Slow and feeble. Apparently this book enjoys so-called cult status, but I must admit I had never heard of it until a movie came along. (Although I haven't seen the movie, it's clear from the trailer that they saw fit to improve on 1/the setting 2/the characters 3/a fair bit of the plot and still it bombed). James Figueras, 35, is a rising art critic who has left himself drift into a relationship with Berenice, a luscious high school teacher from Duluth. The fact that Figueras is half Puerto Rican is mentioned several times, without it mattering to the plot in the end. A famous criminal lawyer and art collector named Joseph Cassidy prompts Figueras to steal a painting from a legendary French painter, Jacques Debierue, whom he has helped to relocate to a tiny house near a swamp outside Palm Beach after the aged artist lost his French home to a fire. The carrot for Figueras is that he'll get a chance to interview the famously reclusive painter whose new whereabouts are kept secret. Convinced that this exclusive will be his big break, Figueras sets off to meet Debierue, with Berenice implausibly in tow. Debierue turns out to be a very nice old gent who plies the young couple with frozen orange juice and third-rate frozen dinners but adamantly refuses to show any of his recent work to Figueras. While Debierue spends his evening at the local drive-in, Figueras sneaks into the artist's studio and finds out that Debierue hasn't painted ANYTHING at all since arriving in Florida, or probably ever. The discovery sends his head spinning but without losing a beat he steals some of the unused painting equipment, sets the studio on fire, and leaves with the plan of faking a Debierue painting for Cassidy and writing a fictitious assessment of Debierue's recent work. Although it is clear why Debierue, Cassidy, and all the experts who made a career out of Debierue's non-existent masterpieces have a stake in the truth not coming out, Willeford failed to convince me that Figueras was cynical and cool enough to pull it off. It felt to me like Berenice was only included in the plot to raise the stakes and make for a violent ending. In other hands, say Yasmina Reza's, such material could have turned into a sour and witty book, but then she has already written "Art", hasn't she? In a final twist, after achieving his life's ambition, Figueras, who has got away with the murder of Berenice, whose body was never found, surrenders to the police, claiming that it was "a crime of passion." Honestly I don't know what to make of the last words of this novel. Had I been more engaged with the protagonist, I suppose I would have found this ambiguous revelation very satisfying, but the weak narrative voice is one of the many problems of this rather dull noir.

Landing somewhere between Elmore Leonard and Charles Portis, this was a fun way to spend time in the American Southeast with a handful of weirdos who are totally full of shit each in their own unique way

possibly the most misogynistic book i have ever read

I got to 72% of the book and I just couldn’t finish it. I don’t know what it was that annoyed me at this point, but I’ll save it to re-read another day and see if it was just the space my mind was in while reading it.

Willeford is a talented writer but the first 2/3rds of the book sort of bored me. I get the appeal of art and art criticism but I don't have much interest in reading books about it, even short ones like this.

But that final 1/3rd...wow. Once things get set in motion, Willeford's set up about what nihilistic surrealism is and how it functions with regards to the story and what he's trying to say as an author pays off in an enormous way, right up to the thrilling conclusion. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

This is the first Willeford book that I've read that was a bit of a dud to me (not counting the collection of posthumously published short stories). It starts slow, the middle is slow, the end is sort of exciting for like 3 pages, and then it's all slow again. I could not stand the narrator. And unlike with most of Willeford's other protagonists (none of whom are all that likeable) I couldn't find one aspect of Figueras that I could tolerate. I would not ever want to be in the same room as that dude, lest I get stuck listening to him pontificate about contemporary art, which--SPOILER ALERT--is what he does for the entire novel. SHUT UP YOU ARE BORING. I think maybe if he would have been developed a bit more into perhaps a Harvey Pekar-type I could have related to him a bit more. Not that one should ever really relate to Willeford's characters, but at least he'd be more well rounded and less of a droning asshole.

The exciting three pages are good, but still not great, and not nearly enough to save this, although good enough to get it 2 stars versus 1. Also, the actual ending? HATED IT.

And, seriously, Willeford, can I get like one female character who isn't deplorable? At this point, I'm not even asking for a strong female character, just one who does something aside from drink, have sex, ask annoying questions, and get in the way.

I think I'm more of a fan of Willeford's later stuff. I like the ultra violence. And I like a crime gotten away with from time to time. And, yes, goddamnit, I like Hoke Moseley.

The Burnt Orange Heresy [1971, Charles Willeford] is a great send up of the art world -the first half is hilarious. Then Willeford takes a sharp turn…crime & punishment. The “protagonist” Jaime, James Figueras is a young and ambitious art critic, and transplant from NYC to Palm Beach. “Only twenty-five full-time art critics in America, out of a population of more than two hundred million! This is a small number, indeed, of men who are able to look at art and understand it, and then interpret it in writing in such a way that those who care can share the aesthetic experience.” And “learned the deep, dark secret of criticism. Thinking, the process of thinking, and the man thinking are all one and the same. And if this is true, and I live as though it is, then the man painting, the painting, and the process of painting are also one and the same.”

Not wealthy, but… “As much as I dislike the term “freeloader,” no other word fits what I had become during my sojourn on the Gold Coast… The man who never picks up a check does not acquire friends. Nevertheless, I felt that my various hosts and hostesses were recompensed for my presence at their homes. I put up genially with bores, I was an extra man at dinners where single, heterosexual young men were at a premium, and when I was in a good mood, I could tell stories or carry conversation over dead spots.” Which leads to dinner at … “I speculated on Joseph Cassidy’s invitation to supper. A social invitation wasn’t unusual, but she had said that he wanted to meet me, and I wondered why. Cassidy was not only famous as a collector, he was famous as a criminal lawyer. It was the huge income from his practice in Chicago that had enabled him to build his art collection.” … “ Cassidy was a formidable man in his early fifties. He carried himself with an air of authority, and his confident manner was reinforced by his rich, resonant bass voice. And his gold-rimmed glasses—the same kind that Robert McNamara wore when he was Secretary of Defense—were beautifully suitable for his face.”

Upon introduction, not Jaime, it’s James. “ “It’s the same name.” He shrugged his meaty shoulders. “No need for a legal change, James.” I smiled. “I didn’t ask for that advice, Mr. Cassidy, so please don’t bill me for it.” “I don’t intend to. I was just going to say that you don’t look like a man named Jaime Figueras.” “Like the stereotype Puerto Rican, you mean? The peculiar thing is that my blond hair and blue eyes come from my father, not my mother. My mother was Scotch-Irish, with black hair and hazel eyes.” “You don’t have a Spanish accent, either. How long have you lived in the States?”…
On James’ mother “I’ve never met a milliner.” “There aren’t many left. My mother���s dead now, and very few women wear originals nowadays, even when they happen to buy a hat.” “Are hats worth collecting?” he asked suddenly, moistening his upper lip with the tip of his pink tongue. “Original hats, I mean?” “ I knew then that Mr. Cassidy was a true collector, and, knowing that, I knew a lot more about him than he thought I knew. In general, collectors can be divided into three categories. First, the rare patron-collectors who know what they want and order it from artists and artisans. This first category, in the historical past, helped to establish styles. Without the huge demand for portraits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, there would have been no great school of portrait painters. Second, the middle-ground people, who buy what is fashionable, but collect fashionable art because they either like it without knowing why (it reflects their times is why) or have been... In the third category are the collectors for economic reasons. They buy and sell to make a profit. That is, in a tautological sense, they are collectors because they are collectors, but they enjoy the works of art they possess at the moment for their present and future value. … The collector’s role is almost as important to world culture as the critic’s. Without collectors there would be precious little art produced in this world, and without critics, collectors would wonder what to collect. Even those few collectors who are knowledgeable about art will not go out on a limb without critical confirmation. Collectors and critics live within this uneasy symbiotic relationship. And artists—the poor bastards—who are caught in the middle, would starve to death without us. “No.” I shook my head. As we crossed through the living room toward his study I explained why. “Hats are too easy to copy. Original hats, during the twenties and thirties, were expensive because they were made specifically for one person and for one occasion. As soon as a new hat was seen on Norma Shearer’s head, it was copied and mass-produced. The copy, except perhaps for the materials, looked about the same. Some of the hats worn during the Gilded Age, when egret feathers were popular, might be worth collecting, but I doubt if restoration, storage, and upkeep costs would make it worthwhile to collect even those.”

While his art collection resides in Chicago, Cassidy does have a minor work here in his Palm Beach penthouse… “You don’t like the drawing, do you?” I shrugged, and sipped from my glass. “Matisse had a streak of meanness in him that many Americans associate with the French. When he went out to a café—after he became well known—he would often sketch on a pad, or sometimes on a napkin. Then, instead of paying his tab in cash, he’d leave the drawing on the table and walk out. The proprietor, knowing that the drawing was worth a good deal more than the dinner, was always delighted. A man full of rich food and a couple of bottles of wine doesn’t always draw very well, Mr. Cassidy.” … He nodded, relishing the story, and looked fondly at his Matisse. A bad drawing is a bad drawing, no matter who has drawn it. But my little story—and it was a true one—had merely enhanced the value of the Matisse for Cassidy. An ordinary person, if he had purchased a bad Matisse, would have felt gypped. But Cassidy wasn’t an ordinary…” And the conversation moves to it’s purpose
“When men of good will get together, some sort of deal can be worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. Isn’t that right, James?” “If they’re ‘men of good will,’ yes. But my own experience has led me to believe that there aren’t many of them around.” “I couldn’t drop to his level and call him Joe. There’s too much informality in America as it is, and in Palm Beach, during the season, it is often carried to ridiculous lengths.” … “In the art world, you happen to have a reputation for integrity. And I’ve been informed that you’re incorruptible.” “I’m not getting rich as an art critic, if that’s what you mean.” “To return to corruption for a moment, let me say that I respect your so-called incorruptibility.” “But you aren’t talking about integrity now, Mr. Cassidy, you’re talking about my profession. I’ve never taken a free picture. The walls of my apartment in the Village are bare except for chance patterns of flaking paint. But if I ever took one picture, just one, that I could resell for two or three hundred bucks, the word would be out that I was on the take. From that moment on I would be dead as a critic.” “And I didn’t intend to ask you for any advice on collecting, but since you made the offer, what do you have in mind?” I decided to tell him about my pet project. “Entartete Kunst. Degenerate art.” “How do you spell that?” I told him and he wrote it on the pad. “It’s a term that was used by Hitler’s party to condemn modern art. At the time, Hitler was on an ethnic kick, and the official line was folk, or people’s, art. Modern art, with its subjective individualistic viewpoint, was considered political and cultural anarchy, and Hitler ordered it suppressed. Even ruthlessly. Then, as now, no one was quite sure what modern art was, and it became necessary to make up a show of ‘degenerate art’ so that party men throughout Germany would know what in the hell they were supposed to prevent. So, in July 1937, they opened an exhibit of modern art in Munich. It was for adults only, so no children would be corrupted, and the exhibit was called Entartete Kunst. It was supposed to be an example, a warning to artists, and to people who might find such art attractive. After the Munich showing, it traveled all over Germany.” “Listen to the names of the painters represented—Otto Dix, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, and many more.” … “suppose you had every painting in this particular show? Every German museum was ‘purified.’ That was the term they used, ‘purified.’ And the painters represented by the show, if the museum happened to have any of their work, were removed. Some were destroyed, some were hidden, and some were smuggled out of the country. But to have the original traveling exhibit, and it would be possible to obtain these pictures . . .”

“Basically, James, you and I are honest men, and, in our own ways, we are equally ambitious. One dishonest act doesn’t make a person dishonest, not when it’s the only one he ever performs. That is, a slightly dishonest act. A little thing, really. Suppose, James, that you were given the opportunity to interview”—he hesitated, moistened his lips with his tongue—“Jacques Debierue?” … “I want one of his paintings.” I laughed. “Who doesn’t? No individual, and not a single museum, has a Debierue. If you had one, you’d be the only collector in the world to have one! As far as I know, only four critics have been privileged to see any of his work.” … “I know. And I want one. In return for the interview, I want you to steal a picture for me.” … “Yes or no. In return for the interview, you will steal a picture from Debierue and give it to me. No picture, no interview. Think about it.”… “Debierue,” Cassidy laughed, a snort rather than an actual laugh, “is here in Florida, thirty-some-odd miles south, via State Road Seven. And that is my so-called dishonest act, my friend. I have just betrayed a client’s confidence. A counselor isn’t supposed to do that, you know. But now that I have, I’ll tell you the rest of it... “I want one of his paintings. I don’t care what it is, or whether anyone knows that I have one. I’ll know, and that’s enough. For now. Of course, if you manage to get a successful interview—and that’s your problem—and you write about his new work—he hasn’t got too many years to live—then I can bring my painting out and show it. Can’t I?”

And the devil’s deal is struck. “Jacques Debierue! Debierue was the key figure, the symbol of the dividing line, if a line could be delineated, in the split between Dada and Surrealism! In my exhilarated state, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I was going to put on a pot of coffee and jot down notes on Debierue from memory in preparation for the interview.” “Only four other critics, all Europeans, have actually seen and written about his work at firsthand. I’ll be the first American critic to examine his work, and it’ll be new, original painting that no one else has ever seen before. For the first time in my critical career, I’ll see the most recent Nihilistic Surrealistic paintings by the most famous artist in the world. It will also be possible, afterward, for me to evaluate and compare my opinions with the critiques of those critics who’ve written about his earlier work. I’ll have a broad view of Debierue’s growth—or possible retrogression—and historical support, or better yet, nonsupport, for my convictions.”

James’ mission however has been complicated by the return of Berenice (the Duluth English teacher who he has recently sent packing). He wants her to understand why he’s the wrong choice and be rid of her. “No. Never. Not after their separation—except in photographs, of course. That’s what made things so tough for me, Berenice. What I’ve had instead is an imaginary father, a father I’ve had to make up myself, and he’s what you might call un hombre duro—a hard man. A boy who doesn’t have a father around doesn’t develop a superego, and if you don’t get a superego naturally you’ve got to invent one—” “That’s silly. Superego is only a jargon word for ‘conscience,’ and everybody’s got a conscience.” “Sometimes I don’t understand you, James.” “That’s because you’re like the little old lady in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon.” “I’ve never read it. That’s his book on bullfighting, isn’t it?” “No. It’s a book about Hemingway. By talking about bullfighting he tells us about himself. You can learn a lot about bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon, but what you learn about life and death is a matter of Hemingway.” “And the little old lady . . . ?” “The little old lady in Death in the Afternoon kept asking irrelevant questions. As a consequence, she didn’t learn much about bullfighting or Ernest Hemingway and toward the end of the book Hemingway has to get rid of her.” “I’m not a little old lady. I’m a young woman and I can learn. And if I want to understand you better…”

Berenice chooses to ignore the warning. James explains to Berenice (and reader) the importance of Debierue, the artist, and therefore this interview. “Debierue rose above the Parisian art world like an extended middle finger. … he was a first in his own right as the acknowledged father of Nihilistic Surrealism” “ The fact that he used the English No. One instead of Nombre une may or may not’ve influenced Samuel Beckett to write in French instead of English”. “No. One was exhibited in a small and otherwise empty room—once a maid’s bedroom—one short flight of stairs above Debierue’s downstairs workshop. An environment had been created deliberately for the picture. The visitor who requested to see it—no fee was asked—was escorted upstairs by the artist himself and left alone with the picture. A closer inspection, with the aid of a match or cigarette lighter, revealed that the gilded frame with baroque scrollwork enclosed a fissure or crack in the gray plaster wall. The exposed wire, and the nail which had been driven into the wall to hold both the wire and the frame, were also visible. Within the frame, the wire, peaking to about twenty degrees at the apex—at the nail—resembled, if the viewer stood well back from the picture, a distant mountain range.” Berenice sighed. “I don’t understand it. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense to me.” “Exactly! No sense, but not nonsense. This was an irrational work in a rational setting. Debierue’s Nihilistic Surrealism, like Dada and Surrealism, is irrational.”…And No. One was widely discussed. “Sporadic newspaper publicity, the critical attention Debierue provoked in European art reviews, and word-of-mouth discussion of the exhibit, brought a steady stream of visitors to his gallery until May 25, 1925, when he sold his shop for the purpose of painting full time. “No. One, naturally, was a picture that lent itself to varied, conflicting opinions. The crack enclosed by the mount, for example, might’ve been on the wall before Debierue hung the frame over it—or else it was made on purpose by the artist. This was a basic, if subjective, decision each critic had to make for himself. The conclusions on this primary premise opened up two diametrically opposed lines of interpretive commentary. The explicit versus the implicit meaning caused angry fluctuations in the press. To hold any opinion meant that one had to see the picture for himself. And the tiny gallery became a ‘must see’ for visiting foreign journalists and art scholars. The consensus, including the opinions of those who actually detested the picture, was an agreement that the crack represented the final and inevitable break between traditional academic art and the new art of the twentieth century. In other words, No. One ushered in what Harold Rosenberg has since called ‘the tradition of the new.’” [A star is born. A crack framed on a wall... No. One, knew better.]

“He had decided, he said, not to show any of his future work to the general public, nor to any art critic he considered unqualified to write intelligently about his painting. “For the ‘qualified’ critic, in other words, if not for the general public, the door was left ajar. ‘If you refuse to exhibit or to sell your paintings, how will you live?’ “‘That,’ Debierue replied, ‘isn’t my concern. An artist has too much work to do to worry about such matters.’ … an organization named Les Amis de Debierue was formed hastily, within the month following his departure from the city. It’s never disbanded… through this continuing activity enough money was collected to give the artist a small annual subsidy. Other donations are still solicited from art lovers annually.” “Debierue had survived two world wars, and a dozen ideological battles.” … “I’m determined to be the first critic to see Debierue’s American paintings, and I’ve already decided to call it his ‘American Period’!”

“Berenice was a funny valentine, that is what she was, and her chin was a little weak, too. In a vague abstract way I loved her. At the same time, I wondered what to do with her. Wouldn’t it help to have a beautiful woman in tow when I called on Debierue? He would hardly slam the door in the face of a strikingly attractive woman. A Frenchman? Never . . .”

And so Berenice will accompany James on his mission to interview Debierue, the old man and artist.
The book at 40% will take on new form and tone. We leave you to find out what transpires with one final note “ The man who achieves success in America must pay for it. It’s the American way, and no one knows this fact of life any better than…”

My coworker found this book, the only library copy of it in the State of Massachusetts, and loved it. The plot, about art critic James Figueras who sets out to meet and criticize the work of a mysterious artist told in a detective noir style, sounded interesting enough. It’s a short 190 pages, and I’ve always wanted to read a Charles Willeford book. So I read it, waited for something to happen, and nothing does. It’s not easy for me to hate things, but this books is the easiest to hate. It’s begging for me to hate it.

Told from James’ perspective, the book suffers a lot because of it. He is an interesting, fleshed out character who is horrible. The stereotype of every art critic in fiction. He says fancy things, they are never as enlightening as he thinks and his voice adds absolutely nothing. I don’t normally complain about characters being unlikable, but he is too much to handle even for 190 pages. He’s just not interesting. Nothing he does, says or thinks actually makes any sense to the audience, because he is trying to sound more important than he is. While that is the point of his narration, he spends most of the time explaining things the audience already knows. I’ve never been talked down in a crime story, so this is baffling to me. Full chapters of him explaining his motive, his plans, his concerns, etc. ALL of them obvious to anyone who reads this, but he’s got to tell us in his stupid pseudo-intellectual jargon. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

There’s one early chapter where he explains to his girlfriend, Berenice Hollis, that art criticism is like a scientist telling us how big a baby whale is. Umm what? No, it’s not at all. A whale is a tangible thing. It’s weight and length are measured. Those things are facts. Art, any art, is subjective. You can’t criticize it accurately because nobody sees art the same. They are based on lots of different, contradictory critical theories. THEORIES. A measurement isn’t a theory! It’s a something that is proven. So that whole speech immediately told me this book was a waste of time. And that was early on. It only got worse. And to go back to Berenice, she is completely useless, James spends every moment of the book complaining about her but drags her along anyway, and their relationship leads to the most predictable ending ever. Another reason not to read this.

The elusive painter at the center of the story, Jacques Debierue, is made to be the leader of a brief movement that bridged Dadaism with Surrealism called Nihilistic Surrealism: isn’t that the most pretentious, hipster bullshit art movement name ever made up? It sounds like the genre of The Big Lebowski (a movie which does a much better job of exploiting and satirizing art movements than this book ever could), but taken to a level so over-inflated that if this book were a mylar balloon it would have floated up into the atmosphere, popped, and disintegrated by the time I finish typing this stupid analogy.

I would like to like this book. I tried. But nothing happens for over half the book! The things that people called “twists” in the book were just obvious to me, and nothing about this felt exciting. You want to know what does happen? A lot of talking and set up until something actually happens on (approximately) page 140 out of 190. I read and love books that are steeped in the post-modern school of rambling, but this isn’t my cuppa. The Claire DeWitt crime series does a great job at having close to no plot or logical point, but presents its ideas without rambly speeches or throwing in insular logic that doesn’t matter to anything. This book is more focused on impressing me with an over 20 page chapter/lecture on art history in order to tear all those things down than allowing a story to organically introduce those topics. It explains, then makes fun of, the concept of art criticism so many times, that the intended response can’t actually happen. It’s all too obvious about manipulating my perspective. When I can see what a writer is doing, when I can feel their words trying to force a thought in my head, then you aren’t actually writing a novel just a speech about a topic only you care about.

How I happened upon this writer of crime fiction, an author whose book, Miami Blues, considered so says the book blurb, to be one of the era's most influential works of crime fiction was through a review. The Burnt Orange Heresy is currently a film with none other than Mick Jagger in the role of eccentric art collector who coerces, and easily too, art critic James Figueras to interview the great nihilistic and reclusive artist Jacques Dubierue in a hideaway deep in the swamps of Miami, circa 1970.
If Figueras can pull off the greatest art interview of all time his career will soar and in exchange for that, he must steal one of Dubierue's art pieces, a never been viewed before piece for the collector who engages him. Along for the ride is Berenice Hollis, womanizer Figueras' latest fling.
Written in three parts, this is a book best read in one go, there's so much to absorb art-wise but the pacing, storyline, character flow is such that one long read does the book more justice. The crime jumps out like a gut punch in the last few amazing pages. It's done, book's over and wow. The ending is sweet, indeed.
This is a book I'll take down from my shelf and re-read, it's that good.

This short little book is divided into three parts. Not until Part II did a plot come into existence; Part I was mostly the douchebaggy art critic protagonist explaining condescendingly and at length modern art movements to his girlfriend. "Berenice had a minimal interest...in anything that bordered on abstract thought..." The second two parts involve the art critic's plot with an art collector to hoodwink a famous elderly artist. Crimes are committed.

The book dates to 1971 and is strikingly misogynistic. We're told that "Berenice ran awkwardly, like most women..."

We're told repeatedly that Berenice is big. She's "large" and "strapping." "Despite her size, and she was a large woman...." She was a "big, marvelous woman." "She was a big woman." "She was amusing when she tried to be coy because she was so big."

Now, you're probably wondering: HOW big is Berenice?

Berenice is, wait for it....

140 pounds.

Probably closer to a 3.5, because James Figueras isn’t all that compelling an antihero, but Willeford really triumphs in the creation of Jacques Debierue, the artist who might never have actually painted a single picture—and might have ensured his place in art history because of it. In some ways the movie is better, but the book is well worth a read if you liked it.

The best Willeford---better even than Miami Blues, which is fun and clever but familiar and makes me think way too hard about the utter furriness of Alec Baldwin's chest hair c. 1990. What I love about BOH is what I love about the best of literary pulp: it finds a way to erase the high culture/low culture divide. Suffice to say, the hero here is an art critic, ambitious, underhanded, entirely comfortable with his greedy-seediness. The story makes you think how much more fun and interesting Edmund Wilson, Kenneth Rexroth, and even Rex Reed would be if they were homicidal maniacs. I'm sure there's a book somewhere about the specific aesthetic theory Willeford employs throughout the narrative, but I'll leave it to others to explore that. Just rest assured if you know even a smitch about Marcel Duchamp and subsequent 1920s Dada/surrealism you'll get a chuckle out of some of the descriptions of the old master painter's work. Who knew so much could be made out of a nail hole, which comes to serve as a significant plot pivot? There are those who say the plot slags a bit in the middle, but when the critic breaks bad the pace more than picks up. Great noir climax set in the Everglades and starring a tire jack, and an interesting denouement that suggests critics do have a conscience and therefore are people too. One wishes Willeford were around to write the definitive GoodReads noir novel. It's time.