning every round and it looked like painting was going to have to throw in the towel and abandon the title. Wolfe stepped into Painting's corner and this round was a decisive winner.
Nobody seems to know what the final outcome of the Championship bout was..... but Painting is still alive and going from strength to strength if not at the cutting edge of lard-'n'-feathers, sharks-in-tanks, used-tampaxes-in-tents that n  ISn the current leading edge of a few sychos in White Cube land. And as for Theory and Critics? Well, they are still there underpinned and supported by the whole government-funded Art establishment and Art School hegemony attempting still to usurp the work of art for the description of the work of art - that is to hijack the artist by intellectualising something that is not - fundamentally - an intellectual process.

Razor-edged wit, entertaining writing style, humor, incredibly detailed insider history of modern art, and the evisceration of art critics wholesale...what’s not to love?!

This short work was jam-packed with historical details. I read this before my art classes started and thank goodness! What a brilliant framework to have on hand. I felt like I had a grip on the coursework ahead of time and with so many zingers in mind from this little gem. Excellent!

In my experience pursuing art as one half of my double major, I have primarily developed an increasing appreciation for the depth of human hypocrisy. For starters, Marxist theory is regularly thrown at us in order to validate the artistic principles at work in the modern gallery, and yet it is nakedly obvious at least to me that the mere existence of a category of "fine art" which operates on certain principles one must learn in school is one that primarily serves to create class distinctions.

Similarly, contemporary art very often serves as a reflection of postmodern theory. Post-modernism, we are told, is the rejection of historical narratives which privilege a dominant group and marginalize others. And yet the entire contemporary art education seems to serve entirely to create a dominant narrative - true art is anything that "responds" to earlier works in The History of Art, anything else is lowbrow art or merely "mass media".

In a sense, Wolfe in this book applies a "postmodern" deconstruction of the dominant narrative behind modern and contemporary art, attempting to describe the economic and social forces which caused certain things to hang in a gallery and other things not to. His cynical reading of the history of modern art is a sort of obvious one in a sense, an emperor-has-no-clothes moment. And yet, when one is around these artist types, you begin to suspect that for some people, even intelligent people, to be exposed to Wolfe's thesis might be a shocking revelation.

Certainly the art establishment attacked this book in full fury. From Wikipedia:

Other critics responded with such similar vitriol and hostility that Wolfe said their response demonstrated that the art community only talked to each other. A review in The New Republic called Wolfe a fascist and compared him to the brainwashed assassin in the film The Manchurian Candidate. Wolfe was particularly amused, however, by a series of criticisms that resorted to 'X-rated insults.' An artist compared him to "A six-year-old at a pornographic movie; he can follow the action of the bodies but he can't comprehend the nuances." A critic in Time Magazine used the same image, but with an 11-year-old boy. A review in The New York Times Book Review used the image again, clarifying that the boy was a eunuch. The opening of Krauss's review in Partisan Review compared Wolfe to the star of the pornographic film Deep Throat. The reviewer viewed Wolfe's lack of a suggestion for what should replace modern art as similar in its obtuseness to statements Linda Lovelace made about Deep Throat being a 'kind of goof.'

Reading about the reaction to this book really solidified in my mind the notion that while there are institutions in our society that do an okay job of providing a platform for those who wish to penetrate the depths of human intelligence and creativity, the contemporary gallery art community is not one of them. The general community of literary and philosophically minded people appeared to receive this book well and think it revealed a valid critique - the gallery art people despised it.

The book's main flaw, however, is its overly casual tone. The book is short, and it reads more like a sort of impromptu rant than anything which attempts to be an objective investigation or a sophisticated argument. Wolfe genuinely does not seem like he cares to be very well-versed in the art theory he criticizes. I think that's fine to a certain extent - one does not need to e.g. read all of David Icke's books on reptilian conspiracies to know that he is a fraud - but it makes it difficult to persuade a hostile audience.

Wolfe also seems a little overly reactionary. I get the impulse to deride Pollock, but he heavily criticizes even Picasso, an artist whom I think has managed to appeal to many casual museum-goers even outside of the art crowd, thus justifying his merit. A more nuanced, in-depth takedown of art theory would appeal much more to me. If art matters at all, it is obvious that the current institutions are deeply cancerous and need to be critiqued in a way that can reform them. And if not, then, well, what are we doing here? Wolfe seems to take the "if not" line - he has no real grander ambition here other than to reveal the art world for the object of mockery that it is to a sympathetic audience.

A pretty good expose on the pretentiousness and questionable abilities of modern artists (circa '50s, '60s, '70s). The part that sticks with me is Wolfe's rundown of the surprisingly small modern art clique and its worlwide haunts.

An updated version should be produced, considering we have all this new and more dreadful material in the art world since 1975.