This year I read the book The Burnt Orange Heresy by #CharlesWilleford. It is the perfect Halloween novel for art lovers. James Figueras is a charming but discredited art critic. His prospects pick up when a wealthy but shady art collector asks him to steal a painting from a legendary reclusive artist. But everyone involved is hiding secrets that end in murder. It’s the kind of book that keeps you reading long after you should have turned out the lights and gone to bed. And oh by the way, they made a movie of the book and the shady art collector was played by Mick Jagger.

review of
Charles Willeford's The Burnt-Orange Heresy
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 12, 2024

This is the 2nd Willeford bk I've read. When I bought the 1st one, The Shark-Infested Custard (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), I thought it was this one, this is the one I was interested in reading. SO, I bought this one next along w/ the DVD of the movie version of it. I read the bk 1st, then checked out the movie. I thought they were both excellent but I actually like the movie better, the movie managed to significantly change the story while still staying faithful to the gist AND made a more sophisticated critique of the art world to boot. STILL, I'll always advocate reading the bk.

The opening dedication before one even gets to the story itself is:

"For the late, great Jacques Debierue
c. 1886-1970
Memoria in aeterna" - page negative iv

& when I read it I thought 'who?' but then he turned out to be the central fictional artist.

As someone who's had considerable experience w/ what I call the "art world" (I've had work in museums in many countries, I worked for many museums for 24 yrs, etc), one of the things I enjoyed the most about this bk was the author's take on such things.

"In my limited visionary world, the world of art crticism, where there are fewer than twenty-five men—and no women—earning their bread as full-time art critics (art reviewers for newspapers don't count), my name as an authority in this definitive encyclopedia means Success with an uppercase S." - p 3

"Gloria Bentham didn't know a damned thing about art, but that singularity did not prevent her from becoming a successful dealer and gallery owner in Palm Beach." - p 6

Willeford was a FLA dweller so I find his takes on FLA living insightful.

"Many New Yorkers, who didn't like Florida for its climate, loved the state because there was no state income tax. By maintaining a residence for six months and one day in Florida they could beat New York's state income tax." - pp 20-21

AND, I checked online & it's STILL THAT WAY for individuals, not so for businesses. Amazing. Then there're the art world tidbits.

""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 well, Mr. Cassidy."" - p 25

Why, I knew a woman who'd do an automatic drawing w/ blood on her sanitary napkin that she'd leave it on her table & the proprietor called the police on her! The police wdn't take it as a bribe, either. That just goes to show you. They must've thought she was degenerate, the degenerates.

""I don't have any pictures for you to authenticate, James. And I didn't intend to ask you for advice on collecting, but since you made the offer, what do you have in mind?"

"I decided to tell him about my pet project.

""Entarte Kunst. Degenerate art."" - p 30

"The Paris Soir reporter then asked the obvious question. '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.' With his mistress clinging to his arm, Debierue climbed into a waiting taxi and was off to the railroad station.

""Perhaps it was the naivete of his reply that agitated an immediate concern among the painters he had known and befriended. At any rate, an organization named Les Amis de Debierue was formed hastily, within the month following his departure from the city. It's never disbanded."

""There was an organization like that formed for T. S. Eliot, but it disbanded. The purpose was to get Mr. Eliot out of his job at the bank."" - pp 48-49

SO, the ground is laid for a vision of the philosophical painter. Whether there was ever a real basis for all the mythology that surrounded him is another matter. And whether the Art World's peculiarities enabled this mythology is another matter still.

The art critic meets the painter at his hideaway.

"The inevitable tiny green alligator was embroidered over the left pocket of the shirt, an emblem so common in Florida that any Miami Beach comedian could get a laugh by saying, "They caught an alligator in the Glades the other day, and he was wearing a little shirt with a little man sewn over the pocket . . ." - p 66

Works for me.

One of my favorite parts of the story is when Figueras, the critic, & his girlfriend, Berenice, are visiting Debierue, the legendary reclusive painter, & the painter offers to make them dinner. One might expect that Debierue wd then make them an exquisite meal sourced from local foods. Instead, they get frozen orange juice &..

"There is the television turkey dinner. Very good. There is the television Salisbury steak. Also very good. Or maybe, M. Figueras, you would most like the television patio dinner? Enchilada, tamale, Spanish rice, and refried beans." - p 85

I'm not knocking frozen dinners, in the past mnth I've eaten very little but; it's just funny that the legendary painter wears a polo shirt, drinks frozen orange juice in FLA where, certainly, fresher juice was widely available, & eats food usually looked down upon by people w/ 'good taste'. Willeford is obviously writing a very different vision.

Debierue is sd to be a "Nihilistic Surrealist", a term coined by a critic, not by Debierue, & one not necessarily based on much of anything.

"No matter how he downgraded himself, false modesty or not, he was the world's outstanding Nihilistic Surrealist. That was the reason I wasn't getting anywhere with him. I was trying to talk to him as if he were a normal person. Any artist who has isolated himself from the world for three-fourths of his life either has to be a Surrealist or crazy. But Debierue was as sane as any other artist I had ever met. Even the fact that he denied being a Surrealist emphasized the fact that he was one. What else could he be? This was the rationale of the purposeful irrationality of Surrealism. The key. But the key to what?" - p 86

It's interesting to see how labels get attached by the Art World. I've read that there wasn't a single woman Surrealist who actually considered herself to be one, that the women were declared Surrealists so that Surrealism wdn't be all male. The term "Happening" caught on & then people like Red Grooms & Al Hansen became Happenings artists even tho they preferred other terms. The obsessed megalomaniacal Neoist, Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor), has declared everyone in the world to be a Neoist. Try explaining that to people who've never heard of Neoism.

One of Debierue's key pleasures is walking to the nearby drive-in movie theater for a night's entertainment. As w/ the tv dinners, I can relate there too b/c one of my main activities during the QUARANTYRANNY has been to go to the drive-in.

""Oh, yes, perhaps you did not see it—the Dixie Drive-in Movie Theater . . ." He pointed in the general direction of the drive-in. "Tonight there are three long features, two films about the Bowery Boys and the film about a werewolf. And before these, the regular films, there are always two and sometimes three cartoons. The first long film tonight is The Bowery Boys Meet Frankenstein, a very special treat, no? And if you will kindly drive me—"" - p 91

Ha ha! I loved the Bowery Boys as a kid, I'd go to a show like that!

Well, things take a twisted turn. The art critic gets his 'interview' & 'sees the work' that no-one's, ostensibly, seen for decades, & gets to build his career off of this. Later, Figueras looks in an encyclopedia of artists to see how Debierue fares.

"Goya had nine and one-half inches. El Greco had twelve. Piranesi had eight. Michelangelo had fourteen. But Debierue had sixteen column inches! The old man, insofar as space was concerned, had topped the greatest artists of all time." - p 142

The book starts out a little slow. A lot of the first act is the narrator/protagonist, an art critic trying to break into the big time, musing on the nature of art criticism and the role it plays as a service, not just to consumers and patrons of art, but the artists themselves. It’s not as boring as it sounds. He takes a pretty dense piece of subject matter and breaks it down into pretty simple lay terms, even using sports analogies. I wasn’t entirely sure if he was satirizing critics or dispatching his own critical manifesto through the narrator. The latter is probably unlikely given that the narrator believes artist and critic should maintain defined roles: critics shouldn’t make art, and artists shouldn’t write criticism. Of course, in real life, in addition to being a writer, soldier, horse trainer, and amateur boxer, Willeford was also a painter and an art critic—hardly a man who believed in singular obsession.

Hang in there. The first act sets up a pretty riveting second and third act, and what may have seemed long-winded and pretentious is actually very clever foreshadowing. After putting this book down, I realized it was a very lean, concise thriller. It was also smart and informative. Without giving too much away, the narrator finds himself compromising each of his previously stated professional ethics one by one until finally he passes a point of no return. Like a lot of Willeford’s novels, there’s a female accessory to the protagonist, a somewhat ditzy but attractive girlfriend. But in the third act, she proves rather perceptive, doing a surprisingly good job of putting the facts together. The narrator’s underestimations of her intelligence drive the plot to its climax, which is dark, brutal, and sparingly well-written in a compelling way, a Charles Willeford trademark.

“If she got away, everything was over for me – everything.” A short, anti-climatic, shaggy dog story featuring a very believable art critic voice and some plot turns I didn’t buy. Imagine a young Brian Sewell trying to interview and then whooshing up a fake Banksy by way of furthering his career and you have “Burnt Orange”. Of course, nothing like this would happen in the real world…would it?

A year after Patricia Highsmith’s 1970 “Ripley Under Ground” Charles Willeford presents Jaime Figueras, an averagely messed up young critic on the make amid the Floridian art set. Figuera, like Tom Ripley, is a cash-strapped social climber who desires status above all. He’s a shit to his schoolteacher mistress Berenice and tends to freeload and then walk out on artist exhibitions he has no interest in but there’s no precedent for his eventual nastiness, no major indicators in his background that would suggest he’s a real bad’un; Willeford’s intent appears to be just to drop a fairly unusual character for these waters (although not for the “foul play in the art world” sub-genre) into a so-so crime scenario. Moneybags collector Joseph Cassidy (a lawyer, natch) reveals reclusive French surrealist Debrierue is now glugging orange juice in sunny Florida and proposes revealing his address in return for Figueras purloining an original Debrierue for him. It’s a weirdly lop-sided deal and Figueras needed to be under much more pressure and demonstrably inclined to such behaviour for me to buy this. Nevertheless, the meeting goes ahead, Debrierue turns out to be disconcertingly normal for a ex-pat French Nihilistic Surrealist and while Figueras’ naughtiness goes predictably awry the finale just made this reader go “oh”. The “Burnt Orange” title of course turns out to be the name of a key art work but is cleverly rationalised, elements such as Berenice’s apparent complicity in the deal followed by her late in the day volte face less so.

“Burnt Orange” is a good example of the talent of the author compensating for any flaws in the narrative. Willeford (his “Pick-Up” – featuring another arty type going off the rails – seriously impressed me) signals Figueras’ narcissism via some bracing vocab: “By going into theoretical entelechy I could have answered him easily”; “a feeling of ambivalence that vitiated my value judgments”; “The most primitive nescience in man cannot remain completely negative — or so I had always believed”. He also makes Figueras just about tolerable until he really joins the Dark Side, at which point Figueras comes out with this:

“Ignorant women have destroyed the careers, the ambitions, and the secret plans of a good many honourable men throughout history”

…which is an open invitation to splutter “and vice versa, asshole” and avidly read on to see Figueras get a good kicking. Except…it never happens, the air goes out of the balloon, it’s like Willeford was up against a deadline and just went “to hell with it” which, considering his obvious talent makes me suspect the exercise here was more one of ventriloquism than narrative. It’s the voice and the backstory of Figueras that are memorable, not the plot turns: Figueras’ extended lecture on Debrierue’s place in art history and the provenance of the “No. One” art work may have sent Berenice to sleep but it had me heading to Wikipedia to find out more. That’s not a bad result for a 50 year old novella and whatever deficiencies there are in this narrative my eagerness to read more of this intelligent, obviously eclectic author remains fully intact. “I am truly a superior craftsman as a critic”.

“Never let a thing’s worth obscure its value”--Cassidy, a prominent Manhattan art dealer

Having read the four novels comprising the whole series of Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosely eighties Miami cop series, I thought I would check this out, because I heard it might be his best, I heard it was very different, more noir and perhaps harkening back to his early roots in pulpy noir, and I knew there was a film loosely based on it featuring Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Debicki, Claes Bang, and.. . . Mick Jagger!

Jaime (also known as James) Figueras is a highly ambitious art critic (and if you have read Macbeth, you may have some idea of how much luck may come to the excessively ambitious). Prominent art and also ambitious dealer Cassidy knows Figueras is both ambitious and broke, so he suggests a (shady) deal. He reveals he is helping hide a reclusive painter in a house near Miami, none other than French painter Jacques Debierue! (Think reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon, if Pynchon had also written almost nothing, which is not true). James is promised the first interview with an American critic and a break-through article published IF he will steal one of his paintings. That’s the set up, act one.

Since we hate the ambitious, arrogant art critic, and nothing really happens for half the book, it is not such a great mystery. But I’d say this is less mystery and more of a dark satirical send-up of the art world--dealing, criticism, greed, power, shallow people, and so on. Oh, there is a murder, and theft, and arson, but the greatest crime in the book for Willeford--who also wrote art criticism, and was an art major in college--is the art world’s reverence for surrealism and dadaism, folks like DuChamp, all of which Willeford perceives as just an art scam. All intellectual pretension. Nothing to do with art and everything to do with the cynical shallowness of the art world. Jacques Debierue is known as a “nihilistic surrealist” and while we have none of his work in any gallery or museum, is all the more prized for his reclusiveness and lack of proof that he is an artist.

I’m kind of torn how to rate this. From the set-up in the first act you know how this is going to end: Badly. The chapter of Figueras lecturing Berenice on art is part of the satire, but it's still a slog. The actual crimes, and there are a few, all happen near the end, in the last quarter of the book, though they do fit the almost Calvinistic expectation for noir, that bad things will happen to bad people. But the writing is good, dark, pulpy, as we get to despise almost everyone along the way. Nasty. But not surprising. I’ll say 3.5 and go either way when I post.

You need Berenice in this novel because at one point what the Duluth native sees very clearly for us is that all these art guys are shallow, greedy, jerks. She's us. Berenice is slammed by her boyfriend Figueras for being a stupid, midwestern girl, but as it turns out in almost every Willeford book, women are just better and smarter than any of the men. That's interesting, though she is also not particularly admirable, either.

Here’s a link to the official trailer to the 2020 film version, which I heard was not very good, and set in Italy not Miami, and gets the tone of Willeford all wrong, but I still might take a look at it because of Jagger and Sutherland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PMAl...

James Figueras is an up and coming art critic spending some time covering galleries and openings on the Gold Coast of Florida. He gets the opportunity to meet and potentially interview Jacques Debierue, a famously reclusive artist who has only ever displayed one work and whose work nobody has seen for decades...and then only select critics. He is the "golden" mystery artiste, who has captivated the art world, even though his work is more mysterious than he. The meeting is arranged by Casidy, a lawyer and art collector and it comes with strings attached, because this is nominally a noir novel. Figueras takes his girlfriend (reluctant girlfriend on his part) Berenice with him as bait for the artist. And, this being a crime novel, unlawful things happen.

I feel like I'm in the vast minority here, because I really don't like this one bit. I mean, I finished it, so it was good enough for that (though it's super short). But it is generally quite well reviewed. And I just don't get it. I know it's not that I don't like Willeford's work. I've read "Pick-Up" and "Cockfighter" which are his two best reviewed stand-alones (this is probably number three) and I liked both. "Pick-Up" was a great noir marred by two twists at the end, neither of which made any sense in the context of the book. And, while it's been a long time since I've read "Cockfighter" I know that I liked it quite a bit, though I didn't review it. So it's not Willeford as a writer.

I'll cop that I know little to nothing about fine art and less about the art world of collectors and critics. Since that was the focus of almost 2/3 of the novel...that didn't help. The idea that an artist can be renowned and world famous even though almost nobody has seen his work, didn't ring true to me. Maybe it's possible...but I'd need proof. The meat of the book didn't happen until the third act. And even that didn't really work for me. Part of the issue is that Figuera is...well he's just dumb. I mean, profoundly dumb. Yeah, this is noir. But he's not trapped in to his dumb moves for love of a femme fatale. He really doesn't even like poor Berenice and she is not the cause of his downfall. It's all about him making choices that are just...stupid. And really making them to no apparent purpose. He could have reached an interesting (though not probably worthy of a noir novel) conclusion without precipitating his own downfall. None of it makes sense.

So I'll cop that maybe I'm missing something. But I have no idea what it is. Because this just didn't work beyond the mechanics of it being well written.

James Figueras, a pretentious art critic with an exaggerated reputation for incorruptibility, is offered the opportunity of a career by an unscrupulous collector. He will be given the chance to interview the most reclusive artist in the world, Jacques Debierue, the father of Nihilistic Surrealism ("He devoted his life to Nothing"). All James has to do in return is steal one of the old man's paintings.

Debierue rose to fame in Paris in the 1920s after he famously hung an empty frame around a crack on his bedroom wall, spawning endless fierce critical debate. ("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…")

Ever since the artist lived alone, never sold or exhibited his work, letting only a handful of people even see them. It is the nature of his art, and what he needs to extract out of his relationship with Figueras, that creates the basis for much of the tension in the story.

I do not usually like satire, especially when it comes from a writer trying to spoof critics (who must be society's easiest target apart from preachers and politicians). However, Willeford's frank, quirky, deadpan prose had me laughing out loud. In fact, the setup of the novel works so well precisely because the high stakes world of art really does revolve around an unhealthy symbiotic relationship between artists, critics, and collectors--and Willleford so darkly exposes it in passages like this:

"Fine Arts: The Americas, which loses more than fifty thousand dollars a year for the foundation that supports it, is easily the most successful art magazine published in America---or anywhere else, for that matter."

"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."

"It is more important for a dealer to understand people than it is to understand art. And Gloria, skinny, self-effacing, plain, had the patient ability to listen to people--a characteristic that often passes for understanding."

Besides lampooning critics and the art world, this is also a neo-noir crime novel. Part of the fun is trying to guess who is going to be killed, and why, and when. As always, the author has an off-kilter eye for detail and expression:

"She was a large--strapping is a better word--country girl with a ripe figure, cornflower-blue eyes, and a tangle of wheat-colored hair flowing down her back. Except for the thumb-tack scar on her coccyx, which was hardly noticeable, her sun-warmed sweet-smelling hide was flawless. Her blue eyes looked velvety, thanks to her contact lenses. But she wasn't really good natured, as I had thought at first, she was merely lazy."

"It was the kind of party where it is assumed that everyone knows one another and therefore no one is introduced. There are many parties like that in Palm Beach. The main idea is to eat first, and then drink as much as possible before the bar is closed or the liquor runs out. If one feels the need to talk to someone, he introduces himself or starts talking to someone without giving his name. It makes very little difference."

Willeford also knows exactly when to land his more a traditional noir observations in the grand tradition of Chandler, Cain, and Hammett:

"Ignorant women have destroyed the careers, the ambitions, and the secret plans of a good many honorable men throughout history."

"The very rich do a lot of strange things."

"All through life we protect ourselves from countless hurtful truths by being a little blind here--by ignoring the something trying to flag our attention on the outer edges of our peripheral vision, by being a little shortsighted there--by being a trifle too quick to accept the easiest answer, and by squinting our eyes against the bright, incoming light all of the time."

This is the second 1970's crime novel I've read in 2020. It is difficult to put my finger on, but there is something about this time frame that seems tailor-made for dark streets and scheming minds. Maybe it was the clothes ("Berenice was willowy in a blue sack suit with lemon, quarter-inch lines forming windowpane checks, and the four tightly grouped buttons of the double-breasted jacket were genuine lapis lazuli. The bells of the slacks were fully sixteen inches in diameter, and only the toes of her white wedgies were exposed.")

Highly recommended.

“ve sanatçı hırsları, kimliklerindeki 'kara ayrıntılar'la çakışarak tehlikeli bir biçime dönüşür”
Kitap sanat akımlarından bolca açıklama içeriyor ama sanata en ufak ilginiz varsa -gördüğüm yorumların aksine- sıkılacağınızı sanmıyorum zaten kısa bir kitap.
Sonu hakkında tam olarak ne düşündüğümden henüz emin olamadım. Bi’ süre Berenice’in parmagını düsünecegim..

This is a top-shelf modern mystery, written by an author capable of great things, but who suffers from unevern output. Nonetheless this title is his best, and one of 5 best I've read in the genre, and I read a lot of mysteries. Set in the rarefied world of modern art critique, the story follows James Figueras' quest to interview Jacques Debierue, the most elusive, slippery, revered, and flimsy artist around. It neatly works into a logical climax, from Figueras' point of view, in which a work in burnt orange is produced. It is heretical, well, because... Try it, you'll finish it in a night. Even my 16-year old daughter loved it. The only other mystery about an art critic that I can think of is Westlake's High Adventure, another total romp.

This is one of the best books you probably never heard of! I had only heard of the author since he was the author of the book series that became one of my favorite indie movies , "MIAMI BLUES." Yet this felt like it had something deeper to say about the art world (maybe even more than when it was written) and human relationships...oh and it's suspenseful, as well. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Interesting book to accidentally read just after Ripley Under Ground. Unscrupulous art critic is given the chance to interview a reclusive master Surrealist as long as he steals the old man’s art for a rich guy. The critic is extremely revolting, treating his naive midwestern gf with contempt. Basically he’s a mercenary interested in status: he uses a ruler to decide if an encyclopedia likes Picasso or the fictional Debierue “more” based on how many column inches they grant. Some of his misogyny verges on or maybe just is non-vicarious, although it seems to fall under the same umbrella as his other unlikeable traits. The old artist himself, living a philistine Florida retiree life of frozen OJ and tv dinners with nightly visits to the movie theater, is kind and ingenuous by comparison. (He even has some classic Série Noire paperbacks by Himes and Simenon, mark of good taste.)

The big twist is that after breaking into the old man’s studio to look at the paintings he finds that there are none. The old man has been looking at blank canvas for years; our narrator suspects that there never were any paintings at all. So he steals some supplies, burns the place down, forges a painting, and kills his gf (witness to the counterfeit). There’s a strange inversion of the roles of critic and artist: the narrator gets to review his own work, and the old man sends him an ancient, empty frame (from his own famous show) marked with a fly to indicate unredeemed sin. At last the narrator turns himself in for the murder.

There’s that patented Charles Willeford strangeness or loopiness. Lots of good art history details (including a apocryphal anecdote meant to prefigure the critic’s own forgery). Willeford studied art and the tech details come through. Feels like an attack on the critical profession, or at least its most unscrupulous oractitioners. Good quick read.

An odd book. Jacques Figueras is an art critic willing to do pretty much anything to rise in the art world. When he gets a chance to interview a notoriously reclusive painter (so long as he can steal of his painting), he more than jumps at the chance, but that interview doesn't turn out quick like he though it would, and some strange events follow it. Could have been good, though I was not very interested in the parts of the book about this painter's history. You can see where it's going, but still the last part of it is very interesting. Willeford wrote many more interesting books.