I am writing a much longer and more detailed review than usual because I plan to attend a local book club's upcoming meeting to discuss this nonfiction book.

Tom Wolfe's small but potent book charts the course of Modern Art. The stylistic writing is as witty and provocative as Wolfe's earlier book "Radical Chic."

The genesis of the book's title stems from a revelation that Wolfe obtained from an art exhibit's 1974 review in the New York Times. The critic had basically stated that to view art without a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial for art appreciation. Wolfe restated the argument as "now it is not 'seeing is believing', but 'believing is seeing,' for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text."


Wolfe starts off by noting ironically that the Modern movement began about 1900 with a complete rejection of the literary nature of academic art. "Literary" came to refer to realistic paintings, while Modernism was "form for the sake of form, color for the sake of color." Paintings were no longer about anything in particular. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jasper Johns are cited as examples of Modernist painters.

Again and again, Wolfe refers to the differences between the elitist Modernists with their hip followers, and the common folk perceived as the bourgeoisie:
"Today there is a particularly modern reward that the avant-garde artist can bring his benefactors ... the feeling that they are in the vanguard march through the land of the philistines."

Many artists become so dedicated to bohemian values, they are unable to cut loose ... they come to the black-tie openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner jacket and paint-spattered Levi's."

And Wolfe believes the Modernist stronghold was not built by bohemians, but "founded in John D. Rockefeller's living room." The elite in America wanted to import the excitement of Picasso in Europe.

On into Pop Art, "a new order, but the same Mother Church." Thus, the arrival on the scene of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and of course, Andy Warhol.

Even a skewering of Op Art, in which "real art is nothing but what happens in your brain."

Eventually even the need for museums seemed absurd and bourgeois, hence the beginnings of Earth Art, such as Smithson's Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake.

Finally, toward the end of the twentieth century, Wolfe believes that "Modern art was about to fulfill its destiny: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple." And then "Art made its final flight, and disappeared up its own fundamental aperture ... and came out the other side as Art Theory." For Wolfe, that Art Theory is just words on a page, a literature without vision.

I ran across this recent segment in an interview of Wolfe:
"Chester Gould (drawer of Dick Tracy comics) had more skill than Roy Lichtenstein. There is a line I love in Tom Stoppard’s play Artist Descending a Staircase (1988), when one of the characters says, ‘Imagination without skill gives us modern art’. And I think it’s quite true. Someone like de Kooning couldn’t draw a cat on a fence; but he was considered to have true genius because he painted like a child – a very young child, I’d say."

Clement Greenberg famously said, regarding Pollock: “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” Wolfe claims that Pollock art looks ugly because it is!

Barbara Rose in the NY Review of Books:
"Tom Wolfe is an attractive writer because he makes hard things easy. He equips one for intellectual name-dropping, the very discourse of the upwardly mobile cocktail-party society of arrivistes for whom Wolfe reserves the greatest measure of his contempt."

Ms. Rose also writes: "When he deals with pop culture, Wolfe’s inability to grapple with ideas of any complexity is no disadvantage; the pop world can indeed be plumbed to its depth by scratching the surface."

So Tom Wolfe, a very skilled polemicist, effectively skewers most of the major 20th century artists and their famous art. Quite a tour de force!

This is a jumping off point for me to read criticisms of Wolfe’s criticism and the criticism that has drawn and follow this thread through articles, books, documentaries, etc. as a way to understand more of the conversation around Modern Art. Wolfe has given me a lot of starting material here.

I read this when I was very young, in my late teens. I thought it was terrific. It was witty, critical, satirical, and poked a lot of fun at the community of artists, collectors, dealers and fashionable rich people with terrible tastes. It was a quick and dirty easy read.

At that time, my idea of 'good' art ended at about 1930. Now, years later, as I see how art has developed over time, yes, we still have the superficial trendies and of course the overblown world of art as investment. But the art itself is not as silly as Wolfe made it out to be. A lot of it has held up, and makes sense in the context of its times. Rereading the book recently, I found it to be quite mean-spirited; it showed a lack of understanding of the art itself, and took some cheap shots as an opportunity for Wolfe to show how clever and sarcastic he could be. I wonder if he would write a different book today.

3 stars possibly for clever writing, but 2 for actual content.

This 1975 sarcastic work of journalism takes aim at the literary flatness of modern art, as the avant-garde types like Warhol moved from offering visual experiences to mere illustrations of art theories. I’m no real art critic, but as one marker of many to analyze culture by, I found Wolfe’s observations and critiques funny, apt, and illuminating. He made mention of art from Marxist cultures and how perfectly predictable and dull they are, and how intellectually unstimulating those and other representative ideological art fads are. I appreciated his wit and candor. I need to read him more. 2 hours or 112 pages of art history and critique.

Wolfe does have a zounds-slap-lightning way with phrases! I liked these: "the Uptown Museum-Gallery Complex," and, referring to deKooning and Pollack: "furious swipes of brush on canvas, ... splatters of unchained id."
You have to appreciate Wolfe for his bluster and charming if irritating and irascible ability to simplify everything to the level of the five-year-old, which is about the age of his persona as an essay writer, esp. circa 1974, when he wrote this. Nevertheless I was inspired to read this after loving John Updike's take-down of Richard Serra in the NY Review of Books. Writing in 1974, Wolfe seems to have already had the similar smart insight about contemporary art in the Serra vein, which is that it is fundamentally about consumption, abstracted from the essence of visual experience. Updike might say this more elegantly. Confession: Wolfe's essays are among my guilty pleasures as a reader.
I thought this was a smart insight about capitalism and art, about the 1965 Op Art show at MOMA: "By the time the Museum’s big Op Art show opened in the fall, two out of every three women entering the glass doors on West Fifty Third Street for the opening night hoopla were wearing print dresses that were knock-offs of the paintings that were waiting on the walls inside…. The Seventh Avenue garment industry gad cranked up and slapped the avant-garde into mass production."

Fantastic, will be using a lot of Wolfe's points in my thesis

In this snarky little gem, Tom Wolfe makes the case against Modern Art (Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in particular), arguing that its success is a phenomenon created entirely by art critics who enjoyed the challenge of trying to convince the public that, say, a canvass painted pure white is a powerful and important thing. In Wolfe's telling, the important thing in abstract art isn't the work itself, but the web of words that critics like Clement Greenberg were able to spin around it. In other words, it's a scam. A pretentious scam.

Having now read a few of Tom Wolfe’s lesser-known nonfiction books, the quality is higher with his more educational/topical survey works (e.g., evolution and “The Kingdom of Speech”) than his dated, piercing social commentary essays (e.g., clueless snowflakes and “Radical Chic”).

This one falls into the former, and he focuses on modern art’s journey from abstract expressionism and its heroes (Pollock) to pop art (Warhol) to conceptual art. Of course, he mocks it all. Particular scorn is showered on how critics applied theory to each movement — and then, how art itself became *the* theory ... i.e., the way art was interpreted through words mattered more than the brushstrokes themselves.

Interesting, but likely forgettable.

...mastered a defining characteristic of the contemporary art industry: the fine art of double-tracking. To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, uptown and downtown, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware. The exemplary double-tracker, wrote Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word in 1975, arrives at a private view at MoMA in a dinner jacket and paint splattered Levis, exclaiming ‘I’m still a virgin! (Where’s the champagne?)'

....THE PIOUS AND THE POMMERY - ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN

This is a short and very entertaining read especially if you are an art geek like me. Tom Wolfe talks about the modern art movement from the beginning of 1900 to 1975. It's refreshing and funny to some extent he focuses more on the critics Greenberg, Rosenberg & Steinberg than the actual artists of each movement. This is much in line with his main theme in the book that all great art is about art and without a theory to go with it, you can't see a painting.

Survey of 20th-century art in a one day read. Or don't read it and just think about reading it and call it art.

Wolfe is a sassy duck. I like his style and content.

Very entertaining the second time round.